Can I confess something?
I’ve been feeling angry a lot lately. And I’m not the only one.
As a pastor, I spend a lot of time my listening to people in all walks of life, religious and not. If I were asked to sum up in a phrase how we, collectively, are doing at present, I’d say “We are royally ticked off.”
Now, the truth is, we are angry about a variety of very different things. We are mad about sexism and racism and the liberalization of the universities. We are mad about homophobia and the breakdown of the nuclear family. We are mad about immigration (either its presence or its lack), about political correctness or incivility, about climate change and income inequality and the closing of small town factories. We’re mad about the harassment of women in the workplace and about boys falling behind in education. We’re mad about unethical politicians and biased media reporting.
We’re even mad at each other for not being mad about the right things.
Anger is not a neat emotion, but it serves a vital purpose. It alerts us that something we value has been threatened or potentially violated. It’s a bit like a check engine light going off in a car. If you ignore its early warnings and carry on without stopping to assess and address the underlying problem, sooner or later you might find yourself facing with catastrophic damage (as some of us learned the hard way…). At its best, anger also serves as a form of energy, fueling the difficult but crucial work of truth-telling and justice-making.
But anger is also a bit like a blackberry bush. It has the potential to produce good fruit. But left to its own devices, it tends to multiply rapidly. And after a time growing unchecked and uncontrolled, it begins to choke out the life of everything of everything in its path.
You might say that in proper proportion, anger is a medicine that accelerates the body’s journey toward wholeness. But consume too much of it over too much time, and it becomes dangerous, addictive, even toxic. It turns to a corrosive bitterness and cynicism that both poisons the person carrying it within them and begins to leak out to wither almost everything they touch.
Jesus recognized the positive value of anger. He experienced it fully—especially in the presence of leaders who misrepresented God. Sometimes he spoke harsh words (“you vipers”) and did tough truth-telling. Once he even when into the temple (the church of his people) and flipped some tables over in protest at the commodification of grace.
Jesus got angry. But Jesus did not live in anger. This is important to note. Healthy anger ebbs and flows as it moves, tightens and loosens its hold. But when anger starts to lock its grip, when it becomes a default mode, when we begin to identify with it too completely, real danger begins.
It’s no coincidence that the first sign of Jesus’ kingdom was a sign of wine, not whips (John 2:1-12). Whips and revolutions serve a necessary corrective but they are not in themselves the kingdom. The kingdom is joy. It is peace. It is a wedding feast. It is a fine wine of celebration. This is where the story starts, and this is where it ends. Jesus came to bring an abundance of overflowing life.
Maybe more anything else, this is what Jesus’ first miracle signifies: Participants in the kingdom of Jesus can afford to celebrate first. We can stop to taste the feast, have the toast, enjoy the party, in all kinds of less-than-ideal circumstances, because we know that, however it might seem, in Jesus Christ truth and justice have secured the victory. We can afford to celebrate because we know that Jesus wins.
For Christians, joy is our base state. It is what inoculates us against the potential toxicity of anger that consumes everything in its path. This is indeed what separates Christian anger from all of the rest—it is separated by the recognition that because of Christ, the future’s feast has already begun.
The first thing Jesus does in his ministry is multiply wine and spend days at a party. Only then does he go to flip some temple tables. I suspect he is teaching us a necessary rhythm. The only way to be angry well is to regularly stop to drink deeply from wells of joy.
I wish the church would remember this, even a little, as we go through our life together. I wish that while all the world is raging, we’d take regular pauses to feast together. This is something we can afford because of Jesus. Because of him, our very causes for righteous fury and lament have become our sites for praise, because these are exactly the places of darkness where Jesus is claiming his victory. We can afford to celebrate the breakthrough of justice and mercy, even ahead of time, because their triumph is a given in Christ, nearer than we think.
Perhaps, in an age of rage, this is a critical part of our witness. When people ask, “How can you celebrate now?” we can say “Because Jesus reigns.”
Crack a whip where you must. But wherever you go, don’t forget the wine.
