“Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables” (John 2:15, NRSV).
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| "Angry Jesus" by Manuel Guzman |
Why this reluctance to acknowledge that Jesus got angry sometimes? Well, for one thing, we generally do not think of anger as a good thing. The church has historically named anger as one of the seven deadly sins, and if we claim that Jesus lived among us as “one without sin,” then if anger is a sin, surely Jesus could never have ever gotten angry. This story makes us uncomfortable because it’s embarrassing when the Son of God suddenly starts acting like a two-year-old having a temper tantrum, so our strategy for dealing with it has generally been to either avoid talking about it and try to distract the masses with other, nicer stories about Jesus: “Look over here! Jesus said to love the little children and let them come unto me!” – or to spiritualize the story by saying that Jesus wasn’t really mad when he did this, that it was a purely symbolic action to show that his death would do away with the system of animal sacrifice or that his message was really about our need to cleanse the “temple” of our bodies and purify our thoughts and intentions in worship rather than an instance of him losing his temper.
But to the discerning reader, none of these responses to the story seem to hold much water. It seems pretty clear that this is a story about an angry Jesus, and besides that, we have all those images of an angry God in the Hebrew Bible to deal with as well. Anger is not a concept foreign to God, at least not as the Judeo-Christian tradition has understood God throughout the centuries. So have we simply projected human thoughts and feelings like anger onto God, or is anger actually an attribute of God?
And if anger is an attribute of God, how did it become labeled as a sin for humanity? Is there a way to be angry as a human being and not be sinful? It is interesting that we read this story of Jesus’s anger during the season of Lent, a season when we are encouraged to name and acknowledge our sins and repent of them. If we have been doing that this Lent, anger has probably appeared many times on our list of sins as we reflect on our lives, and we’re probably trying to think of ways to not be angry or to let go of our anger. But perhaps this story about Jesus’s anger offers us another approach to our anger, an approach that seeks not to repress or deny it, but to redeem it, to direct it toward holy purposes.
If we examine scriptural perspectives on anger, the Bible does not say unequivocally that all anger is sinful. Certainly, it gives many warnings about the close connection between anger and sin, especially in the wisdom literature like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. Proverbs 29:11 (NIV) says, “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control,” and Ecclesiastes 7:9 (NIV) says, “Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools.” The New Testament epistles warn against the dangers of anger as well: James writes that we should be “quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, for man’s anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires” (James 1:19-20, NIV), and the author of Colossians instructs the people to “rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips” (Colossians 3:8, NIV). Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that love is “not easily angered” (1 Corinthians 13:5), and Jesus himself warns against anger when he says in the Sermon on the Mount, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:21). So how do we square this teaching of Jesus with his actions in today’s Gospel passage? All four Gospels record the incident in the temple, so we can’t say that the author of Matthew’s Gospel was unaware of it as he simultaneously recorded Jesus’s words about not being angry in the Sermon on the Mount. So how can both be an accurate representation of Jesus’s teachings and actions, of the message he taught and embodied?
Perhaps the key lies in a distinction implied in a passage from Ephesians where the author is instructing the community on proper Christian behavior. In chapter 4, verses 26-27, he writes, “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.” The wording of this instruction indicates that although the author sees a close connection between anger and sin, he still believes it is possible to be angry but not sin. And I find it interesting that the 10 Commandments, which we heard in our first reading for today, do NOT include a prohibition against anger per se. Despite the fact that Jesus says in his commentary on the 10 Commandments in the Sermon on the Mount that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is liable for judgment, there is not a commandment that says, “Thou shalt not be angry.” I believe Jesus’s point in his rhetorical intensifying of the commandments is not to say “thou shalt not be angry,” which really would not be humanly possible or realistic, but to remind us that we should purify our inner thoughts as well as our outward actions. His point is that even if we refrain from killing, if we are seething with hateful thoughts toward our neighbor, we are still doing a kind of violence toward them.
Robert Masters, a psychologist in Vancouver, Canada, has written about the distinctions between different kinds of anger and the debate about whether openly expressing anger is a good or a bad thing psychologically. While secular psychological literature tends to teach that it is better to control anger than to openly express it, he points out that religious literature includes examples of anger that can be used for good, the kind of “anger without sin” that we have been considering. He calls this kind of anger “heart-anger,” which he defines as anger that is rooted not in a selfish sense of wrongs done to me, but in a deep concern for others and what is right for society as a whole. Heart-anger, he writes, is a kind of “wrathful compassion – a potent, often fiery caring” [1]. He specifically uses the example of Jesus cleansing the temple as an illustration of heart-anger, and also puts the anger of the Hebrew prophets in this category, as well as the anger of various Eastern sages at their disciples [2].
This heart-anger, however, is not simply a raging against the injustices of the world. It is not exactly what we mean when we talk about “righteous anger,” which too often seems to be “self-righteous anger” rather than anything truly sacred. People have rightly observed that those who fight injustice out of a sense of deep anger often wind up in a miserable state of mind, constantly angry people who seem to have no peace and whose life is centered around the very thing they are fighting against. Thus, an anti-war protester’s life is all about war, and their techniques, however different, often mirror the very behaviors they say they want to eliminate in others. Heart-anger, as Masters describes it, is a highly advanced mental and emotional state that requires much intentional spiritual discipline to cultivate. Those who express heart-anger have the ability to completely and fully control their anger, but they make the conscious choice to express it openly and fully because “sometimes what is needed in order to awaken others is a shock” [3]. Heart-anger is a spiritual anger, and spiritual anger always has the objective of stimulating repentance and thus contributing to the spiritual growth of the person [4]. It is not unlike what we might call “tough love,” doing something we know will appear hurtful to another person because we know it is ultimately for their own good, like Annie Sullivan imposing strict disciplinary measures on the deaf and blind Helen Keller to help her crack the code of sign language pressed into her palm to open her world to the gift of communication with others [5]. Masters writes that heart-anger is “pure compassion in action” [6]. Building on the paradoxes expressed in our epistle reading for today from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we might add that just as “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25), so God’s anger is more compassionate than human compassion.
Given the close connection between anger and sin, however, we should be careful about using the concept of heart-anger to justify and sanctify our all-too-often unholy expressions of anger. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we are expressing heart-anger when what we are actually doing is venting unrefined, destructive anger. Masters says that the goal of the expression of heart-anger is always healing and intimacy [7], and that expressing heart-anger requires a high degree of self-awareness, which is cultivated in an ongoing spiritual practice like meditation or contemplative prayer that allows us to examine our anger and be aware of the root cause and nature of it before we begin to give expression to it [8].
The good news, however, is that it is possible to cultivate anger without sin. So when we feel our tempers flare, we can take a deep breath, think about whether our anger is rooted in selfish or unselfish concerns, and pray that we can direct our anger toward spiritual use, like Jesus in the temple or the prophets calling the people to repentance. We can turn to Jesus and pray that our once-angry human Savior would activate in us the anger redeemed through his incarnation, an anger that is pure compassion in action.
[1] Robert Augustus Masters, “Compassionate Wrath: Transpersonal Approaches to Anger,” The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 2000 (Vol. 31, No. 1), 34.
[2] Ibid., 39.
[3] Ibid., 42.
[4] Ibid., 43 (quoting Tibetan spiritual master Marpa).
[5] Helen Keller example given in Jim McGuiggan, Celebrating the Wrath of God: Reflections on the Agony and the Ecstacy of His Relentless Love, (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press, 2001), 69.
[6] Masters, 48.
[7] Ibid., 44.
[8] Ibid.
