Holding onto Hurt Corrodes the Heart
Your anger can kill you. And letting go of it is not a simple act of the will. Even if we know we should let go, even if we’re determined to do so, we might find ourselves holding on even more tightly. Then we’ve got a toxic cocktail: on top of our simmering anger, we feel disappointed in ourselves that we can’t seem to move forward.
In the Sermon on the Mount, which John Ortberg calls “history’s greatest teaching from history’s greatest teacher,” Jesus addresses how holding onto anger hurts us far more than we may realize (Matthew 5:21-26).
Jesus says, “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister…is in danger” (Matthew 5:22). In the old King James version, the phrase “without cause” is added. Apparently, some of the later scribes, in creating copies of the New Testament, added this phrase, editing Jesus, presuming that surely Jesus couldn’t be saying that we can’t be angry, as that would be impossible! They tried to soften Jesus’ original words to make them more palatable.
After all, we know that Jesus himself got angry on occasion (Mark 3:5). The Bible doesn’t say “Don’t be angry.” It says, “Be angry and do not sin” (Ephesians 4:26). Anger happens; it’s biologically unavoidable. We can’t quench the spark of anger, nor would we want to when we know what good purposes that spark can serve.
But what happens in us after anger arises is of decisive importance for the kinds of people we are becoming.
Spark is the right metaphor. Because if we don’t learn how to notice, name, and tend to this emotion, it can spread like wildfire and burn our lives down. Holding onto anger burns us up.
What is Anger?
In its simplest form, anger is just a surge of energy. It’s the defensive reaction we feel when our will is thwarted or when our way is impeded. More deeply, when someone we care about is threatened or injured (think Momma Bear), or when something we care about is threatened (say, our reputation or our home or our livelihood), we get angry.
The rise of anger is far from a character flaw or moral deficiency. The great Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel pointed out, “The secret of anger is care.” We get angry because we care: no care, no anger. And that’s one reason our anger is hard to release – because it’s bound up with things that we care about, things that we don’t want to let go of.
Anger is also bound up with our sense of justice. That spark of anger can be stirred by our sense that something is not right, that a wrong needs to be redressed. Indeed, sometimes it’s a sign of moral sensitivity that we get angry. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be angered when you see someone being unjustly treated, especially someone vulnerable like a child. It’s a measure of our full humanity that we can be moved to anger.
And yet, there’s the Danger.
Because that initial spark, when it’s directed at another person we view as a threat, can easily pass over into something corrosive: wishing them harm, wanting to see them suffer. Without even thinking about it, our anger can convince us that we are entitled to hurt them as we believe we’ve been hurt.
The danger is not the surge of energy. It’s in the moment after the spark. In that tiny space between stimulus and response, if we are not aware that this is the moment we have a choice, if we don’t “watch ourselves,” anger can erupt and burn us up.
We can lash out with our words or our actions. The flash fire can also lead to something even more dangerous: burying the coals of our anger to the point that it begins to change how we view the person we are directing our anger toward.
A good definition of love is to will the good of another. When our anger passes over from protecting what we love into passing judgment, contempt, wishing ill; in other words, when anger is no longer in service of love, it becomes corrosive to the heart that hosts it.
Put another way, the spark leads to a fire. And that fire catches so easily, so quickly, so subtly, that Jesus – without qualification – warns us about our holding onto our anger. “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be liable to judgement…” For Jesus, our anger is a serious problem for us.
Who has a serious anger problem? We do. We all do.
Scholars call this section of the Sermon on the Mount “the six antitheses,” where Jesus contrasts the letter of the law with its fuller and deeper meaning; “You’ve heard it said… But I say to you…” When Jesus says he came to fill the law full (Matthew 5:17), it’s his way of saying that he came to show us the law’s fullest meaning – the law of God that is an expression of God’s love.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus paints a picture of a whole new way to be human, the Jesus Way, the new life that he will die to make possible for those who follow Him. And it’s not coincidental that Jesus begins his sketch of this new life by talking about the greatest threat to this new life – our anger. Precisely because it is so common, our anger can derail us like nothing else.