Respoding To Anger
Psalm 4:1-8
Matthew 5:21‑26
Howard W. Roberts
February 10, 2008
I want to frame our Lenten focus this year on issues that are very real to us. I will explore how Jesus responded to these issues, and how we can look to and learn from the life of Jesus to develop redemptive responses to anger, charlantry, sexism, rejection, denial, and betrayal.
A basic and most important affirmation is Jesus was a human being. We struggle with this concept. The time span between his life and ours is only a minor struggle. We don’t seem to have the same struggle with Socrates or Aristotle. Our major struggle with accepting and living our lives based on the understanding that Jesus was a human being is that we have to forfeit our alibis for our poor showings as people. Jesus is the model of wholeness for us, but our lives reveal that much of his modeling has been lost on us.
Let’s learn from Jesus how to deal with anger in a redemptive way. Anger is a human emotion that may lead to an increasing cause of hurt, harm, violence, and war. In our lifetime, anger management has become a growth industry. It has become the way to deal with professional athletes who respond with infantile aggression. We excuse an entire baseball team for emptying its bench to “protect one of its own” and then hear the manager justify the action as necessary. Some of us are confronted by road rage nearly every day, others and our own. An anger management course may be one of the recommendations a judge gives to one who has caused harm and damage due to road rage. Last week a man killed five women in a store in Tinley Park and this week a man killed several people in City Hall in Kirkwood, MO.
For centuries anger and sin have been equated. In the Middle Ages anger was identified as one of the seven deadly sins. A contemporary writer, Frederick Buechner describes anger this way,
“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 are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”2 Buechner’s description really portrays the action that anger leads to as deadly rather than anger itself being deadly. In the biblical material godly people are described as those who dealt constructively with their anger rather than being people who permitted their anger to deal with them. (Pro. 14:17; 14:29; 16:32; 19:11; Ps. 4:4).
Jesus gave guidance about anger and revenge in the Sermon on the Mount. His statement about anger is instructive but first it is alarming and disturbing. On reading the words, "But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, 'You fool!' shall be liable to the hell of fire" (Matt. 5:22), the impression is that anger is just as bad as murder. But I certainly would rather have someone angry at me than to murder me. So would the victims of Tinley Park and Kirkwood.
What is Jesus saying in the Sermon on the Mount? He got angry. Was he guilty of murder? The word translated "is angry" (Matt. 5:22) is a present participle conveying continuous action. The New English Bible translation reads, "Anyone who nurses anger...must be brought to judgment." That captures the intent of the Greek language. Jesus was forever addressing himself to the motives for people's actions. He was concerned about how the process began. He knew there was an intricate correlation between roots and fruits in people's lives. Jesus' words regarding anger expressed a radical protest toward the person who allows anger to fester and eventually poison the relationship with another human being. What Jesus said was that if people nurse their anger, they feed it, causing it to grow larger. Nursing anger sends a message to the body that it is in great danger and needs stronger, quicker reactions and responses in order to survive. To continue to feed anger will result in being devoured by it. To nurse anger is to be sucked dry.
The first step in dealing creatively and healthily with our anger is to recognize it and call it by name. A very significant event is recorded in the second chapter of Genesis when Adam was invited to name the animals. The Bible treats a name with significance. To name something is to acknowledge its existence and to have some control over it. Naming anger is the beginning point for being responsible for action motivated by anger and for being in control of anger. Unrecognized anger goes unnoticed and unnamed and becomes demonic because it gives birth to hatred rather than to nurturing love. To ignore anger is to abdicate control over it. The result is we collaborate with sin and make ourselves vulnerable to the demonic.3 Thomas Aquinas said, "He who is angry or afraid is not praised or blamed, but only he who while in this state behaves either properly or not."4
One of our difficulties in dealing constructively with our anger is our desire to cling to a few little hurts or one or two big ones and stockpile them in our arsenals. Then, when the next disagreement comes, we can go to the well of our resentments and hurt feelings and draw enough ammunition to blow away the person with whom we are angry. The result is a Pyrrhic victory. When Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, led the Grecian forces into southern Italy in 281, his 25,000 men, remarkably well equipped with cavalry and elephants, met and defeated the Roman forces. His losses, however, were so great that he was compelled to utter his celebrated lament, "Another victory like this and I shall be ruined."5 So it is with our relationships when we nurse our anger. We insult our brothers and sisters and call them fools. Another victory like that and both they and we will be ruined.
Nursing anger leads to resentment. Resentment means to feel again, and thus involves revisiting and reliving an old conflict. Resentment is an attitude in which a person refuses reconciliation. Frederick Nietzche is credited with saying that nothing on earth consumes a person like resentment.
What about the distance I experience in a relationship where I have had a major role in causing the alienation? Forgiveness is essential and yet very difficult. I wonder how many times I have been wrong in my relationships with others. How many times have I admitted my mistakes and sought forgiveness? This is where life gets tough for us. Three small words, "I was wrong." Three more small words, "I am sorry." Two more words, "Forgive me." Eight words, so few, so powerful, but so difficult for so many of us to say with integrity. "I was wrong. I am sorry. Forgive me." We are never stronger than when we are admitting our failures, wrongs, and weaknesses.
In our intimate relationships we experience the most anger and have the greatest opportunity to learn how to cope with our anger in constructive ways. Marriage and family living generate more anger than other social situations. Abuse, verbal or physical or both, results from the misuse of anger. Murder is an extreme form of abuse whose roots are buried in anger or buried anger. The majority of murders are committed by people who know their victims, usually family members or close friends. One suggestion to achieve longevity is to have no friends and to have nothing to do with family members. However, these actions are contrary to our nature and need and contrary to Jesus' suggestions about responding to anger. The inner failure of a close relationship usually occurs because the persons involved have been unable to achieve mutual love and intimacy. "The failure to achieve love and intimacy is almost always due to the inability of the persons concerned to deal creatively with anger."6 I wonder if that’s true of a congregation, of this congregation.
Anger is an indicator of danger, an emotion that we feel, and is part of the early warning system when something is threatening our well being. Physiological changes occur in our bodies when we are angry. Our heart rates increase, breathing becomes more rapid, muscles tense, adrenalin pours into the bloodstream, and anticoagulants in the blood diminish. There is an immediate surge of energy as our bodies prepare to fight or to take flight in response to a threat. There also is an increase in mental awareness. Anger is an emotional response to a stimulus and is part of our human survival kit.
The value of anger is its impelling force toward action, but how can the action be positive and build up a relationship rather than tear it down? The two most common ways of dealing with anger are suppression and ventilation. Suppression is probably our immediate first step when we get angry. It is a burial process by which anger is buried alive. The anger festers and poisons, eventually working its way out of a person in damaging and bizarre ways. Suppressed anger erupts as sarcasm, withdrawal, silence, secret planning, nagging, or violence.
To suppress anger is to swallow it. There is a limit to the amount of anger people can swallow before they get sick. Some will eat excessively to help them swallow their anger. An adolescent girl who was extremely overweight was referred to a pastoral counselor because her family relationships were frayed with tension. Her counselor sensed early that in some way her obesity was related to her anger, although she denied ever getting angry. During one session the girl reported an incident with her mother. Her body language clearly communicated anger. The counselor asked her what she did in response to the incident. She said she made a double recipe of brownies and ate all of them herself. Further discussion revealed this to be a regular practice for her. Food, especially something sweet, helped her swallow her anger. Damaging our bodies physically or emotionally because of mishandled anger is wrong, hurtful, and sinful.
Ventilation is the other common way we deal with anger. Venting anger often is akin to the eruption of Mount St. Helen's. We do not discriminate about who gets burned by our heat. All we know is that we just have to let it out. We cannot hold our anger any longer. This willingness to vent anger is healthier than suppressing it for the one who is angry, but venting anger usually is destructive to any relationship. Vented anger usually is misdirected. A cartoon portrayed this well. A man who had had a rough day at work arrived home exasperated. As soon as his wife said "Hello," he growled and shouted at her. She turned and yelled at the oldest child who screamed at her sister who yelled at her brother who kicked the dog. The caption read, "It would have been better if the man had kicked the dog." Vented anger often is projected onto an innocent person who catches the brunt of anger that is misdirected. Vented anger is an overreaction. Ventilation usually follows some suppression of anger which means that more anger is ventilated than was caused by the current incident. Damaging others emotionally or physically by venting our anger is sinful.
It is impossible to avoid getting angry. People use a variety of terms to identify their anger. They say they are hurt, disappointed, miffed, upset, disturbed, irritated, frustrated, suffering righteous indignation, mad, or angry. Neither suppressing nor venting anger proves to be a constructive method of coping with anger. What Jesus suggested regarding reconciliation (Matt. 5:21‑26) is what David Mace, a marriage and family therapist, identified as processing anger.7 His suggestions are workable in any intimate relationship. If we are unable to process our anger in our intimate relationships, we will not cope with anger very well in the larger community of human beings. In Jesus' view of life we are all siblings of one another and children of God.
Several years ago a convict rehabilitation program developed seven steps that were essential for one who had been imprisoned to reenter society and not be a repeat offender. People who followed this approach were known as the Seven Steppers. The fifth step in their litany of commitment is, "Deciding that our freedom is worth more than our resentments, we are using that power to help free ourselves from these resentments."
Was not this the approach Jesus suggested regarding worship? When a person brought his offering and remembered someone had something against him, he was to seek reconciliation before giving his offering. Isn't this a strange sequence of action? We would expect that if someone had something against us, she ought to come to us.
Why are we who have been wronged expected to take the initiative for reconciliation? When we have been wronged, even through absolutely no fault of our own, the wrong done to us is a threat to our personhood and our natural response is anger because a breach has occurred in the relationship. If we are to have close encounters of the right kind, as soon as we recognize that someone has something against us we need to initiate reconciliation.