The issue is not that Christians are allowed to be angry or even outraged at what Trump and his quislings are doing to America but how Christians choose to interpret and respond to such bold-faced bullying in the belligerent theft of our country. There are two basic things that we can control in the transactions of human experiences: how we interpret things that happen and how we respond to things that happen.
If our anger is uncontrolled and we do violence by bringing harm to persons who have caused or precipitated such anger in us, it is one problem. If we allow the sun to set on our anger, and froth and seethe with a vengeance as payback and attack physically those who inflicted pain on us, it is quite another. The Apostle Paul who instigated more than his share of angry conflicts in his persecution of the Jesus Movement and Followers of the Way and in planting new churches throughout Asia Minor advises us in Ephesians 4:26″In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry.”
In looking at scriptures and reading J. Oswald Sanders’s masterpiece on
Spiritual Leadership, Sanders states that Holy Anger is an important quality for spiritual leaders and Christians in conflicts and battle laden situations.
If someone gets angry, it means they care about the issue that makes them angry. Indifference and apathy are perhaps more concerning when the individual feels no pain and is not invested in working on a constructive solution. Sometimes in monumental conflicts, Christians can be too passive. When a person gets angry, something awakens, arouses, and quickens him. The question is how will that person express his anger? Will his response bring harm or healing? So much of human conflicts culminate in fight or flight behavior, attacking the person or the silent treatment and running away from the problem which is seldom a solid remedy to the problem.
How then can we say that Christians should not get angry when Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth, ala the prophets Elijah and Moses, became angry when confronting political powers in the Kingdoms of Ahab and Jezebel and Pharaoh?
We see evidence of Jesus’ righteous indignation in personal conflict in Mark 3:1-5 where his critics badgered, antagonized, and nit-picked him for acts of healing and rebuked the authority by which he performed such spiritual intervention on a day that such intercession was presumably prohibited by law.
Jesus encounters a man with a withered hand. His antagonists watched him closely to see if he would heal the man on the Sabbath. Contrary to widespread beliefs, there may have been no major prohibitions of healing on the Sabbath, but his critics were looking to accuse him of something to justify their disdain for him and to reveal their “See I Told You So About This Guy” put-downs” as a lawbreaker to discredit him, challenge his authority and ultimately to prevent him from gifting the ailing man with one act of compassion and divine grace. Such conflicts often occurred between the Hillel and Shammai schools of Pharisaism, where the Shammai schools were more conservative in their interpretation by following the exact letter of the law while the Hillel School of which Jesus was presumed to favor preferred more liberal interpretations by acting according to the spirit of the law. In the case of Jesus, love triumphed over law. The law is necessary but love acts expediently to heal the person now.What I mean here is that while law could be meticulously exact, if a real need presented itself, the belief was to heal the person on whatever day the need was manifested. The real need superseded the so-called Sabbath Laws.
The scriptures say, “And he looked on them with anger and told the man to stretch out his hand and healed him.” Note the word does not say that Jesus should not have gotten angry with them. He had every right to feel what he felt. They questioned not only the time of the healing, which angered Jesus but his authority to perform such a charitable act. They may have also wondered if such a man was worthy of healing. Who is this man and who is Jesus to heal him? To audaciously heal the man, since acts of healing were reserved officially for Temple priests, Jesus took that anger and channeled it into an act of love for the man. Jesus’ holy anger was rooted in the genuine love of the people. Holy Anger is rooted in the genuine love of God and God’s people to break through the constraints, regulations, and bureaucracies that prevented such critical intervention from transpiring in the lives of God’s people.
Christians get angry out of genuine love. Christians have become angry at Trump and the Republicans because they assiduously seek to destroy this nation through, hatred, selfishness, and greed. They cannot be reasoned or bargained with. They are not in touch with truth or reality. They thrive on lies and make no sense in their reasons for railing. Christians are angry because they hate to see the innocent suffering; they hate the fact that the uber-wealthy or what the great Thom Hartmann calls the “morbidly wealthy” want to take everything away from the poor and middle class by extracting more undeserved government subsidies and by failing to pay their fair share of taxes which they conceive to be unjust. Many Christians love their country and are rising in opposition to the fools who want to tear their country down. Christians are fighting back and channeling their righteous indignation into acts of righteous resistance and protest through acts of mercy, peace, grace, and love even to those considered to be undeserving of such love. Remember when all is said and done Love is the great equalizer among social or political nonequals and forgiveness is the great game changer in a world given to the harsh penalties incorporated into accompanying Retributive Justice.
Jesus also angrily chased the moneychangers out of the Temple in Matthew 21:13. “Jesus’ love for God’s house made him angry at the sellers and buyers who had turned the temple into a den of robbers.” Holy Anger is rooted in genuine love.
So, we need to stop saying that Christians shouldn’t be angry at the injustices and transgressions they observe in the world especially now when so many people are catching so much undeserved hell from ruthless and reckless politicians chief of which is Donald J. Trump. Yes, anger can be right and useful for Christians and Spiritual leaders but the use of violence that can accompany anger can become abusive, even subversive, and certainly an addictive response that does more damage and harm than good.
The goal is to feel what we feel and not deny or suppress what we feel. Repeated denial and suppression of our feelings can end in volcanic eruptions that spill all over the place causing more harm and damage to people not responsible for causing our anger. Holy anger means to own what we feel and sublimate those feelings into redemptive acts of righteous intervention optimally expressed in acts of love and genuine healing of God for the people of this world.
Beware of the various ways the people seek to disarm you from your faith practice, by hoodwinking you into believing that you have no right to genuinely feel what you feel to express your righteous ire at injustice, wrongdoing, and ill will.
Express yourself in acts of love and justice on behalf of those treated unjustly through peaceful forms of non-cooperation and non-violent resistance, as did our Lord Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth, the author and finisher of our faith practice in a world where we need so much more of love sweet love to make it a better place for all people.
Yes, Holy Anger is an acceptable characteristic of Spiritual Leaders and Christian believers. It can be good when channeled into acts of goodness and healing for those in need in our time. Saving our country is important now and we must use every constructive tools available to make our feelings known and to fight back against the rising tyranny that seeks to destroy us all.
Carlyle Fielding Stewart
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