Manage Your Anger
The Sixth Commandment is “You shall not murder.” Exodus 20:13.
Just in case we think we can avoid the consequences of this commandment simply because we’ve never committed murder, Jesus once again, takes the words of one of the Ten Commandment and pushes the issue deeper to its source.
March 6, 2011
Exodus 20:13, Matthew 5:21-26, Manage Your Anger
Douglas Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
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Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ 22 But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. 23 So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. 25 Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.” Matthew 5:21-26
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is talking about murder and anger. In most societies including that of Moses, Jesus, and our own, murder is viewed as the ultimate crime and often was and is punished with the ultimate of penalties. When Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to people in ancient times, ‘You must not murder’; and ‘The person who murders will be in danger of judgment.’ The folks on the hill would have nodded their heads in agreement, “Of course that is the way it is and the way it should be.” Their nodding agreement would have been shocked by what Jesus said next, that a person who is intensely angry with some one else is open to equal condemnation before God as one who commits murder. Jesus uses the exact same phrase, “will be liable to judgment,” to apply to anger as the teaching of Moses applied to murder. This is difficult for us to hear and to deal with because murder is not an act most of us are likely to engage in. We look down upon those who commit acts of murder as the most reprehensible in our society. However, while we’re not murderers, the truth is most of us get angry and when we do, our anger frequently leads us to sin and does violence to ourselves and to other people.
What is anger? According to Daniel Goleman in his terrific book, Emotional Intelligence, anger is an emotion. An emotion is “a feeling and its distinctive thoughts, psychological and biological states, and range of propensities to act.” Anger and its family comprise one of the primary human emotions. Anger’s disagreeable and unattractive offspring include fury, outrage, resentment, wrath, exasperation, indignation, vexation, acrimony (not to be confused with matrimony), animosity, annoyance, irritability, hostility, and perhaps at the extreme, pathological hatred and violence.[1] Those of us who are familiar with Paul’s words about love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 will recognize how love is described in nearly opposite terms from anger, “love is patient, kind, not envious, boastful, arrogant or rude, doesn’t insist on its own way, is not irritable, or resentful. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Anger is impatient, unkind, often boastful and arrogant, frequently arising because we insist on getting our own way and we’re mad because we’re not and we refuse to yield. Anger is irritable and resentful, unwilling to bear hurts, often not believing or trusting another’s words or motives, has lost hope, and the ability to endure. Anger can lead us to quit or give up.
We can acknowledge that not all anger is sinful; in fact, anger can lead to positive action, protection, justice, or change. One form of anger is righteous indignation, the kind of anger we feel when we witness or learn of acts of injustice or wickedness. This was the anger of Jesus when he drove people out of the Temple for exploiting those who were coming to offer their sacrifices (Matthew 21:13-16). This is the kind of anger that has mobilized reformers like those who led the abolition movement to end slavery in the United States, or those who led the Civil Rights movement. However, we need to be very careful about claiming our anger is righteous indignation because while we have Christ in us, none of us is as pure or holy as Jesus.
Jesus obviously wants what is best for us and for others which is why he is so concerned about anger. Anger does violence to our selves. A study of anger in heart patients at Stanford University Medical School revealed that anger seems to be the emotion that does the most harm to the heart, and dozens of other studies support that conclusion. Dr. Redford Williams at Duke University found that being prone to anger was a stronger predictor of dying young than were other risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. A Yale School of Medicine study tracked over 900 men who had survived heart attacks and found that those who had been rated as easily roused to anger were three times more likely to die of cardiac arrest than those who were more even-tempered. So if you don’t like what you’re hearing this morning, the first thing you need to do is calm down.
“These findings do not mean that people should try to suppress anger when it is appropriate,” but “the net effect of ventilating anger every time it is felt is simply to feed it, making it a more likely response to any annoying situation.” The difficulty is when anger and hostility become “so constant as to define an antagonistic personal style – one marked by repeated feelings of mistrust and cynicism and the propensity to snide comments and put-downs, as well as more obvious bouts of temper and rage – (sounds like a number of people on television and radio, doesn’t it?) The hopeful news is that chronic anger need not be a death sentence: hostility is a habit that can change.”[2] Dr. Williams from Duke concluded, “When people see that their hostility can lead to an early grave, they are ready to try.”
Anger not only does violence to our selves, it hurts other people. When we learn someone is angry with us, we are often already wounded or hurt, even if we haven’t received that anger directly. Anger raises the stress level of everyone exposed to it. The tension around a table or in a room goes up rapidly when someone is expressing anger, especially if they are out of control. Anger feeds on anger and often evokes anger in others. People who are angry at us may want to hurt us which they can do by how they look at us or refusing to look at us, or by how they talk to us, or refuse to talk to us. Most of us are very adept at these behaviors and we can recognize quickly when they are being done to us. Perhaps anger’s most frightening and dangerous expression is that of physical violence.
According to a news report, there are around 25,000 murders each year in the United States, many of these deaths can be attributed to first hand or second hand anger. Second hand anger being the innocent people who are mistakenly killed when the murderer is after someone else. Most murders would not happen except that the killer chose to embrace and indulge his or her anger, instead of letting it go. Dallas Willard describes how “When we trace wrongdoing back to its roots in the human heart, we find that in the overwhelming number of cases it involves some form of anger. Close behind anger you will find its twin brother, contempt. To cut the root of anger is to wither the tree of human evil. That is why Paul says simply, “Lay aside anger” (Colossians 3:8). To retain anger and to cultivate it is “to give the devil a chance” (Ephesians 4:26-27). Anger is a feeling we can choose to nurture or not.
Whether our problem is with another believer or with an opponent or adversary who is suing us and taking us to court; Jesus says our response is not to be one of anger and self-righteousness. We are not to pat ourselves on the back just because we didn’t kill the other person. Jesus wants us to see the value of the people with whom we are angry, even if we are in the right. Laws like the Ten Commandments that deal only with outer actions, can restrain or guide behavior to a certain degree but they can’t reach the human heart, the source of actions. A relationship with Jesus can get to matters of our innermost self so that we are not concerned merely with what we shouldn’t do, but we are filled as Jesus was with an incredible positive regard for our neighbor, whom we love as God does. So Jesus says, if one were to find oneself in the holiest of moments for a first century Jewish person, standing before the altar about to present your sacrifice to God, when suddenly you realize, you gossiped about somebody and that person is mad at you, Jesus says in that moment, a heart filled with the goodness of God, leaves everything to make that relationship right as much as it depends on you. We can’t control how other people will respond to our honest and genuine attempt to do the right thing.
If anger is something you wrestle with, let me suggest three things.
The antidote to anger involves Self-Awareness, being mindful when anger is beginning to stir within us, the ability to Regulate Anger once it has begun, and Empathy for other people.
Self-Awareness – an old Japanese story tells how a belligerent samurai challenged a Zen master to explain the concept of heaven and hell. The monk replied with scorn, “You’re nothing but a lout – I can’t waste my time with the likes of you!” His honor attacked, the samurai flew into a rage and, pulling his sword from its scabbard, yelled, “I could kill you for your impertinence.”
“That,” the monk calmly replied, “is hell.”
Startled at seeing the truth in what the master pointed out about the fury that had him in its grip, the samurai calmed down, sheathed his sword, and bowed, thanking the monk for the insight.” “And that,” said the monk, “is heaven.”
When the angry samurai suddenly wakes up to his own emotional state, he illustrates the difference between being caught up by a feeling and becoming aware that you are being swept away by it. Self-awareness means “being aware of both our mood and our thoughts about that mood.”[3]
Self-awareness includes one of the most powerful ways to defuse anger undermining the convictions that are fueling the anger in the first place.
“The longer we ruminate about what has made us angry, the more “good reasons” and self-justification for being angry we can invent. Brooding fuel’s anger’s flames. But seeing things differently douses those flames. Reframing a situation more positively is one of the most potent ways to put anger to rest.”[4] The Bible teaches us to be angry but not to sin. We are not to go to bed and sleep on our anger and stoke it with self-righteousness and self-pity.
Self Awareness is important and so is Regulating Anger which is purposely substituting reasonable thoughts for cynical, mistrustful ones during trying situations. For example, not being so selfish that every time something doesn’t go your way you think it is because the world is conspiring against you. This is especially applicable when we’re driving; some people think cars are a means of transportation and self-expression. Actually they are God’s way of revealing exactly what is going on in our heart and soul at any given time. You don’t have to go away to a monastery for a retreat, just get in your car and start driving around and what is going on within you will become clear. So the next time someone goes flying by you on the mid Cape highway like an angel out of heaven, instead of cursing them out, think that they may be rushing to a hospital emergency room where a loved one has been taken and say a prayer that they will get there in time and that their loved one will be okay. Even if that isn’t the case, you’ll be amazed at how different you will feel. It is much harder to stay mad at someone or to see them as your enemy, if you are praying for them.
Empathy – in frustrating situations, learning to see things from the other person’s perspective helps to calm anger. God twice asks Jonah, the reluctant prophet with zero empathy for the residents of the city of Nineveh whom he considers his enemies, “Is it right for you to be angry?” That is a good question to ask ourselves when we are angry. In his vanity, self-importance and immaturity, Jonah replies, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Anger can kill you.
We all are susceptible to angry flare-ups when we’re tired, hungry, worried, frustrated, or stressed and we can lash out with angry words often against the people we love the most. These incidents have their cost since they’re like driving nails into a fence, even when you pull the nails out the holes in the fence remain. Wise families learn to excuse or overlook these outbursts while also working to prevent them from happening.
We need to be even more on guard against contempt, resentment, bitterness, grudges – those angers with a long, slow-burning fuse are even more deadly and more destructive of our peace of mind, our health, our spiritual welfare, our families, and our relationships. Jesus says it is not enough merely not to do harm when we’re tempted to say or do something in anger, rather we are to love and to seek the good of the other person. We are to be willing to give and receive forgiveness. We are to lay aside anger and to act out of an intense desire to help.
Jesus’ goal in teaching about anger is to show the value of human beings.
In Shakepeare’s play. Hamlet, Hamlet says to his friend Horatio, “Thou hast been…. A man that Fortune’s buffets and rewards
Has taken with equal thanks….Give me that man
That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him
In my heart’s core, aye in my heart of hearts
As I do thee….”
A sense of self-mastery, of being able to withstand the emotional storms that the buffeting of life and Fortune bring rather than being “passion’s slave” has been praised as a virtue since the time of Plato. Jesus is comparing goodness in the kingdom of heaven with the mere goodness of not killing someone we’re mad at. While it is good to avoid committing murder when we’re mad, Jesus says it is even better to grow in spiritual maturity and self-awareness so that we can become aware of our emotions, so we master them rather than our emotions ruling us.
For people who wonder if there is hope regarding anger or even having taken human life, consider the amazing truth, that God forgives even murder if we are repentant. Have you ever thought about the fact that God used 3 ex-murderers to write a significant amount of the Bible?
- Moses (who was given the Ten Commandments) murdered a man.
- King David murdered a man to cover up his own adultery
- Paul was at least an accessory to the murder of Christians.
If there was hope for Moses, David and Paul, there is also hope for us.
2,000 years ago God allowed his Son to be murdered
I may hurt other people by my actions and attitudes
I may hurt myself by my actions and attitudes
But most of all I hurt God, because my actions and attitudes crucified Jesus Christ On a dark Friday afternoon, anger and wickedness were overcome by love and forgiveness. Jesus died with arms stretched wide, as if to embrace even His executioners. God allowed His Son to be murdered so we could be given life, and be transformed from:
- Being those who hate and despise
- Those who bear grudges and bitterness
- And those who take life
To become those who are life givers and peacemakers.
Prayer:
Jesus, I confess my unforgiveness and any hatred in my heart.
You know my failing and weaknesses.
Through your death on a cross, be merciful to me and forgive me.
Fill me with your Holy Spirit.
Produce in me, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness and self-control.
Help me to value and protect life, because you do.
Lord, teach us to master ourselves, in order that we may become the servants of others. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Blessing: “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.”
James 1:19
A Parable to Ponder
There once was a little boy who had a bad temper. His father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.
The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence.
Finally the day came when the boy didn’t lose his temper at all. He told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper. The days passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone.
The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, “You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won’t matter how many times you say I’m sorry, the wound is still there.”
The little boy then understood how powerful his words were. He looked up at his father and said “I hope you can forgive me father for the holes I put in you.”
“Of course I can,” said the father.
Proverbs 14:29, “Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but one who has a hasty temper exalts folly.”
Proverbs 15:18, “Those who are hot-tempered stir up strife, but those who are slow to anger calm contention.”
Proverbs 19:11, “Those with good sense are slow to anger, and it is their glory to overlook an offense.”
Proverbs 29:11, “A fool gives full vent to anger, but the wise quietly holds it back.”