2 Maccabees 6:12-17: in context

Second Maccabees pauses its narrative here to speak directly to the reader, and it is one of the few places in scripture where an author explains how he wants his own book taken.

He has just described appalling persecution under Antiochus. Now he says: I urge those who read this book not to be discouraged by these calamities, but to recognize that these punishments were meant not to destroy but to discipline our people. Then his argument, and it inverts what anyone would expect. It is a sign of great kindness when the impious are not let alone for long but punished at once. With other nations, he says, the Lord waits patiently until they have reached the full measure of their sins, but with us he does not wait.

So the reasoning goes: God's swiftness with Israel is mercy, and his patience with the nations is the more frightening arrangement, because it lets a thing run to the end of itself. He never withdraws his mercy from us, the writer says, and though he disciplines with calamity, he does not forsake his own people. That is a theology built in the middle of a massacre by someone who needed it to hold. When correction comes fast, do I read it as anger, and what would change if I read it as speed?