The occasional delivery of a sermon to the
professor of preaching and my seminary classmates provided me with anxious
moments. After the sermon, they would offer constructive criticisms. After one
of my classroom efforts, the professor said, "You preach like an angry young
man!" At first I thought I was being complimented; it was the 1960s, and
virtually all anger was fashionable. However, he elaborated gently: "Richard, I
hear no good news. I don't hear an angry prophet announcing the gulf between
God's will and human behavior. I don't hear a call to repentance. I just hear
you venting your own resentments and frustrations."
Constructive criticism can be piercing. The
professor was correct; I was angry. The government was often wrong; the church
was occasionally cruel; the public was not infrequently heartless and mindless.
But, prophetic criticism was not coming through my words to this wise
professor. Instead, he heard me whining indignantly that life just wasn't the
way I thought it should be! In retrospect, that period of my life did include
bits of temper tantrums as I discovered I couldn't have it my way, even when I
was sure I was right! Now and then I was using the pulpit to ventilate my
youthful hostilities and disappointments, not recognizing that random and
misplaced personal anger undermine a sermon and much else.
I'm not suggesting that all anger is
inappropriate. I am proposing that we reexamine what kind of anger deserves our
time and energies by first exploring the anger of Jesus Christ, in light of
today's Gospel.
When Jesus chased the money-changers from the
Temple, he was clearly angry, but not for any injustice done to him. He had
gone to the holiest place in Jerusalem to proclaim and inaugurate the kingdom
of God. The corruption he found there provoked his wrath against the Temple's
guardians. Perhaps he was protesting the Temple tax or the use of coins with
pagan images. Perhaps he was angered that the selling of animals had taken over
the only area where Gentiles were allowed to pray. Perhaps the vendors and
money-changers were overcharging or cheating the people. In any case, Jesus
sensed that the Temple no longer expressed the holy Covenant between God and
Israel; the holy place where God and people meet had been defiled, its hallowed
mission betrayed. He was angry for God's sake and attacked the whole Temple
system with its modes of worship, purity laws, and prescribed compliance. He
would replace the Temple, not with another structure, but with himself as the
New Temple, the resurrected place where every human being can meet God.
I do not have a precise gauge to determine
whether particular degrees of anger, irritation, hurt, disappointment, or
sorrow are appropriate for our various circumstances. However, in response to
many unjust situations a steady, calm and cool indifference is wrong, and
degrees of anger are right.
Indeed, righteous anger accompanied by
purposeful action is a moral responsibility for us individually and as the
Church: especially, when human beings of any age are abused or exploited
financially, physically, or emotionally; when individuals knowingly engage in
activities that jeopardize their own health and well-being; and, when
institutions such as schools, governments, hospitals, the courts, and churches
do not effectively serve the human beings for whom they exist. Principled anger
with resolve is a moral responsibility when we confront greed, fraud, gluttony,
laziness, envy, aggression, or murder. Righteous indignation should be our
response when the holy name of God or of Jesus Christ is profaned, and when
God's sacred places are defiled. The authentic Christian life includes remedial
anger for God's sake: prophetic anger for change, reversal, and generating good
will among human beings.
Going beyond the noble outrage of Christ in
today's Gospel, anger is also a proper reaction to personal betrayals: when
promises have been broken, confidentiality breached, when we have been lied to,
and when we or those we love have been victimized by ignorance, lechery, theft,
arrogance, back stabbing, and other injustices. We may respond with appropriate
anger that motivates remedies or which we allow to settle to levels of
irritation, hurt, sorrow, disappointment, or perhaps compassion and
forgiveness. Alternatively, we may respond with devilish, ongoing rage and
resentment: hate-filled, avenging, wallowing bitterness damaging to ourselves
and others. One commentator states it this way: "To lick your wounds, 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 giving back -in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The
chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at
the feast is you." Our difficult responsibility, then, is to dissipate ungodly,
lingering hostility and be energized by godly anger; to meet this challenge we
might now and then need counsel from others.
Furthermore, our lives (like Christ's) should
not be monopolized by anger, even for God's sake; there is room for joy and
peace. Even as Jesus was aware of a multitude of personal and social
injustices, he was not angry all or most of the time. We are first and foremost
an Easter community! It is up to us to discern prayerfully when anger is
timely, wise, and constructive.
The prayerful poem "Holy Anger" is a fitting
conclusion to this sermon: With holy anger, Christ, disrupt the power that
feeds upon the cruel sacrifice of others' rights and needs. As you turned over
tables and sent coins spinning and jangling across the temple floor, disrupt
the unholy commerce in our hearts: selling faith for security and trading
justice for peace. By your holy anger drive out every transaction that profanes
the house of prayer. By that same anger start what evil can't defeat: a
stubborn passion in the heart to see God's will complete. Baptize us with fire
hotter than Herod's wrath, until we no longer mute the fury in our hearts at
the slaughter of the innocents. Baptize us with fire! But do not let our rage
grow bitter as the din of fierce mean minds that fail to gauge when anger turns
to sin. Instead, let anger be the first note in love's ascending scale, the
starting tone of heaven's dove: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the
things that make for peace..." Instead, let anger be compassion's kindling fire
that lights in us the energy/to live as you desire. [Thomas H. Troeger] Amen!