Choose Love over Anger

PASSAGE FOR THE DAY:
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

23 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.

25 “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny." (Matthew 5:21-26, NIV)


REFLECTIONS:
In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus takes the commands of the law and shows how they provide a blueprint for a way of being fully, genuinely, gloriously human. This new way, which Jesus had come to pioneer and make possible, goes deep down into the roots of personality and produces a different pattern of behavior altogether. 

It begins with smoldering anger against someone very close to you. Okay, okay… it may not result in murder; but the point of the commandment against murder was not that you should stop short of killing someone, but that you should never get near even the thought that you wish they were dead. 

What "judgment" will you incur (verse 22)? God’s judgment, clearly; but this isn’t simply an arbitrary punishment that will catch up with you eventually, but rather a judgment that will begin right here, right now. 

Every time you decide to let your anger smolder on inside you, you are becoming a little less than fully human. You are deciding to belittle yourself, to live in a way that is less than you were designed. Of course, if you let your anger turn into ugly and abusive language, sooner or later you may find yourself in court. And if you are the sort of person who sneers at everybody and calls them hateful names, the fire inside you may eventually become all that’s left of you, as Gehenna—the smoldering garbage dump of ancient Jerusalem—may take you over completely. 

What’s the alternative? Jesus offers two remarkably specific and practical commands. "Be reconciled." "Make friends." How simple that is—and yet how hugely difficult and costly! It will almost certainly involve climbing down from the high pedestal on which you have placed yourself, abandoning your position of superiority over the person you’re angry with. But genuine humans don’t live on pedestals; they have their feet on the ground, on a level with everybody else. 

In particular—and this is very striking!—reconciliation takes precedence even over worship. Jesus imagines someone getting all the way into the Temple courtyard, buying a sacrificial animal on the way, and suddenly remembering (as well one might, when approaching the presence of the loving and holy God) some relationship that has gone wrong. The scene then becomes almost comic. It takes about three days to get back to Galilee, where most of Jesus’ hearers lived. He cannot seriously have imagined an anxious worshipper leaving a live animal sitting there in the Temple courts for a week while they scurried back home, apologized to the offended person, and then returned to Jerusalem. As so often in his teaching, he seems to use hyperbole, to exaggerate to make the point. The point is that you must live, day-by-day, in such a way that when you come to worship there is no anger between you and your neighbor, your sister, your brother. Impossible? Jesus implies that it isn’t, now that he is here to show the way. 

Then the picture widens. You and a neighbor are actually going before a judge to fight out your legal differences. Don’t even get to court, he says. Sort it out beforehand, or you may end up in jail and paying every penny you have. This may well be good advice as it stands, but it most likely reaches far beyond mere lawsuits. Israel in Jesus’ day was in trouble, oppressed by pagans from outside and by rich aristocrats from inside. Many Jews longed for their day in God’s court when they would be proved right and their enemies overthrown. Don’t even think of it like that, says Jesus. Make friends, not enemies. He will return to this point later in the chapter (verses 38–48). Otherwise, what will happen? Your enemies may win after all, and then what will you do? 

All this is, of course, impossible. That is, it’s impossible until you look at Jesus. As we continue through Matthew’s story, we discover that our natural question ("How can anyone possibly do what he says?") is eventually answered. Jesus himself refused to go the way of anger. Instead, he took the anger of his enemies on to himself, and died under its load. From that point on, reconciliation is not simply an ideal we might strive for. It is an achievement—an accomplishment—which we in turn must now embody as Spirit-led followers of Christ.


PRAYER:
Gracious God, forgive our anger and mean-spirited attitudes toward others, and help us to seek reconciliation where it is needed. Amen.