A man in my congregation called me to discuss a gravely unjust situation that was unfolding within his family. Folks were telling lies, leaving him and his grown son marginalized and excluded and caught – so it seemed – in a terrible Catch-22: Let the lies be, and risk being shut out of the family for good; Confront the lies, and risk exploding the family and alienating themselves forever.

The stuff I take in as a pastor. Just heartbreaking.

He asked me what I thought, what counsel I might give, and we talked about that for a while – some possible approaches for remedying the injustice. Towards the end of the conversation he said, “As you can imagine, pastor, I’m really angry about this. Like really angry. I don’t know what to do with that anger…” and then he asked: “What do you recommend?”

Such a good question. Indeed, it is a central and recurrent question of the spiritual life:

What shall we do with our anger?

///

Anger, after all, is a core emotion, right along with happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, and disgust. We cannot eradicate it without doing fundamental violence to ourselves. (1/3) Share on X

Anger not only tells us something about what’s happening to and around us, it also rouses us to action. To cut it off is to cut off a key part of our divine design, our humanity. Jesus, let us remember, got angry. (2/3) Share on X

The trouble is, our anger is not often tempered by wisdom or self-control. Anger is a great indicator, and a great catalyst to action, but a bad master. (3/3) Share on X

The Christian tradition, so it seems to me, is not entirely clear on this point. On the one hand, we have the many admonitions of, for instance, the Apostle Paul, telling us that passions like anger, rage, and malice are to be left behind as we press into the life of salvation (Colossians 3:8, e.g.).

And indeed many of the early monks of the church agreed with this counsel. “Prayer is the seed of gentleness,” said Abba Nilus, “and the absence of anger.”¹ Likewise, Abba Agathon stated: “A man who is angry, even if he were to raise the dead, is not acceptable to God.”² Abba Ammonas remarked, “I have spent fourteen years in Scetis asking God night and day to grant me the victory over anger.”³ And Abba Poemen, flatly: “A monk is not angry.”⁴

On the other hand, we have, for instance, the (Pauline!) admonition of Ephesians 4:26: “Be angry and do not sin” — the clear presupposition being, of course, that it is at least possible to handle our anger in a way that is – at a minimum – not sinful, and maybe even righteous.

But how? Clearly we are going to need help with this. 

I found some recently in the book of Jonah (Jonah 1-4). I have loved Jonah since I was a boy (I mean, who doesn’t, what with the huge fish and all?), but have always struggled making sense of the exchange between the prophet and the Lord in chapter four. The Lord asks Jonah if it is right for him to be angry about what has just taken place in Ninevah (Jonah 4:4). And of course Jonah answers that he does. Those abominable Assyrians get off the hook just because they said they were sorry? Give me a break, God.

And then the Lord provides a little object lesson: a plant to cover Jonah that is quickly eaten by a worm, followed by the hot sun and a scorching wind that pushes the now-exposed prophet to the brink of death. And the Lord asks again, “Is it right for you to be angry?” — this time about the plant and the sun and the wind and whatnot (Jonah 4:9a). And again, Jonah answers, “It is” (Jonah 4:9b).

And then the Lord responds to Jonah with these well-known words:

“You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left — and also many animals?” (Jonah 4:10b-11)

Now I’ve been reading this book for nearly four decades, and that part always seemed weird to me. Like the Lord was trying to talk Jonah out of his anger by providing him with an object lesson that was sure not only to exacerbate Jonah’s anger but — so much the worse for the Lord — prove Jonah’s point.

But suddenly it occurred to me — maybe proving Jonah’s point WAS the point. Maybe the Lord wasn’t trying to talk Jonah out of his anger at all. Maybe when Jonah said, about the plant, “I have every right to be angry,” the Lord, so far from slapping his forehead in exasperation, was nodding his head in approval. It is right to be angry about evil things. By at least one ancient definition: “To fear the Lord,” says the writer of Proverbs, “is to hate evil” (Proverbs 8:13).

On the one hand, we have the many admonitions of the Apostle Paul, telling us that passions like anger, rage, and malice are to be left behind as we press into the life of salvation (Colossians 3:8). (1/2) Share on X

On the other hand, we have the (Pauline!) admonition of Ephesians 4:26: 'Be angry and do not sin' — the clear presupposition being that it is possible to handle our anger in a way that is not sinful, and maybe even righteous. (2/2) Share on X

I believe the text of Jonah bears this out. Chapter four, after all, concludes not with the Lord’s rebuke of Jonah’s anger but rather with the Lord’s setting Jonah’s passionate feelings in a new context. “You were concerned about the plant,” the Lord says — adding, by implication, “and you were right to be so concerned” — and then goes on to ask, “and should I not have concern for that great city?”, a rhetorical question whose obvious answer is, “Yes, you should.”

The Lord, it seems to me, is not trying to truncate Jonah’s passionate intensity but elevate and transform it. He wants Jonah to see as he sees, and to feel as he feels: deep concern for those whose lives have been wounded by sin. (Somewhere off in the distance we hear an echo of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The prophet is a man who feels fiercely…the fundamental experience of the prophet is a fellowship with the feelings of God, a sympathy with the divine pathos”).⁵

And that, I think, is a really important psychological insight. Anger, after all, is a core emotion, right along with happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, and disgust. We cannot eradicate it without doing fundamental violence to ourselves, for anger not only tells us something about what’s happening to and around us, it also rouses us to action. To cut it off is to cut off a key part of our divine design, our humanity. Jesus, let us remember, got angry.

The trouble is, our anger is not often tempered by wisdom or self-control. (That’s the big difference, of course, between our anger and the anger of Jesus – when the Son of God turns over tables, he can be trusted to do so because, well, you know… he’s God…) Anger is a great indicator, and a great catalyst to action, but a bad master. Which is why Basil the Great, for instance, said of it that when it takes hold of the human soul “It makes him entirely like a wild beast…it is a kind of short-lived insanity…such a person does not stop until great and incurable harm is done…everything at hand becomes a weapon for the madness.”⁶

I find Basil particularly instructive because he distinguished between two different types of anger, using two different Greek words: ‘thumos’ and ‘orge.’ We might translate the two words “temper” and “wrath.” For Basil, “temper” was the thing that indicated the presence of evil and roused to action. “Wrath,” on the other hand, was temper run amok – destroying everything in front of it in a blind rage. Basil’s counsel?

“Redirect your temper onto the murderer of human beings, the father of lies, the worker of sin; but sympathize also with your brother, because if he continues in sin, with the devil he will be delivered up to eternal fire.”⁷ 

That is to say, Basil thinks that thumos (“temper”) is God-given and properly ordered to righteousness: towards love for God, and love for people, which implies a great hatred of sin. Then, and only then, is it both useful and right. (I’m reminded here of the great moment in C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra where the hero, Dr. Ransom, in the face of pure, embodied evil, suddenly discovers in himself “a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred…As a boy with an axe rejoices on finding a tree, or a boy with a box of coloured chalks rejoices on finding a pile of perfectly white paper, so he rejoiced in the perfect congruity between his emotion and its object.”⁸). Beyond this, and it is orge (“wrath”), and it destroys — both ourselves and the world around us.

///

I find Basil particularly instructive because he distinguished between two different types of anger, using two different Greek words: 'thumos' and 'orge.' We might translate the two words 'temper' and 'wrath.' Share on X

For Basil, 'temper' was the thing that indicated the presence of evil and roused to action. 'Wrath,' on the other hand, was temper run amok – destroying everything in front of it in a blind rage. (2/2) Share on X

So back to the man in my congregation, and his question: “I don’t know what to do with my anger…what do you recommend?”

Do you know what I told him?

“I think you should pray…”

He laughed on the other end of the line. “No, I’m serious,” I said. “You can’t and shouldn’t deny your anger. It’s telling you something true about your situation, and it’s calling you to action. You just can’t put it in the driver’s seat. You need to lead it to Jesus. Let him talk to your anger. Let him speak wisdom in its ear. Let him guide and transform it and lead it — you — to righteous action, if there is any to be had. And when that has happened and you have done all you are able to do in this situation, then you must surrender it completely to God. It’s too powerful for you to hold on to for any length of time.”

This is one of the places where we can go wrong. In her otherwise masterful book on prayer, Thoughts Matter, for example, the Benedictine nun Sister Mary Margaret Funk writes:

“The goal is never to be angry at all, whether for good reasons or bad ones….I ought never to pour out my prayer to God while I am angry. It is not proper to pray to God with anger burning in my heart.”⁹

But how else will I deal with anger appropriately except by praying? Prayer is the place, the very place – modeled on every page of the Psalter – where destructive orge (“wrath”) is brought before the face of the Lord, surrendered, and either let go of and replaced by the peace that passes understanding, or else transformed into a life-giving passion for wise and righteous action.

And maybe, now that I’m thinking of it, maybe that surrendering — that instinct that anger is radioactive, too deadly to hold in its virginal form for any length of time — is behind those admonitions of the monks. My gut tells me that if we could talk to Abba Nilus, for example, he’d tell us that prayer is the very thing — maybe the only thing — that can help transform anger from wrath into genuine gentleness and sympathy. Maybe gentleness is where we wind up after we’ve properly worked through our anger in the presence of God. Surely that’s behind the counsel of Jesus to pray for our enemies? Perhaps that’s how we reconcile the different ways the Christian tradition talks.

At any rate, the man in my congregation was grateful for the advice.

More and more these days I find folks asking me questions like the following: “Pastor,” they’ll say, “I hear you talking about the call to kindness and love and compassion…but there are so many things that are so wrong in the world…that make me so angry…wars raging and injustice prevailing and corruption everywhere…what should I do with that? Are you telling me to deaden my heart as I turn a blind eye to what I’m seeing…?”

Not by a long shot. Rather, what I say is that our anger is not wrong — but it can go wrong. We need to pay attention to it, listen to it… and then lead it to Jesus, letting him be Lord over it, surrendering it to him as we seek conformity to his character, purpose, and will.

Anything less or more than that comes from the evil one. If we cut it off, we cut off a critical part of our humanity — and the evil one wins. If we let it run wild, on the other hand, we will set the world on fire — and once again, the evil one wins.

But there is a better way. The way of the kingdom. Remembering that our anger is a powerful, God-given force, and that only under the influence of the all-wise Spirit will it go right, we may yet stand a chance of bringing the healing righteousness of God to bear on a world wounded by evil.

So may it be.

///

How else will I deal with anger appropriately except by praying? Prayer is the place, the very place – modeled on every page of the Psalter – where destructive wrath is brought before the face of the Lord and surrendered. (1/2) Share on X

As we pray, we either let go of our wrath, and it is replaced by the peace that passes understanding, or else it is transformed into a life-giving passion for wise and righteous action. (2/2) Share on X

Footnotes    

^{1 Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Cistercian: Trappist, KY, 1975), 153.}

² Ibid., 23. 

^{3 Ibid., 26.} 

^{4 Ibid., 179.}

⁵ Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (HarperPerennial: San Francisco, 2001), 5.

⁶ St. Basil the Great, On the Human Condition, (St. Vladimirs Seminary Press: Yonkers, NY, 2005), 90.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ C.S. Lewis, Perelandra (Book 2 of 3, The Space Trilogy). (Scribner Publishing: New York, 2003), 193.

⁹ Mary Margaret Funk, Thoughts Matter (Liturgical Press: Collegeville, MN, 2013), 100.