On Love and Anger
June 16, 2026
Yes, there is Matthew 11:28, where the Gospel reports Jesus as having said that his burden is easy and his yoke is light. Frankly, I’ve never really understood that saying, for it seems to me that the life of following Jesus, which, after all, is what the Christian life must be, is hardly easy. One reason it isn’t easy is that the texts it is based on contain contradictions that make it seemingly impossible to carry out both sides. The most basic commandment for the Christian life is the Great Commandment. In Matthew’s version is reads: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. this is the greatest and the first commandment The second resembles it: You must love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets too.” Matthew 22:37-40. New Jerusalem Bible (italics sic). The demands of the faith get no more foundational than these verses.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that Jesus also calls us to witness for the realm of God, for God’s demand that we do what we can to reform this corrupt world from its own ways to the ways of God. Jesus calls us to work for a world of distributive justice achieved through nonviolent resistance to evil. And frankly, it is very hard if not impossible to work for that world in this world without getting awfully angry. Without feeling a deep righteous indignation over how wicked the world and the people who support its ways can be. We see that wickedness in our country today in Donald Trump and the MAGA movement that continues to support him despite his failings, which are more numerous than we can count. I must confess that Donald Trump, MAGA, and the advocates of “Christian nationalism” who are such a big part of the MAGA movement make me madder than hell. They are destroying my country. They are perpetuating precisely the kind of evil Jesus condemned. They are grounded in and perpetuate the evils of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, economic injustice, and world empire maintained through military violence. They are, in other words, nothing short of American fascists. They seek to destroy democracy, and they bastardize Christianity at every turn. Surely the Holy Spirit calls me to oppose them in every nonviolent way that I can. How can I not be madder than hell at them?
Yet, as I must conclude from the Parable of the Good Samaritan, these people too are my neighbor in the sense of the Great Commandment. And, as hard as it is for me to do it, I must confess that they too are beloved children of God. So I have to ask myself: Do the facts that these American fascists are my neighbors and that God loves them even though I can’t mean that I can’t oppose everything they stand for? Does it mean I can’t be angry with them? Does it mean that I can’t feel righteous indignation toward them? These are questions with which I’m struggling today.
One way to get at an answer to those questions, I think, is to ask: What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself? And to answer that question I have to start, I think, with asking: What does it mean for me to love myself?1 More specifically in today’s context: Does loving myself mean I have to love myself even when I’ve thought or done something that is terribly wrong? Is there a distinction between myself and what I might think or do that is terribly wrong that will help answer my questions here?
I think that there is, but before I get to what I think that distinction means for me, let me dispose of a cliche we’ve all heard. Self-proclaimed Christians who condemn God’s LGBTQ+ people are fond of saying that they “love the sinner but hate the sin.” These so-called Christians have used that cliche to justify the way they hate something that actually isn’t a sin, that is actually so much an intrinsic part of some people that you cannot legitimately separate the person from it. Thus, no matter how much they deny doing it, they actually hate the person and not just the person’s sex life, whatever that sex life may be. That is not the situation I’m dealing with here, as I hope to explain below.
I don’t know that I am capable of hating what American fascists say and do and still love them. I can, however, confess that I do not love them and remain aware that, although I cannot and do not love them, God can and does. I don’t know how does that. I, after all, for all of the personal arrogance I sometimes feel, am not God. I don’t know how God does it or how God is able to do it, I just know that God is able to do it and does indeed do it. For that divine, transcendent truth I guess I can say, however reluctantly: Thanks be to God! So, just as I could not and would not love myself if I acted or thought like them, I don’t and can’t love American fascists. I’m content to confess my sin of not loving them and to leave the loving of them up to God.
I am convinced, however, that I am not only free to feel righteous indignation toward them, I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to my own Christian faith. And I am convinced that I must feel righteous indignation toward what they say and do if I am to be true to Jesus Christ as we learn of him in the four canonical gospels of the New Testament. Jesus Christ taught, lived for, and died for everything American fascists reject; and he rejected everything they stand for. Jesus preached love not hate. He preached nonviolence not violence (though not passive acceptance of evil), he preached distributive justice not the gross economic and political inequity of empire that we have in our country today. He could have saved his life by kissing Pilate’s ass the way American fascists kiss Donald Trump’s ass, but he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t give in to the power of empire and its acolytes like Pontius Pilate.
I won’t either. Jesus didn’t often get angry, or so it seems, though he did once call the Pharisees a “brood of vipers.” Matthew 12:34. He got mad at Peter when Peter said that Jesus’ prediction of his coming execution must not happen. Mark 8:31-33. Yet Jesus was in many ways a reappearance of the ancient Hebrew prophets. The Judaism of Jesus’ time had reduced itself essentially to the book of Leviticus and all of the laws that book contains. But Judaism had, and has, a much older tradition than the tradition of the law. It is the tradition of the prophets, especially the eighth century BCE prophets like Isaiah of Jerusalem, Amos and Micah or the sixth century BCE prophet Jeremiah. Jesus clearly associated himself with those prophets, as we see when we read of him associating himself with Isaiah at Luke 4:16-21. Those ancient men of God (sadly, they were all men) were nothing if not angry at the way the powerful in their world bastardized the Jewish faith by oppressing the poor and other marginalized people and by putting the Torah law above distributive justice.
So yes. I am mad as hell over what our American fascists are saying and doing today. I will condemn what they are saying and doing until I take my last breath. And I will do so because I am convinced that my Christian faith not only justifies me in doing so, it requires me to do so. Anger can be justified. Indignation can be righteous. Anger is justified, and indignation is righteous, when they are reactions to hatred, violence and, and injustice, that is, when they contradict the kingdom values for which Jesus lived and died. Jesus insisted that we be nonviolent, but he never called us to be passive in the face of such evils.2 I will never be violent nor will I ever advocate violence, but neither will I be silent. Neither will I be at peace with the evil I see before me. I believe that words are my tools more than physical protest is, and I will keep writing words against Donald Trump, MAGA, and Christian nationalism for as long as I am able to do so. I pray that perhaps you too, dear reader, will do whatever nonviolent thing you can to bring down Donald Trump’s fascist regime, restore our precious American democracy, and build the realm of God on earth. May it be so.
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