Reprocessing Anger Into Grace

February 12, 2017

Matthew 5: 21-26

²¹ “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘you shall not murder; and whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ ²² But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister your will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘you fool!’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. ²³ So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, ²⁴ leave your gift there before the alter and go. First be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then comes and offer your gift. ²⁵ Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. ²⁶ Truly, I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.

Friends, it is always a bit of a temptation on our part to limit God’s role in our lives to merely a therapeutic role. This is something that we run into with teenagers around the time of confirmation class. If you ask them to give a statement of faith as to who God is, you end up with a lot of therapeutic language. What I mean by that is, well, “When I’m down, the Lord lifts me up. When I’m lost, the Lord shows me the way. When I sin the Lord forgives me.” It sounds like an excellent kind of arrangement. In other words, my needs create the need for a Savior; whose chief role in my life is Divine Healer.

This is true of course. The Lord does lift us up, and show us the way, and forgive our sins. But the Lord is always leading from the front. The Lord creates the need and he addresses the need. Our Lord did die for our sins, but the Lord also rose in triumph over sin. So our Lord has things to say to us that go beyond mere therapy, though healing is included.

In this part of Matthew, Chapter 5, our Lord is redefining the commandment, “You shall not murder,” which can equally be translated as, “You shall not kill.” And in Hebrew it is basically one word, it is one of the Ten Commandments.

Now murder is an act, an outward act, a result; but it originates as an inward act. So our Lord wants us to examine how we think about people — He claims that this is as important as what we actually do to people. He judges our thoughts as well as our actions and that’s an examination that makes us all guilty. Our Lord is going to name anger as equal to murder.

Now, anger in itself is legitimate. This is Eugene Peterson:

Anger is a most useful diagnostic tool…. When anger erupts in us, it is a signal that something is wrong. Something isn’t working right. There is evil or incompetence or stupidity lurking about. Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighborhood. Diagnostically, he says, “it is virtually infallible and we learn to trust it. Anger is infused by a moral/spiritual intensity that carries conviction: when we are angry, we know we are onto something that matters, that really counts… But then he goes on, What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside us or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us – our spouse or our child or our God has done something wrong, and we are angry. But when we track anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us — wrong information, inadequate understanding, under-developed heart.

So we know that our Lord became angry at the Pharisees and hypocrites, at the money-changers in the temple, and others. So it’s not anger itself that is equal to murder, but the swelling of it, the nursing of grudges, and the seething resentments; the uncontrolled and uncontrollable anger that remains coiled in our hearts. Today we might speak of passive aggressive anger, a kind of underlying emotion that is injury- based and injury-causing; the anger that has a kind of imagined origin, and issues in hate and prejudice – an unhealed wound in the heart that seeks revenge. So our Lord equates this anger with murder. And he wants us healed before it’s too late; before the thought turns into an action.

E.B. White has a wonderful essay about a fox that is killing and consuming some of his chickens up on his farm in Maine. He pursues this fox with great diligence, purchasing a rifle and keeping on the watch. His comment is that, “The most exhausting thing in the world is to have an enemy. You’re just imagining the enemy everywhere.”

So friends, if we follow Jesus, we have to let him deal with our inner lives — our desires and our fantasies and our resentments. And in that regard we have to let him in. I think this is what it means to be a Christian — to trust our Lord with our drives and our motivations and our imaginations. God is big enough to deal with them.

Frederick Buechner has a definition of anger, in which he writes,

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you’re wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Well, anger is legitimate. The problem is we can’t be trusted with it by ourselves. The Lord needs to go to work in our lives and begin to reprocess anger into grace; into something that he can use and defuse in our lives.

Then our Lord goes onto speak of insulting people. It is interesting that in the Greek: “to insult people” is a word that is a kind of onomatopoeia thing; it’s the sound you make when you clear your throat when you are getting ready to spit, and that’s a pretty insulting any time. And this abusive speech, this contempt, he goes on, calling somebody a fool — this is where thoughts become speech. The words we use to describe people reveal what’s really going on in our lives.

The meaning of the word ‘fool’ here is a moral judgment, not an intellectual judgment. When we really don’t like somebody we accuse them of moral failure. Just keep an eye open for that, you’ll find it all over the place. And often what we say about them is a window into what we are thinking about. So our Lord is really putting us on notice — all of us — and some of the thinking might go like this:

–What are we holding onto that just really needs to be released?

–Who are we blaming for what are our own failures?

–What has become, as C.S. Lewis beautifully put it once, “of our harem of fondled hatreds?”

–Who is it that we’re holding in contempt?

–Who do we want to harm through defamation of character and slander and gossip?

–And, what does that say about us? What’s going on inside us that has created this nursery of fear and

bitterness?

–How can I turn this over to the Lord?

–Who will I become if I let go of these things?

–Will my health and focus and service possibly improve?

And notice that the goal in our lives, according to our Savior is reconciliation. “When you are offering your gift at the altar,” (that is, going to worship in order to be made right with God), “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you,” (Oh, it’s not what someone else has done to me but what I’ve done to somebody), “then leave your gift there before the alter and go; first be reconciled to your brother and sister and then come and offer your gift,” says the Lord.

In other words, worship is not a substitute or a cover for what needs to happen between me, and the people I have wronged or neglected. The relationship we have with God is based on the relationships we have with people. And the health of the one brings health to the other. They intersect in the central meaning of the cross — the vertical and horizontal — God and people.

Commenting on this is Clarence Jordan. I find his life quite fascinating. He passed away in 1969 but from 1942-1969 he was a white Southerner, in Americus, Georgia, trying to change the thoughts of his fellow Southerners. He started to practice integration and to preach the equality between the races, and for this he was shot at multiple times, machine-gunned and had dynamite blown up in front of his farm. Whenever he had to go out — he was about 6’2”, a pretty sturdy fellow — whenever he had to go out and buy seed, or fertilizer or whatever, he never quite knew what was going to happen at that particular store and often there were confrontations. He refused to fight back and this confused people. Commenting on this, Clarence Jordan says,