A Call to Good Anger
March 29, 2021
The Scripture quotations
contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright ©
1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the
Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
So many Christians
think the life of faith mostly means being nice. I think women especially are
apt to have been taught that they’re supposed to be nothing but nice. And of
course most of the time being nice toward other people is good and proper. I’ve
known lots of very nice church folk. It’s pleasant to be with and to work with
them. Many of them do good work in their communities, charity work mostly
rather than justice work, but doing charity is a good and necessary thing. I
mean nothing here to disparage good, nice church people and the work they do.
These days,
however, I keep thinking of John Lewis’ admonition to all of us that sometimes
it’s necessary to cause good trouble. Good trouble is refusing to be complacent
and inactive in the face of injustice and other social ills. It is acting,
nonviolently, to disrupt those injustices and those social ills. Lewis spent
his whole life causing good trouble against the diabolical expressions of
American racism that still plague our nation. In 1965, on a bridge in Selma,
Alabama, causing good trouble against Jim Crow laws that deprived Black
citizens of their right to vote nearly got him killed by the forces of
injustice. Nothing ever caused him to stop making good trouble against American
racism. Lewis was an extraordinary man. He somehow managed mostly to remain
nice—and nonviolent—as he caused his good trouble. Yet surely his motivation
for causing that good trouble wasn’t that he wanted to be nice. His work for
racial justice surely arose from a deep-seated anger about the brutality, dehumanization,
and discrimination that American racism produced and produces; and John Lewis
was a devout Christian. He grew up in the Jim Crow south. He experienced the
worst American racism directed against him and his family. He had to be angry
about it, and I’m sure that he was.
Lewis spoke of and
caused good trouble. Well, if there is good trouble there must also be good anger
that leads us to cause that trouble. The idea that Christians should just be
nice is a serious misreading of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus got angry,
and at least once he acted on that anger and caused some real good trouble. At
Matthew 12:34, for example he calls the religious leaders of his day a brood of
vipers. That was hardly being nice to them. Then there’s the famous story, so
often misinterpreted, of Jesus performing a disruptive prophetic act in the
Jerusalem temple.[1]
There’s a version of that story in each of the four gospels. I’ll quote the
oldest of them, the one in Mark.
In that story
Jesus has just ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey, recreating a scene from
Zechariah 9:9. The first thing he does in Jerusalem is go into the temple. We
read that he “began to drive out those who were selling and those who were
buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the
seats of those who sold doves, and he would not let anyone carry anything
through the temple.” Mark 11:15b-16. Jesus must have seemed downright crazy to
those who saw what he did. Surely he did what he did because he was angry. I
mean, you don’t just walk into the central edifice of your faith and start physically
disrupting what goes on there because you’re happy with the place and want to
be nice. This story tells us that Jesus was angry with the authorities who ran
the temple and objected strongly to how they did it.
So too does what
he said about those authorities a bit later in his time in Jerusalem before his
arrest and execution as a real troublemaker:
As he
taught, he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes,
and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats
in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses
and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater
condemnation.’ Mark 12:38-40.[2]
Jesus was righteously angry with
the temple authorities of his day because he believed that they put themselves
above the people they were meant to serve and oppressed those people with the
temple tax they tried to get all Jews to pay. He was also angry with them
because he was convinced that they replaced true worship of God with ritual
animal sacrifice (that’s why people were selling doves in the temple) which he
knew wasn’t at all what God wants from God’s people. It should be clear that
getting angry is a perfectly Christian thing to do as long as you’re angry at
the right things for the right reasons and always act on that anger only
nonviolently.[3]
Our world today is
full of situations, conditions, and institutions to which the only proper
Christian response is righteous anger. I can’t possibly list all of them here.
They range from attempts by state legislatures and governors to take away from
women their right to control their own bodies to environmental degradation so
severe that if not reversed it could threaten all human life on earth. Two
other outrages have gotten a lot of attention in the press lately. One of them
is gun control. This country lacks the wisdom and the political will to do
anything meaningful to reign in our out of control gun culture. We can’t even
reinstate the ban on military style assault weapons that we once had but
Congress let expire. Who the hell needs an AR-15 for any purpose other than
mass killing? No one, but we can’t even make everyone who wants to buy one undergo
a basic background check. Much of the world thinks America is insane about
guns. They’re right, and we’re doing nothing about it. How can a Christian
committed to Jesus’ way of nonviolence and respect for all human life as every
Christian must be react to America’s gun culture with anything but furious
anger? No Christian should respond nicely to the outrage of America’s love of
guns.
Then there’s the
attempt currently underway by Republican controlled state governments to suppress
the vote. The targets of these anti-democratic measures are primarily Black,
Brown, and poor American citizens. Republicans know that these voters are
unlikely to vote for them. They know they can’t win when voter turnout is high,
as the 2020 election proves. So rather than develop and advocate policies that
actually help people, including people who aren’t rich, they work to make
registering to vote and actually voting so difficult that a great many people
will just give up and not vote. The state of Georgia, for example, with a
Republican governor and a Republican controlled legislature, has among other
anti-democratic things substantially reduced the number of polling places in
future elections. The result will be even longer lines of people waiting to
vote than we’re there before these new laws were passed. Then they made it
illegal for anyone to give food or water to anyone waiting in line to vote.
Measures like these disproportionally affect minority communities. The
Republicans who enacted them know that they do and intend that they should. We
Christians must be outraged and mad as hell about these efforts to impose a new
Jim Crow on the Black people of Georgia and other states with regard to their
right to vote.
So must Christians
always be nice? Hell no. Jesus wasn’t. Why should we be? The world is full of
injustices that require our anger. We must get righteously angry about them,
then we must let our righteous anger lead us to every nonviolent action we can
think of to correct them. Yes, being nice is nice, but it isn’t always
appropriately Christian. Let us allow our good anger to lead us, nonviolently,
to cause the good trouble John Lewis caused his whole life long. May it be so.
[1] For
a discussion of what Jesus was really about in this act of his see Thomas
Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour for Seeking
Christians, Revised Edition, The New Testament (Briarwood, NY,
Coffee Press, 2019) 48-50.
[2]
For a longer discussion of these verses and those that come immediately after
them see Thomas Calnan Sorenson, Liberating the Bible, A Pastor’s Guided Tour
for Seeking Christians, op. cit. 50-52.
[3]
People sometimes say that Jesus’ action in the temple was violent. it wasn’t.
It was disruptive, but he harmed no one. In the Gospel of John’s version of the
story he uses a whip of cords, but he uses it only to control animals. He never
uses it against people. See John 2:13-16.
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