In Defense of Angry Religion

Has anyone ever accused you of being angry?  Notice I didn’t ask you if you ever are angry, but I specifically used the word “accused.”  Accused implies there is something necessarily bad about anger.  Many people mistakenly make anger synonymous with inappropriate behavior or abuse.  To be angry is often presented as tantamount to a moral failure on par with lying or cheating.  Consequently, we fall into the trap of not acknowledging when we are angry, or feeling that we need to confess our anger and apologize for it.

 A few years ago, I was angry with a guy named Fred, a friend who had dealt very dishonestly with me and hurt me. So, I confronted Fred about it.  Rather than deal with what Fred had done to me, he responded by being hurt.  I hadn’t said or done anything inappropriate in my confrontation with Fred.  Nevertheless, he was hurt because I was angry and people shouldn’t be angry with Fred.  Therefore the whole conversation became about Fred’s feeling hurt, rather than his dishonesty.  It was as if, my being angry negated wrong Fred had done to me.

Unfortunately, I bought into Fred’s mindset and felt guilty about being angry with him.  Consequently, when telling the story to my friends, I kept denying that I was angry with Fred.  Finally, a friend confronted me and said, “Why can’t you just admit you’re angry with Fred.  So what? What’s wrong with that?”

I replied, “Well apparently, it’s a big deal to Fred.”

The more I though about it, the more I realized that there was nothing wrong with me being angry at Fred.  I had every right to be angry with him.  I hadn’t done or said anything inappropriate to Fred.  I was justifiably angry. 

In the years since, I realize that Fred’s reaction was really just designed to manipulate and control me.  I have learned the hard way that, consciously or unconsciously, many people use this technique.  When confronted with their own bad behavior, they respond, not by addressing the issue, but by being hurt by the anger their own behavior induces in others.  You may have someone in your life who does that to you.  Or you may be the person who does that in another’s life (and if you’re both here today, you’re not going to be able to do that anymore).  Either way, it stems from the idea that anger is always a bad thing.

For me, somewhere in my upbringing was this deep-seated notion that getting angry was wrong - even a sin.  I had been socialized to believe that good people never got angry.  I was indoctrinated to think that Christians especially, never got angry.  We are always supposed to be nice, pleasant and dispassionate.  Somehow we get this misguided notion that followers of Jesus are never supposed to get angry because Jesus never got angry.

In reality, Jesus got angry often.  Perhaps, you’re thinking, “Sure I know about that whole turning over the tables in the Temple incident, but that was just one time.”  For some Christians, that story let’s them have a briefly macho Jesus to make up for the wimpy Jesus who let’s himself get killed a few days later  without fighting back.

In reality, the Gospels convey several incidents of an angry Jesus, in addition to the Temple cleansing.   The truth is Jesus was not a pleasant guy to be around if you got on his bad side.  Just ask the fig tree he cursed in Mark 11.  We can easily accept the idea that not everyone who met Jesus liked him, or felt good about him.  But it’s harder to accept the idea that Jesus didn’t like everyone he met nor did he always make them feel good.  Maybe that’s because we imagine that if Jesus met us, he would like us.  Or if Jesus met us, he would make us feel good.  And certainly, if Jesus met us, he wouldn’t get angry with us.

As uncomfortable as it makes us, Jesus did get angry.  Our discomfort stems from the fact that, as I said, many of us were socialized to think anger is always wrong or is even sinful.  On a purely logical level we could deduce that since we believe Jesus was sinless and since Jesus got angry, therefore anger cannot be a sin.  Such theological formulations may satisfy our intellects, but still leave us feeling uneasy with an angry Jesus.

Therefore, perhaps we need to look at the times Jesus got angry and especially the kinds of things that provoked his anger.  Interestingly, his anger was not provoked by people’s moral shortcomings, sexual habits or personal failures.  In other words, none of the things Christians get angry about today.  Instead he was angered by people’s cowardice, hypocrisy, self-promotion and interest, and cold-heartedness.  In other words, all the things people think about Christians today.

Let’s look at that last one, cold-heartedness.  The stories about Jesus’ disciples plucking grain, or healing a man with a withered hand are certainly about Sabbath controversies and legalism.  However, on their deepest level they are really stories about people’s cold-heartedness toward the plight of their fellow human beings.

First, we have the grain plucking controversy.  Jesus’ disciples are walking through a field, they get hungry, pluck some grain and eat it as a quick snack on the go.  Big deal, you may think.  Yet for Jesus’ critics, it was just the sort of screw-up they were looking for.  When Luke’s Gospel tells this story, it adds the detail that the disciples rolled the grain in their hands.  For an expert in Jewish laws, that constituted threshing which is strictly prohibited in Deuteronomy Chapter 5 and Exodus Chapter 34.  Therefore Jesus and his disciples are lawbreakers and clearly not of God.  All this deduced from the simple bodily function of eating.

In response, Jesus first gives a rabbinical argument.  He cites how David once violated the Law in order to feed his men and ate bread from the Temple that no one but the priests were supposed to eat.  We can easily come away from Jesus’ argument with the idea that he was claiming that such laws were mere technicalities.  However, let’s keep in mind that one person’s technicalities are another’s core values.  I think Jesus understood that, so he takes things even further. 

He says the Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.  In other words, God gave human beings the law not so they would follow it slavishly in order to elevate the Law.  God gave human beings the Law in order to elevate human beings.  God’s ultimate concern is not the Law.  God’s ultimate concern is not religion.  God’s ultimate concern is for the good of human beings.

Ponder that for a moment.  God’s ultimate concern is for your welfare ad for mine.  Certainly there were Jews at the time who also believed that.  But for this group of fault-finding stuffy legalists, it must have sounded threatening and heretical.  It was as if Jesus was pulling back the curtain on their religion and revealing what was truly behind it.  In fact, he even uses a phrase from apocalyptic literature to express it.  Apocalyptic means “unveiling” and Jesus unveils a deep truth.  Referring to himself in a term from Jewish apocalyptic literature he claims that the Son of Man (that’s him) is Lord even over the Sabbath.  The Sabbath was a unique and indentifying aspect of being Jewish.  Who God was in Jesus takes precedence over all our cherished notions of religion and self- indentity.

As if that wasn’t enough, Jesus then enters the synagogue and encounters a man with a deformed hand.  He calls him out to stand in the middle of the room, in the middle of a worship gathering.  Jesus is deliberately provocative, as all good preachers should be.  He isn’t seeking to make a beautiful peaceful church experience that feeds people or makes them feel good.  He is looking for a confrontation and he knows he is about to become angry.

The other religious folks are watching him, the text says, to see what he would do.  They’re trying to catch him.  Know people like that?  We talked about this a few weeks back, how when we join in God’s restorative purposes in the world, the critics come out of the woodwork.  When you claim to follow God or Jesus, there are people in this world who will just look for you to make a mistake. They want to catch you doing something wrong.  They want to catch church leaders or pastors in mistakes or point out their faults.  Their more concerned with others doing wrong, then with themselves doing right. (Right now some of you may be saying, “Well aren’t you just pointing out their faults?”  Yes and you’re just playing word games with me.)

These are the people Jesus dealt with and these are the people who made him angry.  Jesus provocatively asks these busy-bodies, “So is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath or to do harm?”  He is implying that he is capable of healing this man with a withered hand, and that for him to do nothing just because it’s the Sabbath would be as bad as if he caused the man harm. 

Then here’s the key part of the text.  It says Jesus looked around at them with anger - anger.  Think about the angry Jesus staring them down.  That makes us uncomfortable.  Not just us, it made the later Gospel writers of Matthew and Luke uncomfortable too.  So much so that they redacted the word “angry” from their version of the story, even though they almost certainly had Mark’s version in front of them as they wrote.

What was it? What could possibly make Jesus so angry?  The text says he was grieved by the hardness of their hearts.  Other translations say they had “closed their minds,” or “they were so stubborn and wrong,” or as the New English Bible puts it, it was their “obstinate stupidity.”

Traditionally, many Christians would say this is a story about the legalism of Jewish Pharisees, which makes it so specific as to let us off the hook.  But that’s not what this story is about.  Jesus was angry about their legalism but he was neither anti-Law nor anti-Jewish.  Nor was he preaching about grace versus law, in the manner of Paul or a sixteenth century Protestant Reformer. What angered Jesus about legalism was that legalism elevated rules to be more important than people.  Behind valuing rules over people is the idea that I follow this rule, and you don’t.  Therefore, I am a better person than you are.  Therefore, I can be cold-hearted about you.

In healing the man with the withered hand, Jesus was unveiling the in-breaking of God’s new world and reality.   The people of this world are withered and hurting.  Sure it’s because of evil and sin, but you people are just pointing your finger and quoting the Bible at them.  To be a part of God’s Kingdom, you need to be calling them into middle of the community and healing them.  That’s a very different image of church isn’t it?

Look at the reaction of the religious folks.  Jesus had challenged them with the question of which is better to do on the Sabbath, to do good or to kill and destroy.  Well, the story ends with not with them walking off inspired to do good.  They don’t leave the encounter motivated to bring healing into the world.  They leave their encounter with the angry Jesus, wanting to destroy him.  It’s the first mention of Jesus’ death.

That says a lot, doesn’t it?  If you and I are not to end up like them, we must do something different.  Counterintuitively, I would like to suggest that that difference must begin with our anger.  We must get angry at the same things that angered Jesus.  In order to be the church, we must be angry at the cold-heartedness and indifference this world often displays toward human suffering.  We must get angry when people follow the rules of what makes good economic sense, or what’s good for us and our kind, or what nice religious people are supposed to do, while hardening our hearts toward the suffering of others.

We need to be angry about the right things.  The church has been at its worse when it has been angry about people not following the rules.  That has lead to witch hunts, inquisitions, and hurting people streaming our of doors burdened with guilt and shame.  Conversely, the church has always been at its best when its been angry about cold-heartedness toward human beings, even when that cold-heartedness resided in the church.  The church has been at its best when it has been angry about slavery, civil rights, poverty, sexism,  war, and violence.  

Think of the arguments that vex Christians today, issues like abortion and homosexuality.  Imagine how different these conversations would be, both for members of the right and left, if we approached these conversations in this way.  Imagine all the misguided and anger handled inappropriately that would be avoided.  Instead of just following the rules, whether secular or sacred, or just quoting either the Bible or court decisions, what if we opened our cold hearts to suffering of others?  What if we got angry about practices that deny life and fullness of life to every human being.  As we can see, the path of Jesus would lead us beyond comfortable religious or political categories.

Next time something gets you angry, ask yourself if it’s something that would make Jesus angry too.  If it is, let God do something constructive with that anger.  Like Jesus, take that anger and reach out, not with destruction, but with healing.

Sometimes the heat of anger is just what we need to allow God to thaw out our cold hearts.