This is part 2 in a series of 3 articles. You can read part 1 here.
Drop the Rock
The verb tense that Jesus uses when talking about anger in Matthew 5 suggests that the anger he’s talking about is ongoing. It’s not the rock that we pick up; it’s the rock that we hold onto and feel like throwing – to the point that we bear ill will toward another – this is the anger that burns up our lives.
Our anger might come out in the words we use, whether out loud or in our heads. Jesus says, “Whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.” In Jesus’ context, “Raca,” or “you fool,” were Aramaic terms of contempt.
And contempt might feel completely natural. What’s the big deal? Wouldn’t anyone feel this way?
John Ortberg cautions, “It’s never OK to not will good for another person.” That seems like an extreme statement, but if you define love as willing the good of the other, and if you know that God’s will is for us to love God and love others, then it follows that the essence of sin is the failure to love. Hence, “It’s never OK to not will good for another person,” also means it’s never OK to sin, even when you feel entitled to your anger.
In another place (Luke 17), Jesus warns that our anger can seep out in the settled sense that we are justified in looking down on someone for what they’ve done to us. Holding on to an offense is a way of describing unforgiveness. You might wonder – what does unforgiveness have to do with looking down on someone?
Is there someone that you have a hard time releasing your anger toward? Consider that the only way we can hold onto anger is if we believe we’d never do what they did, that we are better than them.
Anger is thus a delicious feeling, helping us feel superior to those we enjoy looking down on. In justifying our anger; we justify ourselves. The circuit is mutually re-enforcing. Where anger can’t be released, self-righteousness is always near. It lets us feel superior and it feels empowering. A double shot!
Moreover, it gives us a sense of control over someone who hurt us. And that’s precisely one of the things that may have triggered our anger in the first place – our sense of powerlessness. What can I do about this? It feels so wrong, so unjust! Ah, I can be angry!
Watch Yourselves!
We might feel anger because we feel like an unjust victim of something someone did to us. And we might be! But if we don’t attend to that spark of energy with grave seriousness, watch out – because that anger can burn up our lives. That’s why Jesus begins his teaching on forgiveness by warning us who’ve been hurt to first “Watch yourselves!” (Luke 17:3). Isn’t that unexpected? We are the ones who’ve been wronged, and yet Jesus tells us to watch ourselves.
In any conflict, we tell ourselves a story about what happened, based on our recollection of events. We have feelings attached to this story. And if we hold onto that story, if we rehearse our grievance over and over, if we brood over it and ruminate on it, then it becomes what Robert Lupton called “a grievance story.”
Lupton says you know you have a grievance story when you keep repeating it to yourself or to those close to you. You can’t let it go. You are warming yourself at the fire of self-pity and inviting the pity of others.
Our grievance story is about them and what they did. But it ends up killing us.
Because when we are so hell-bent on blaming them, we can’t see that we are the ones amplifying our hurt by nursing our grievance. We are so easily self-deceived.
Of course we are stuck. Of course we are still hurt. We are holding onto our anger. Most likely, our well-meaning friends tell us we’re entitled to it, not realizing that their intended compassion is only keeping us locked up in our anger. It’s a rare friend, a friend like Jesus, who dares to say, “Ok, it’s understandable that you feel hurt. But watch yourself.”
Anger Held Onto
We have a word in English for holding onto our anger, and that word is resentment. One of the best teachings on resentment can be found in the Big Book, but it’s applicable for any of us. It reads: “Resentment is the ‘number one’ offender.” Isn’t it striking that the Big Book identifies resentment as the core problem driving our self-destructive behaviors? That’s not intuitive. Because, again, we feel entitled to hold on. It continues:
“[Resentment] destroys more [of us] than anything else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick.”
Have we ever considered how much of our discomfort – mental, physical and spiritual – may stem from the root of our resentment? It’s a dash of cold water in the face. All this time we felt entitled to our hurt, but the Big Book, echoing Jesus, dares to tell us that at a certain point we have to take responsibility for our feelings. It’s about us, not them.
The Big Book charts a path forward. “In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principles with whom we were angry.” Because we can’t release what we won’t name. Part of letting go of our resentments is writing down what we’re holding against whom and how we think they hurt us. We have to do the hard work of naming the hurt.
The Big Book continues: “We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were ‘burned up.’”
As we said, anger arises because something or someone we care about was injured or threatened. And that’s real. It’s clear that “this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got.”
I’m walking slowly through this because I believe what’s being said here deserves our close attention. Yes, you’re right. What they did was wrong. It was.
But the consolation of realizing that we’re not crazy for feeling the way we do is as far as most of us get. “The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore.”
It is a step forward when we realize we can’t change them, and most likely they are not going to change or even admit they did anything wrong. But if we stop there, you can see the tarpit in which we get stuck. Because where does this lead? The Big Book continues:
“It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worthwhile.”
Is this not a recognizable tragedy?
When we nurse our hurt, we end up hurting our relationships with the people who still care about us. As we brood and ruminate about people from our past, we rob ourselves of being present with and for the people we love and who love us. And so the Big Book concludes, “If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.”
How can we be free of anger? The Big Book prescribes compassion, seeing the frail humanity of those who hurt us. They are sick themselves, so we need to stop torturing ourselves by wishing they would be other than who they keep showing themselves to be – unable to see or admit their wrong.
As powerful and necessary an antidote as compassion can be, stronger medicine is required if we are going to let go of our anger. Is there a remedy, a God-prescribed remedy, for releasing our hurt and relinquishing our grievance stories? There is, though it is much misunderstood.