CHAPTER 4
The proper place for anger
“For
the churning of milk produces butter,
And pressing the nose brings forth blood;
So the churning of anger produces strife.”[1]
And pressing the nose brings forth blood;
So the churning of anger produces strife.”[1]
What
makes you angry?
| Is your anger most related to how the boss treats you? The insensitivity of your coworkers? The lack of understanding your spouse has for you? Your kids’ lack of respect or their laziness? Traffic? I am guessing it is mostly about how other people treat you. |
Our
anger is closely related to our fear.
Often we are angry about whatever we are afraid of. Anger covers the fear. We come on strong and push back on the
situation or person who scares us and it protects us from confronting our fear. In that way, anger is destructive to the
person who exhibits it, because it covers the underlying emotion and prevents
us from having to deal with it. Without
the anger, we could meet our fears head on, but anger prevents us from doing
so.
A
little or a lot makes no difference
Some
of us go through life showing very little anger. For whatever reason, temperament maybe, it
just takes a lot to make us mad. And
when the door to our anger is opened, it is often sudden, loud, maybe out of
control. But it is short lived. Then we are under control again. Our burst of anger itself scares us. It is inconsistent with our view of ourselves
and we hurry to bury it again.
Others
of us wear our anger on our sleeves.
Anything, it seems can touch it off and no one is safe from its
consequences. But whichever category
describes our anger, or whether we are somewhere in between, it is still not a
part of who God calls us to be.
Now
that is a powerful statement: “God does not call us to be angry.” But I believe it to be true. If we can begin to understand how God calls
us to deal with fear and anger, we will begin to take our places as effective
citizens in his kingdom. We need to
eliminate these barriers to our service to him.
“Be
angry and sin not.”
Okay
so Ephesians 4:26 says to be angry. How
can we argue with that? Well, the
context is a call to righteousness. In
the larger passage we are called to quit lying and stealing. Paul does give us enough leeway to get
legitimately angry if we must, but then he says in the same verse not to go to
bed angry. Then in verses 31 and 32 he
says we should put away from us all bitterness, wrath, and anger, and we should instead be kind, tenderhearted, and forgiving. So this passage is clearly not a call to
anger.
Was
Jesus’ clearing of the moneychangers from the temple and act of anger?
Another
Biblical passage sometimes used to justify anger is Jesus’ clearing of the
temple.[2] But if you read the passages carefully,
clearing the temple follows immediately after his triumphal entry into
Jerusalem. The people were crying out
“Hosanna! Hosanna!” And when he got into town he went directly to
the temple. Nowhere in the three
accounts does it say he saw the money changers and got angry.
In
the Mark account it says he went in one day and looked around and saw
everything that was there. He then left
the temple, went to Bethany to spend the night, and came back and cleaned it
out the next day.
The
John account says he made a whip of cords before he cleaned it out. Some commentators believe there were two
events when Jesus drove the money changers out of the temple. That discussion is not relevant to our
purposes here. Whether it was once or
twice, it seems very deliberate – going in and seeing it one day and coming
back to clean it out the next – taking time to make a whip. Neither of these events reads like he saw
something that made him lose his temper.
They seem very deliberate.
Yes
cleaning the money changers out of the temple was an authoritative act on
behalf of his father, who owned the place, but it does not really read like an
act of anger.
Hebrews
3:17 says God was angry with his people for 40 years, but we are called on to
turn loose of our anger by nightfall.
That is okay with me. God has a
right to be angry with whomever he chooses.
He was angry at sin.[3] If we are angry at a brother (the implication
is that we harbor ongoing anger) we are in danger of the judgment.[4] I get the impression that anger is primarily God’s
job and we are to be peacemakers.
Jesus
angry at the Pharisees
But
Jesus is our example and we do know that he was angry at least once – at the
Pharisees.[5] He was in the synagogue on the Sabbath and a man
was there with a withered hand. Jesus,
as he frequently did when he met someone who had some infirmity, wanted to heal
the man. But the Pharisees were watching
to see if he would heal on the Sabbath.
If he did, they would accuse him of violating one of their rules. Yes the Sabbath was God’s rule, but they had
interpreted it very narrowly, and then forced that interpretation on the
people. They interpreted this “religious
rule” in such a way as to prevent people (Jesus in this case) from doing what was
really God’s overall, summary rule – helping someone who needed help.
Jesus
did not secretly heal the man’s hand; he called him to the front of the
room. Once Jesus and the man were
standing together, in front of all the people, Jesus asked the crowd whether it
was “lawful” under their law to do good or evil on the Sabbath. No one gave an answer. At that point John records that Jesus was
both angry at them and grieved because of their hard hearts. Jesus loved even these hypocritical religious
leaders who set out to trap him and eventually to kill him. He was grieved because they would not
understand what he was teaching. And he
was angry. What did he do with his
anger? He did what he would have done
anyway. He healed the man – so everyone
could see. He asked whether it was
lawful to do good or evil, then he did good.
That looks like an example of how we can “be angry and sin not.”[6] We should continue to love the person we are
angry with (he was grieved) and we should turn our anger into energy to do the
right thing.
Anger
gives us energy
Anger
triggers the “fight or flight” response in us.
It releases chemicals to prepare our bodies for action. Our job at that point is to direct that
readiness toward something good – toward helping someone as Jesus did. If we are angry because someone cut us off in
traffic, we can redirect that energy not only toward letting him or her into
our lane, but also letting in the next two or three people.
God
acknowledged that the emotional makeup he created for us includes the anger
response just as it does the sexual response and fear. But he asks us to be in control of it and not
vice versa. We are to be known as people
of peace.
If we follow Jesus' example, our anger
will be directed at injustice, and as Isaiah wrote, we can aim that energy at
correcting unfairness:
“Is this not the fast which I choose,
To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free
And break every yoke?"
“Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor into the house;
When you see the naked, to cover him;
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?"[7]
To loosen the bonds of wickedness,
To undo the bands of the yoke,
And to let the oppressed go free
And break every yoke?"
“Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry
And bring the homeless poor into the house;
When you see the naked, to cover him;
And not to hide yourself from your own flesh?"[7]
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