What makes you angry?What is it that really gets you going, churns you up inside and sets your blood to boiling? What is the thing that, when you see it on the news or experience it in your own life or meet it in person, makes you mad?
Is it war? The cost of health care and the legions of uninsured? Taxes? The government? Pollution? Liberals? Conservatives? The rising cost of health care? Rude people on the road? What makes you angry?
I know you have some; everybody does. It’s part of what makes us human. I know, too, that I’m breaking at least a couple of rules of church by asking you to focus on and feel your anger. If your churchgoing has been anything at all like mine, then chances are you’ve experienced a rather deafening silence when it comes to the issue of human anger and how to understand it. Sure, every once in a while in the stories we tell, somebody gets mad at somebody else for something they’ve done, but not very often, and the one who gets mad is more often than not the one who ends up getting punished or smitten by God, isn’t it? God gets all wrathful every once in a while and smites somebody or lays waste to something, but frankly, while it’s nice to know that even God has fits of anger every once in a while, it doesn’t really help me understand what to do with my anger. I mean, I’m not God.
Jesus, now, Jesus did get mad that one time and drive the money changers out of the temple with a whip—that was pretty cool. And he told the scribes and the Pharisees off a few times, and got annoyed with the disciples, too. But every sermon I’ve ever heard about those stories focus on why the Pharisees, or the disciples, or whoever, was wrong and why Jesus was trying to correct them. And of course we in the congregation are put in the place of those receivers of Jesus’ anger, and in effect asked to stop making Jesus angry. Which I guess is a useful spiritual discipline, God knows I’ve gotten much good out of those kinds of sermons. But they don’t help he to understand about my anger. What am I, who look to Christ as pioneer and perfecter of my faith, to do when I’m angry and sitting in the pews, or in a committee meeting?
I think we’re afraid of anger, most of us. I think, having felt the power of it in our own souls and lives, we tend to recoil from our anger, for it seems to make us the opposite of the kind, compassionate, loving, meek, caring people that our Christian tradition has sometimes called us to be. I’ve done and said things while angry that I sure wish I hadn’t done or said; I think that’s probably true of most of us. It makes us wary of what will happen the next time we get angry. We’ve all been at the other end of anger as well. Many of us have experienced violence at the hands of angry people, and fear it for that good reason. It is a powerful, powerful thing, and because the church has given us few tools for understanding, or managing, or channeling and using it. So we’ve pretended it’s not there. And, as always when we ignore a powerful force or emotion at work in our lives, it becomes both more powerful and more unpredictable, even dangerous…which is just what many of us feared in the first place.
So, what’s a good Christian with a little anger to do? Feel guilty? Repent? Ignore it? Burst into a rage whenever we feel like i?
Our story from Mark today suggests another option. A leper comes to Jesus and says, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” In the Bible, the word for “leprosy” actually refers to any of a number of skin diseases. All of them were considered contagious and dangerous. All of them made their sufferers ritually unclean. As a result, all of them made their sufferers outcasts. They were not welcome in the camps and towns. They could not approach the Temple of God. The people shied from them, were in fact forbidden to come into contact with them, for to do so would be to take the impurity, if not the infection on oneself. It was a double whammy. Not only did people have to contend with the disease itself, whatever it was, but they were left bereft of human contact, outside the community of God, alone. “If you choose, you can make me clean” really means, “If you choose, you can bring me home.”
The only way to be brought back into the community was to be ritually cleansed and pronounced clean by a priest. In ancient Israel, the priests held a great deal of power, as intermediaries between humans and God and as controllers of the huge and wealthy Temple in Jerusalem. And to be made clean by pronouncement of the priests, one had to perform an expensive series of ritual offerings of animals, spices, and oils, in propitiation and thanksgiving.
Now, when the leper approaches Jesus, we assume that he has already been to the priests; going to the priests of the Temple is what anybody of that day would have done, for that was the only option, the only hope of being brought back into human contact. So we assume he’d approached the priests and had been, for unknown reasons, rejected, and now he’s making a last hopeful effort, almost daring Jesus to do what he’s asking. When Jesus hears his request, we’re told that he is “moved with pity”. Which is nice of him, I guess. But here’s the thing: some of the ancient manuscripts from which our modern Bible was translated say that Jesus was moved with “pity”. Others say that he was moved with “anger”. Aha. Jesus, “moved with anger.” Listen to the story this way: “Moved with anger, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’” Moved with anger, he chooses to make the leper clean, and he reaches out.
It’s no surprise to me that, given the choice between Jesus being moved with pity and Jesus being moved with anger, the people that translated our modern Bible chose “pity”, for, after all, those translators were products of the church, and, well, we know how the church is about anger, don’t we? But I have to say, I rather prefer the “anger”. It makes more sense given what I know of Jesus:
Always reaching out to those in the greatest need and resisting those that abuse them.
Always seeking to bring God’s love and promises to those whom others said were outside them.
Always preferring the poor and the outcast, those to whom adequate care for their illnesses had been denied by those with power and wealth.It makes sense to me that the Jesus I know,
the one who said that his work and mission was to make the last first and the first last,
the one whose mother sang to him of a God that fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty,
the one who preached that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor
would be very angry indeed if he thought that the wealthy and powerful of the religious establishment had turned away from the opportunity to care for the ill in their midst, turned away from the opportunity to reach out and bring back to the beloved community one who had been cast out through no fault of his own.The psychologists say that anger is, “The behavior that manifests and the physiological state… that occur when (1) An individual identifies a source of pain/deprivation…usually from another person/organization/object, and (2) Chooses behaviors…to stop or oppose it.”1 The key to the definition, they say, is the second part: the choice, or the desire, to stop the source of the pain. Without the choice to act to stop the source of the pain, anger would just look a lot like fear: displeasure at a painful thing, or the threat of a painful thing, and the desire to get away from it. But anger, anger is what happens when we choose behaviors to stop the source of the pain.
“I do choose,” says Jesus, when the ailing and outcast comes to him. “I do choose,” he says, and he reaches out and touches him, “Be made clean. Come back to life, come back to community, come back to the world, to touch and human contact. Come back, and together you and I in our anger, shall choose to build a new world, the very realm of God.” And then he tells the leper to go back to the priests, the powerful ones who would not make him clean, and there, right under their noses, right before the eyes that had been turned away, to make a bold offering of thanks to the God that had made him clean and welcomed him home, who did so all outside the regular channels of power and wealth and prestige—indeed, in spite of them—, who brought about healing through the anger of Jesus shown forth in loving touch.
And that loving touch is important. Because for Christians, anger alone isn’t enough, is it? We feel pain or its threat, we choose to act to stop or oppose it. That is, we get mad. But what do we choose? How do we know what the right action is? Jesus is angry at the situation, at the powers that be, at the order of the world when the leper comes to him. He is angry, and he reaches out in loving touch. He uses the power of his anger to take action that reconciles, that invites to relationship, that brings home those who feel cut off from human community and touch by illness or by action. He chooses to act in love. With the power of his anger and the guidance of his love, he reaches out to the leper, invites him into a loving solidarity, the kind of solidarity that the powerful do not want them to be in, for the wealthy and the powerful know that angry people acting together in love is God’s power for change in the world.
When Jesus, when we, see injustice, when we notice the poor and oppressed being marginalized and pushed to the edges or even outside the bounds of community, when we see the creation being broken, abused, destroyed by the powerful, we get angry. We choose to act. We do it with love and gentle touch. And when we do, lepers are made clean, the hungry are filled with good things, the mighty are brought down from their thrones, the poor inherit the kingdom, and the glory of God shines forth to make the world new.
So, people of God, let me ask you again: what makes you angry?
1. "Anger." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 9 Feb 2006, 19:15 UTC. 10 Feb 2006, 20:53 <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anger&oldid=38952568>.