Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

© 2021, Dr. Tamilio

When I was working on my Masters in English at Northeastern University, I took a course with Prof. Mary Loeffelholz.  Dr. Loeffelholz is a world-renowned Emily Dickinson scholar, and, on the surface, she is a lot like Emily Dickinson, at least the way I imagine the poet to be: a quiet, serious, methodical, even-keeled person.  During a lecture one day, she yelled to make a point.  I cannot for the life of me remember what the point was, but I remember the shock that reverberated through the class because this was totally out of character for this scholar.  I didn’t know if I should laugh or run for the door!

You may have had a similar experience at one time or another in your life: someone acting so out of character that it is a shock to everyone else.  That must have been the case when Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem, overturned the tables, and made a whip to drive out the moneychangers.  The crowd must have been saying to each other, “Isn’t this the guy they call the Prince of Peace?  Isn’t this the rabbi who taught us to turn the other cheek?”  It had to be a shock.

“Why did Jesus react this way?”[1]  This is the question asked by Bible scholar, Richard D. Phillips.  This story, which appears in all four Gospels, occurs during Passover.  Many Jews would have been coming from Jerusalem to celebrate this festival that is central to the Jewish faith.  Local charlatans would have taken advantage of them.  Yes, they turn the Temple into a marketplace, which in itself would have been an offense to Jesus, but the moneychangers add another dimension to the wrongdoing.  Think of moneychangers as money exchangers.  When you go to another country, you have to exchange your money (US dollars, for example) for that country’s currency (such as Euros).  The same is the case with pilgrims coming to Jerusalem for the Passover.  William Hendriksen reminds us that, “The money-changers would charge a certain fee for every exchange-transaction.  Here, too, there were abundant opportunities for deception and abuse.”[2]  Jesus took umbrage at such unethical behavior, especially since it was taking place in the temple.

There is a name for this: righteous anger.  When the world does not appear the way it should — meaning that it does not appear the way God intended it to be — the Christian should get mad.  But it should not end there.  In an article from Christianity Today, Lisa Harper writes, “after we take offense, we should take redemptive action.  Christians must get involved with organizations working to free children from slavery and volunteer at shelters working to protect battered women.  We must lead the charge against hatred and oppression and cruelty!”[3]

It is normal for us to be enraged when we see injustice anywhere in the world.  Some of us get angrier the closer to home the injustice appears to be.  We become enraged when we hear about sex trafficking that occurs halfway around the world.  We become more enraged when we hear that it is happening the next town over, or even in our own community.  We feel the need to do something.

We feel this way because we know that the offense — that which angers us — does so because it is an offense to God.  Tim Challies writes about this.  He says, “Does God allow his people to express anger?  Yes, he does.  But only under these circumstances: You are reacting against actual sin, you are more concerned with the offense against God than the offense against yourself, and you are expressing your anger in ways consistent with Christian character.  And as we can all testify, this kind of righteous anger is difficult and rare.”[4]

Rare or not, righteous anger does occur and should compel us to act.  We do so not just to placate ourselves and our sense of right or wrong.  As Challies writes, righteous anger stems from the fact that something has been done that is an offense to God.

Look at our outreach endeavors.  For a church our size, we have an Outreach Team that moves mountains.  The projects we fund in our community, in our state, in our nation, and around the world are a testament to our faith in Jesus’ command for us to minister to the least of these.  Our church takes Jesus’ command to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned seriously.  Therefore, when we see people who are hungry or people who lack adequate clothing and shelter, or people who are lonely, we see this not just as something that is sad — something that offends us in some way.  We see this as an affront to the Gospel — a human situation that fails to correlate to the way God intended for our life together to be.  Hence, we experience righteous indignation.  We are not mad for the sake of being mad or because things did not go our way.  We are mad because what we see is wrong from a sacred perspective.

The list of issues that call for our response is lengthy.  Our world is plagued by racism, child sex trafficking, and rampant drug abuse.  As the poet Seamus Heaney wrote,

Human beings suffer

They torture one another,

They get hurt and get hard.

We do hurt one another.  We kill, rape, and torture.  We steal, embezzle, and cheat.  We pollute the environment and exploit the marginalized.  The list is endless and should raise our ire.  Anger is an appropriate response, but we need to move beyond that.

Sarah Sumner writes, “Anger does have a place in the Christian’s new life”.  Not the nasty kind of anger that gets smeared around when protesters write hate mail.  Not the political kind of anger that produces angry Christians who demonize those on the other side of the aisle.  Not the ugly kind of anger that causes church splits but a radically different anger that’s beautiful and loving because it ushers in the healing grace of God.”[5]

Our anger is fine, but it cannot end there.  It should spurn us into action.  It should cause us to act.  We see the world the way it is and we put our faith into action to help make it the way God wants it to be.

 

[1] Richard D. Phillips, John, vol. 1 (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing Company, 2014), 132.

[2] William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Exposition of the Gospel According to John (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 2002/1953), 122.

[3] Lisa Harper, “What is ‘Righteous Anger’?” taken from Christianity Today (online).

[4] Tim Challies, “3 Marks of Righteous Anger,” from Challies (online), December 9, 2013.

[5] Sarah Sumner, “What Righteous Anger Looks Like,” from Relevant (online), April 22, 2016.