Freedom From Rage ...

If you don’t have a temper, you may not understand.  If you don’t hold a grudge, you just may not get it.  But there are anchors that show up in your personality from time to time, that make a mark.  They hold you back.  They keep the enjoyment of life, just a few yards out of reach.  And nothing.  And nobody seems to be able to change it.  But what they reflect is something even darker, something even more insidious, something you likely would not have connected with the boat anchors of rage or resentment that creep into your emotional constitution.  They reflect a horrible misalignment of values and priorities.  Indeed “I” become the hero, and the center, of “my” story; and in no small measure distinctly more important than the other cast of characters who may intersect with me over the course of my life.  This recipe is one well suited for rage, and almost perfectly aligned for resentment.

And it happens inside the “church” just as often as outside of it.  But this begs the question, are Christians merely responding to “righteous” anger, or is the term “righteous” a matter of convenient perspective.  Ask yourself, does God get angry?  He sure seems to.  And the devil works hard to paint Him that way.  The devil thrives on a picture of an angry, and wait for it … vengeful … God.  The devil conflates the punishment of the wicked with an expression of anger.  Because how else, could you inflict horrific pain and death, without it being simply an expression of deep seated rage?  God sure seemed angry during the flood, and again with Sodom and Gomorrah.  The Egyptians may have experienced it, and the Assyrians as well.  But what is it that makes God mad?

Pain does.  Imagine how you would feel, if some bully began inflicting pain on your child.  And what if that bully, just knew what they were doing, had no excuse, and did not intend to stop no matter what the consequences.  What if your child did nothing to deserve it?  What if your child did everything to avoid it, but the bullying would not stop.  What if the bullying only escalated?  Parents begin to get indignant when faced with a situation like this.  We instinctively want to protect our child.  We’re not looking for revenge as much as we are a simple resolution.  We just want it to stop.  We want somebody to do something about it.  What about the bus driver who sees it, and could do something, shouldn’t they?  The same for the teachers at school, or even the friends of our child.  If other “righteous” people just acted, perhaps the bullying of our child would end.  But what if nobody does?  It’s going to get under your skin.

Being unable to solve a problem this substantial for your child tends to make one angry.  At some point, you want to hurt the bully.  Can you imagine this is where God might be sometimes?  And we could equate as parents, but it is more complicated than this.  Take our bullying scenario of our precious child, and add a new factor, add in the idea that the bully, is his brother or sister.  Add in the idea that both the bully and the victim are OUR kids, both born into our family, both provided equally with love and affection, both cared for equally.  The bully remains with no excuse for his activities.  But now we are forced to confront a situation within our own family, within the doors of our home, within the confines of our love.  At that point, we NO longer want to hurt the bully, we just want the behavior to stop, all the more desperately.  We do not understand it.  The terms mystery of iniquity come to mind.  How does one child become victim, and the other become psychopathic perpetrator when our love has been consistent to both of them?  It makes no sense.  But then sin never makes sense.

The quandary remains, what do we do about it?  And what if we simply cannot “make” our child stop embracing evil towards their sibling?  At some point, if we do nothing, the innocent child may die at the hands of the punishing one.  We have to take action, that will “seem” like punishment to the bully.  We have to separate them, perhaps isolate them, perhaps remove them from the home.  We will send them to counselors.  We will get all the best psychiatric help we can find for our bully.  We don’t just send our bullying child straight to the electric chair for what they do.  We try to fix it first.  We try to get them to see that what they do is wrong, it hurts other people, ultimately it hurts them, it keeps them away from the joy of life they might otherwise be having.  But the bully sometimes just refuses to see, refuses help, and gets even more aggressive, now likely blaming you for what they continue to do.

This is how God gets mad.  He is not mad at the bully half so much, as He is mad at the behavior, the disease, the choice to embrace pain.  This is NOT what He wants for His child.  But He cannot “make” His child choose something different, He can only try to coax, enlighten, and love His child, hoping they will choose to make another choice on their own.  The alternative is robots not humans.  God gets mad that one of His children must suffer, and His anger is mixed with pain, that another of His children is causing the problem.  They are both His kids, He loves them both equally.  He hurts for both of them, just like we would if faced with the same situation, except that, we are ALL His kids.

At the end of the day, it is the choice to love-self, and forego the loving of others that underlies the problem behavior.   For when we love self, we can justify a great many actions and behaviors that result in pain for someone else.  And often we don’t care.  And often we know better.  We are both victim and perpetrator, and “righteous” anger is directed at the sin itself, while redemption is directed at the person who suffers from, or is inflicting it.  When they are both your kids, you want to find a way to fix the problem, for both of them.  You want to save both of them.

So when Matthew records this part of Jesus’ famous Sermon on the Mount in chapter five of his gospel, he was taking an in-depth look at anger, rage, resentment, and perhaps how we might find freedom from it, at least within the “church”.  He begins with the words of Jesus picking up in verse 21 saying … “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment: [verse 22] But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: … “  To equate anger itself with the action of killing is something the Jewish audience, and frankly our Christian one, had rarely considered.  To equate internal personal motives, thoughts, and feelings with the deeds they would otherwise inspire as being “equal” to God seems new.  It means our motives matter as much as our deeds.  They count as much.  They must be transformed as much.

Refraining from actually killing my brother is not as life affirming as not hating him, but rather loving him in the first place.  If I am angry at him all the time, my life is being spent needlessly suffering from the chains of rage and resentment.  Any who judged my life spent in anger, would see that it was far less than it could have been, even if, I had never harmed a hair on my brother’s head in actions.  The thoughts of anger, become the motives of my life, and constrict it to a life of pain I inflict needlessly on myself.  But what if my anger against my brother is “with cause” you ask?  I ask, what is your cause, and what are you angry with?  If you are angry as God would be, just wanting an end to the sin that infects our lives, directing redemption towards your brother, and anger towards Satan who keeps him ensnared, then perhaps you do have cause, and perhaps your anger is righteous after all.  But if your anger with your brother leads you to care less about his redemption, and much more about inflicting justice upon him, you are living back in the land of problems.

Jesus completes verse 22 this way “… and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.”  The word “Raca” has no immediate definition in the English language.  The current thinking is that it is an Aramaic word meaning foolish or empty headed.  The minority opinion is that it could mean effeminate or some derogatory term against homosexuals although that seems less likely given the comparator used in the remainder of the verse.  What is clear is that Raca was a gentler form of insult, than the word Fool at the time.  It is akin to making fun of a person in gentle terms, and making fun of them in harsh terms … either way you look at it, you are making fun of a person, tearing them down, attempting to make them feel less about themselves through what you say.  And apparently, this is a big deal for Jesus, as hell fire is seldom used as the outcome to our actions, but it is plainly stated for this one.

Hurting someone else because of what we say, reflects the same motives, and mis-aligned priorities that our rage filled counterparts carry.  Our hurtful language testifies that we care more about what we think, and what we feel, than the object of our speech.  In the process, our words become weapons, and we leave someone else on the floor, stabbed with our tongue, or shot with our prose.  The damage can be just as real and far less clean to recover from.  The idea that we could so casually hurt someone else, in effect without thinking about it, is a revelation of how little we have been transformed.  It demonstrates how little we love others, how much we still love ourselves, and that our submission to Christ has yet to begin in earnest. 

And lest Christians think they are immune from these kinds of thoughts and feelings Jesus continues in verse 23 saying … “Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; [verse 24] Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.”  The interesting twist here is that Jesus is not asking the angry person to go apologize.  He is asking the calm person, to go find the one who is upset with him, and find a way to make peace.  In monetary terms, to find the guy he owes money to, and pay him, to make sure everything is up to date, before completing the action of offering in the church.  Jesus does not stipulate that the debt is legitimate, or that the dispute is equitable.  Instead He asks, that we find a way to make peace with those who make claim upon us, whether legitimate, or equitable, or not – before we complete the transaction of our offering in church.  In other words, our relationships with our brothers and sisters is more important than what we give in the offering plate.

In case we missed that point Jesus continues in verse 25 saying … “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. [verse 26] Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.”  The money this world is obsessed with is not supposed to be equally interesting to us.  Jesus asks us to agree with our adversary.  It is hard to continue an argument when we agree with the other side.  If this means we wind up giving away money we think we should be able to keep, then so be it.  Jesus does not say, make an effort.  He says find a way.  If that means you lose money, then lose it.  Better being broke and free, than rich and in debtors prison.  We don’t have debtors prisons anymore in our world, unless you count student loans, credit cards, and home mortgages that will keep you cash poor forever.  But perhaps these too, reveal to us, how much of our lives are spent in the service of debt repayment, for expected financial gains, that rarely if ever come.  Jesus repeats the point, our money is not as important as our ability to part with it.

The freedom from rage and resentment begin when we value something else.  When a Christian can learn to part with their money, and hold tight the people they love, something wonderful happens.  When I let Jesus get in and dig into my life, making whatever changes He wants, an awesome journey begins.  I become different, because He makes me different.  I begin to stop loving me, and start loving others.  I begin to get passionate about it.  The passion that used to be a hallmark of my temper, now becomes a hallmark of how much I care about someone other than me.  And the time and energy it takes to get mad, and stay mad, float away replaced by an infinite source of energy invested in loving someone other than me.  My life gets better.  Anyone who looked at it after Jesus begins to see that, to judge that.  And more importantly I see it, I feel it, I experience it.  A new-found freedom that only Jesus can bring.

And the sermon was not over yet …