This is Part 3 of a series. You can read Part 1 and Part 2 at these links.
God’s Remedy for Releasing Anger
Remember that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is moving us beyond the letter of the law, beyond religious duties. As he says elsewhere, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice’” (Matthew 9:13).
For Jesus, it’s not simply a case of, Do not murder: Check. Jesus widens the lens to show us that the fullest meaning of that commandment has to do with what’s in our heart and what comes out of our heart when we are angry with someone. What do we wish for them?
Jesus asks us: do we love mercy? That’s what the LORD requires of us – to do justice precisely through loving mercy, which will require supernatural humility.
He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)
In calling us to release our anger, Jesus wants us to become people who love mercy, and who love mercy toward others more than our own private practices, no matter how pious we imagine ourselves to be. So Jesus tells us,
“If you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23-24).
Is there a more ignored sentence of Jesus in the Bible? To walk out of church, as it were, and first…as far it depends upon us…to live at peace…with them? To get the log out of our own eye first (as Jesus says later in his sermon, Matthew 7:5) and go and be reconciled?
Notice, Jesus doesn’t say, “If you have something against your brother,” which is what we might expect him to say – we’re the angry ones, after all!
But Jesus says that if you come to worship and “remember that your brother has something against you…” That seems like an incredibly high bar!
And yet, harboring resentment is such a danger that Jesus says if you suspect that someone has something against you, leave your sacrifice to God and first go and be reconciled to them. Stop what you’re doing and attend to…their anger! That requires something incredibly rare – listening, paying attention, seeking to understand why they feel the anger that they feel.
This is a portrait of someone who aspires to walk in Jesus’ way. Jesus goes beyond resentment, beyond “if you are holding something against someone…” As a recipient of God’s great mercy, you come to love mercy. And as someone who loves mercy, not only do you want to let go of your own anger, but you take care that others might be free from the corrosive effects of holding on to their anger. Love seeks the healing of the other.
If that sounds like too high a bar, imagine what an expression of particular love in your particular conflict it would be, to be able to express, “Not only do I want to be free, but I want you to be free!”
We know that Jesus wants us to become people who love God and who love others. In the face of our conflicts, that looks like replacing the energy of our anger with a zeal for love. That kind of zeal looks like the Apostle Paul, speaking of those who were plotting to kill him, that he wished his own name could be blotted out of the Book of Life if only they could be healed (Rom. 9:1-5).
Love means wishing the flourishing of the other to the point you long to be reconciled to them. If the desire for their healing is not in your heart, then don’t fool yourself to think you have forgiven them. And there’s Jesus’ open secret as to how we are to release our anger.
The Open Secret
To our anguished question: How can we be free of this anger? God’s remedy for us to release our anger is forgiveness. We can only let go by learning to forgive.
Forgiveness is one of the most frequently mentioned but least understood words in the church.
Many of us declare it too quickly (Oh, I forgive them!), in an attempt to bypass the long and painful practice of actually extending it, over and over.
Most Christians don’t realize that forgiveness is a practice, a habit of the heart. And like any new habit, it has to be grooved by ongoing wise practice to take root. If you wait until you feel it, you’ll never get started. Forgiveness is declared before it is felt. It is a process that must be repeated, again and again, to let go of that debt, over and over, as opposed to dwelling on it, ruminating over it, brooding on it.
Every temptation to ruminate over a past hurt is an invitation to forgive in the present.
And because forgiveness is easier said than done; easier talked about than practiced; easier pronounced than embodied; if we are not vigilant, the spark of anger lights the coals of resentment. To mix metaphors, anger can almost overnight take hold and become “a root of bitterness” (Heb. 12). This is why the Bible exhorts us to tend to our anger promptly (Eph. 4:26).
Just as, where I grew up, kudzu grows deep and wide unbelievably quickly, so too the weeds of bitterness. They can take root and take over our hearts. To deal with our anger and bitterness, “uproot” might be a more appropriate metaphor than “let go.” We have to dig up those roots of bitterness, as deep and wide as we can, and as often as is needed.
Because here’s what we forget: we have to keep doing it, over and over, and sometimes for years. “Seventy times seven” does not just mean 490 offenses; it means every time and any time that debt arises in your heart and clamors for the other to pay it!
We get stuck when we forget that forgiveness takes time and ongoing practice. If you want a tested tool that can help you in the practice of forgiveness, check out the forgiveness workbooks created by forgiveness expert Everett Worthington.
Two Paths
Anytime you feel that grievance story welling up within you – imagine two paths in front of you.
One is the way of nursed anger, which might take the form of withdrawal or avoidance. It’s a posture of judgment, superiority, and self-pity. The pull down this path is strong, which is why this way is broad and well-travelled. It is the road most people choose: the way of nursing our hurt, cutting off the other person, as if we could snip Matthew 5:24 out of the Bible.
The other path is the way of forgiveness. It’s important to say that reconciliation may not be possible, for it takes two to be reunited; but it only takes one to forgive. This path is narrow but leads to life. It includes naming our debts, but only so we can release them.
Reconciliation may not be wise or even loving at this point, if it allows others to persist in actions that continue to harm them and continue to harm you. Boundaries do have place in forgiveness. But which of us can trust our motives enough to draw these boundaries without the wisdom of peacemakers who dare to remind us that lots of things can be true at once.
The older I get, the more I’m convinced that when it comes to our anger, directed at another person, the way forward is always forgiveness. Forgive as you’ve been forgiven. Forgive everyone everything.
Two Pictures: Lewis and Bonhoeffer
Many consider Till We Have Faces to be C.S. Lewis’s greatest novel. It’s based on the myth of Cupid and Psyche, told from the perspective of Psyche’s sister. She wasn’t beautiful like Psyche was. And she resented the gods for the bad hand she felt she’d been dealt. She carried with her a “book of complaints.” At the end of Lewis’s novel, she is allowed a forum, a courtroom setting, to finally read her book out loud. After she’s had her say:
“Enough,” said the judge.
“There was utter silence all round me. And now for the first time I knew what I had been doing. While I was reading, it had, once and again, seemed strange to me that the reading took so long; for the book was a small one. Now I knew that I had been reading it over and over—perhaps a dozen times. I would have read it forever…if the judge had not stopped me…At last the judge spoke.
“Are you answered?” he said.
“Yes,” said I. The complaint was the answer.
“To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean…[they say] to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
“A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech that has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about joy of words.
“I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
When we feel we have been wronged, we may wish for an audience with a judge, someone to adjudicate the injustice against us. But this passage suggests that it’s in the voicing of our complaints before the Judge that we come to see ourselves, and the folly of our resentments for the first time. We see the vanity, the futility, the hypocrisy of holding on to our complaints.
How can I complain about them before the Judge when I remember who I am? When we finally see who we are, our complaints about them must cease. Enough.
If you think, “I’ve tried to forgive, but I just can’t seem to let them go.” You could pair Lewis’s image with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s advice on bringing the face of someone you can’t forgive into Jesus’ presence with you in prayer. Bonhoeffer counsels:
“I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.
“This is a happy discovery for the Christian who begins to pray for others. There is no dislike, no personal tension, no estrangement that cannot be overcome by intercession as far as our side of it is concerned. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the fellowship must enter every day.
“The struggle we undergo with our brother in intercession may be a hard one, but that struggle has the promise that it will gain its goal… offering it as intercessory prayer means nothing other than Christians bringing one another into the presence of God, seeing each other under the cross of Jesus as poor human beings and sinners in need of grace.
“Then everything about other people that repels me falls away.
“Then I see them in all their need, hardship, and distress. Their need and their sin becomes so heavy and oppressive to me that I feel as if they were my own, and I can do nothing else, but bid: Lord, you yourself, you alone, deal with them according to your firmness and goodness.
“Offering intercessory prayer means granting other Christians the same right we havereceived, namely, the right to stand before Christ, and to share in his mercy.”
Conclusion:
Holding onto anger corrodes the heart. Jesus’ strong words about anger in the Sermon on the Mount are an index of his care for us. He loves us so much that he wants us to be free of the resentment which steals our life.
In his teaching on anger and forgiveness, in both Matthew 5 and Matthew 18, Jesus warns about being handed over “to the jailer.” If we allow bitterness to take root in our souls, we build a prison of anger, thinking we are locking the other away inside it. It’s a way of asking them to pay the debt they owe! Only later, by the grace of God, we may come to understand that the one we imprison is ourselves. And that, all this time, we’ve held the key to our own freedom.
It’s not possible to hold onto our anger with someone if we are praying for them, bringing them with us into Jesus’ presence. That’s great news – especially if the person we are struggling to forgive feels that they didn’t do anything wrong. What we need in order to experience freedom is not in them. It was never in them. It’s in us and always available to us. We don’t need anything from them in order to forgive them or to be free of our hurt.
In forgiving another, we set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner set free is ourselves, wrote Lewis Smedes. Forgiveness! That is the open secret for how to let go of our anger. What’s the catch? You have to keep choosing that narrow path. And it’s hard. And few find it.