Anger: Passion that Purifies and Plunders
‘Be angry; don’t sin.’ (Eph. 4:26)
Anger cuts both ways. It can incite one to drive idols from the Father’s house; it can drive others to fill that house with idolatry.
We each face resistance to what we perceive as worthy goals. It helps to access the passion that motivates us to go against the grain. Anger may activate us to bore a hole through the hard wood of injustice, or at least what we perceive as unjust.
Maybe that’s the catch. What begins as ‘justice’ may devolve into a self-serving effort to get what we want, our way. In other words, our concept of ‘righteous anger’ can veil a selfish effort to justify ourselves.
People who have been mistreated often point to their wounds as justification for their defensive, angry behavior. They thus cherish the wound and brandish it like a knife in order to secure certain rights. When they bypass God with their wounds and in defining these rights, they run the risk of becoming despots, little gods who now seek to control others by virtue of the real injustices done to them.
Consider a woman who has been cheated on by her husband. Incited by real injustice against her, she can arise to hold the whole family hostage with her rage.
Or a man wounded by one creepy pastor or by a system that ultimately sides with the creep and not the victim. He like the betrayed wife is right to press through fear and expose that darkness. But anger too often morphs into an infectious stranglehold of hate (in this case, against the Church) which bars him from what could cure him.
The most obvious example of misplaced anger is gay activism. Citing real ills done to some children who are gender confused and claiming that suicide is immanent for any such confused soul who is not allowed to act out homosexually or get a sex change, activists have done a masterful job at changing how an entire civilization understands sexual brokenness.
Brokenness, what brokenness? We can no longer even speak of Jesus’ loving redemption of persons who repent from what Scripture defines as a perversion of God’s will for humanity in our ‘born that way, stay that way, get out of my way’ culture.
Still, anger can be a good thing. I am angry at what unfaithful men do to women and what clergy men can visit upon the vulnerable. And I am angry that the Church has often failed to understand such relational and sexual brokenness and to provide healing. That anger motivates me to do something about it. I want to go against the grain of a complacent Church that would rather play ‘nice’ than act decisively on behalf of damaged people. If she arose as the prophet, she may well begin to remove the stains that blemish her. She could become a healing community worthy of Jesus.
God got mad, so mad He drove idolaters from the Father’s house then submitted to misery in order to end ours at Calvary. His passion is always the litmus test for whether our passion will plunder or purify. In order for anger to motivate us rightly, we must submit our wounds to the One who bears them and cleanses them from bitterness and other infections. We must forgive our captors. I must continually lay down activists at the foot of the Cross—‘Father, forgive them; they know not their self-justifying ways.’
I want to arise and see and act on behalf of persons enslaved by a host of injustices. Let us be His witnesses, inviting them to kneel before the One in whom mercy and justice meet.
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