What makes a man calmly and deliberately get into car, sneak past barriers, and drive down a boardwalk full of helpless pedestrians, hitting as many as he can? We may soon hear about the effects of drugs or alcohol, or mental illness, but whatever the root there was clearly a seething, deadly anger at work in Nathan Campbell this past Saturday.
We are all intimately acquainted with the deadliness of anger. We see its effects in crazed acts of public violence, in terrorism, and in domestic abuse. On a smaller scale we know well what anger can do to personal relationships and even to community and business relationships. Anger is horribly and visibly destructive.
In our text, Matthew 5:21-26, Jesus prohibits anger against a brother [or sister, we presume]. It’s the first of the Sermon on the Mount’s antitheses, wherein Jesus refers to ancient Old Testament law and practice and intensifies those requirements. So God does not forbid merely the violence arising out of anger, but anger itself, including the forms which issue in such seemingly innocuous behavior as name calling (verse 22).
However, unlike many of the other deadly sins, anger is more complex in that there appear to be good and justified occasions for anger. The Bible says that God Himself is wrathful toward sin (Romans 1:18) and we see Jesus clearly displaying anger in His cleansing of the Temple (Matthew 21:12). We can also hear Jesus’ anger at points in His condemnation of injustice and empty religious display (i.e., the “woes” of Matthew 23). So the emotion of anger in and of itself is not necessarily wrong.
Here is the point where our understanding of vice needs to be connected with our grasp of virtue. Anger is sinful when it lacks justice. Thomas Aquinas sees anger as essentially a desire for revenge. But when the desired revenge is unjust, when it is undeserved or goes beyond fair punishment, then it is wrong. And Jesus in our text warns us about anger because we so easily go beyond those just limits. It’s very easy to slip from a righteous anger with some evil to an unrighteous anger that itself perpetrates evil on others.
Jesus invites us to temper our anger with a focus on quick reconciliation in the larger part of our text, verse 23-26. That is how God Himself deals with us, though He has great cause to be angry with us for our sins. Instead of seeking His revenge out of hand, He offers us reconciliation through the grace of Jesus. May we learn to be more like God in His anger, first letting go of any wrath which has no cause or reason and then even in justified anger learning to gently offer of forgiveness and restoration of relationship to those who have offended us.