Sometimes, we feel so angry that we don’t know what to do with ourselves. As Christians, we feel guilty because we think we are not supposed to feel anger at all. What is going on? How do we deal with anger as Christians?
Regarding anger, we have two fundamental misunderstandings.
We either think that we are supposed to burn with righteous anger or that meekness means we never even feel angry.
Both visions are mistaken.
We have been lied to regarding anger. We are told that venting is the best way of releasing anger. This is how we “get it off our chest.” Research on anger suggests otherwise.
Looking at the psychological studies, we can conclude that venting does not get rid of anger. Instead, it feeds it.
When we imagine the hurt we have suffered, we are training ourselves to be perpetually hurt and confused. This seems to be the prevailing narrative in our society today and part of the reason people are so generally hurt and confused. Replaying the anger is not always releasing the anger.
How often have you run into someone who rants about the same thing over and over? We probably all fall into this from time to time. We become experts in how other people have hurt us. We hold onto the hurt instead of letting it go and growing greater than the injury.
How do we get rid of the anger and the hurt? We need to bring the anger and hurt out of the darkness into God’s light. He alone knows everything that is going on in our hearts and can help us get to a place of healing. The secret lies in confession.
Brandon Robinson wrote:
There is a difference between confession and combustion. Confession brings darkness into the light. Combustion keeps feeding the fire.
Christianity does not ask us to never be angry, but rather to avoid sin. Anger is tricky and can lead us into sin, so we have to be careful not to give ourselves over to anger.
Righteous anger is rare. People love to cite the example of Jesus clearing out the money changers from the Temple (cf. Jn. 2:14-16). He probably did this with the right amount of passion. His anger was rightly ordered towards the good, while our anger is usually mixed with our wounded ego and desire for revenge.
I know that I am not Jesus, and if I were to take a whip of cords and start swinging it around, I don’t think that I would be full of righteous anger.
Sometimes, we think that we need to be able to get angry so we can react forcefully when an emergency arises. But I think this may not be as wise as we might think.
One of the favorite lessons I learned from Brant Hansen’s book, Unoffendable, is that you probably want to be level-headed when there is a crisis.
Being so meek that we never experience emotions is inhuman. We are going to feel things: it is part of the human experience. But this does not give us the right to turn over our decisions to our emotional responses. Our reason should always be driving our responses.
Standing before the mirror and rehearsing your angry discourse is probably not healthy. What you rehearse, you reinforce. There is no reason to make yourself angrier about a specific situation. You are much better off training your heart to forgive in these situations.
Forgiveness is the Christian answer to anger. This does not mean that we are going to ignore the injury or pretend that we were not hurt. Rather, we learn to release our desire for revenge by focusing on the fact that we are first forgiven.
The more we realize that we are forgiven by Christ, the more we can forgive others. One of the privileges I experience in pastoral ministry is getting a glimpse of what is going on inside others. I am continually amazed at how understandable people’s actions are when we get to perceive their motivations and pressures more clearly. Understanding does not necessarily justify the behavior, but it makes forgiveness easier.
Anger is an emotion, not an act of the will. We don’t sin by feeling anger, but rather when we give it free rein and allow it to form our response. We are all going to have moments when we feel sad, confused, and even angry. What we do with these emotions, especially when we forgive, is what makes us better followers of Christ. Following Jesus means responding to anger as he would. We don’t deny the hurt. Rather, we carry it into the light and choose to forgive.
For much of my marriage, I struggled (gave into) my swiftness to anger. It was destroying my marriage. Then, one evening, the Lord graced me with calming words in a moment when I was ready to descend into a fiery rage against my husband, who'd just said something he knew was cutting to me (I, too, had been doing the same to him...we were in a heated argument) and then fled upstairs to our room. I'd been cooking dinner and turned off the burner, ready to fly upstairs after him, spitting even worse rage.
And if I were to name just one moment in my life when I knew without a doubt the Lord had spoken to me, this was it. As I shoved the frying pan aside, I happened to glance up at the crucifix on my kitchen wall and at the exact same moment "heard" within me: "I died for you. Will you die fo Me?" With those words, the anger seemed to slip out of me. The shock of those words, of being confronted with their truth, calmed me like the sea Jesus rebuked. How could I say no to such a question? To do so was unthinkable.
Only the grace of God caused me to do what was next. I walked upstairs and met my husband in the hall. He was surely ready to defend himself against the tirade he was expecting. Instead, I kissed his cheek and said calmly, "I know you didn't mean what you said, and I forgive you for it. I'm sorry for what I said, too. Wanna come down for dinner?" And with that, he apologized as well and the fight was over.
I can't say I never gave into anger again. But it was a start. That question of Jesus' has stayed with me and through it (and through many more moments of grace), He has saved me and my marriage.
I don't know what I'm sharing, except that I don't think it was for me alone that He did that, and when I read this, it all came flooding back and felt like it needed to be shared. God bless you, Father, for your spiritual fatherhood and guidance on this little corner of the wide online world.
Thank you for this Father. This was fantastic.
When I think about meekness and Aquinas wrote about meekness, he mentioned it’s not that we don’t get angry. It’s actually that our reason is dominant over our anger. Rather than anger dominating our reason. Because anger is actually okay when there’s a legitimate injustice. But we have to keep our heads about us. The real question is are we angry about the right thing? Are we angry in the right way? Are we angry to the right degree.
When I hear that I think about Christ in the temple as well. Because sometimes we picture Him almost pounding over these tables like He’s going to lose control in his anger. But He was the opposite of that right? Christ was so ordered that he was not losing His control. He was asserting control.
One thing I really liked about your point about marinating in our anger is I think something else happens here as well. Not only do we get angrier, we start sculpting the story that we tell ourselves about what happened because we’re looking at it through angry lenses. We stew in our anger and it molds us.
Because when we feel hurt we don’t know their intention. We view everything through our own lens of hurt. What we perceive as somebody being cruel is often times carelessness, or weakness, or fear, or someone operating out of their own wounds.
We hear that hurt people hurt people and I think that is so true. And often times when somebody does something, it may be because one of their own wounds was triggered and we are not privy to that.
It doesn’t make their behavior towards us any less real. It doesn’t excuse what they did but can change how we look at the person who inflicted it on us.
But if we sit and stew in that injury enough, we will convince ourselves we know exactly what someone else’s motives were when we didn’t know that to begin with.
That’s also why I think forgiveness needs truth. We’re not pretending that we didn’t get hurt, but we’re no longer allowing that hurt to become the lens through which we view everything.
Great piece. I loved it. Thank you so much Father.