Anger and Righteousness in the Way of Jesus

Summary:

Jonathan’s sermon dives deep into the Sermon on the Mount, emphasizing the struggle between living on the “narrow path” of righteousness and the “broad path” of judgment. He contrasts the Pharisees’ legalism and self-righteousness with Jesus’ teachings of grace, love, and forgiveness. Jonathan challenges the congregation to examine their own hearts, especially their relationship with anger, reminding them that while anger is a natural human emotion, it must not be allowed to consume or lead them astray. Drawing from both personal experience and scripture, Jonathan encourages confession, community, and reliance on God’s grace to transform anger into a redemptive force for good, rather than a destructive power.
 

Transcript:

Jonathan Have you ever found yourself with a stubborn heart? It's easy for us when we read passages of scripture like this one to look down on the religious leaders as their story is shared with us. And the scripture that Jeremy just read stopped short of verse six, which is remarkable as what happens in this scripture. Jesus heals, someone, heals their arm, and the response of the religious leaders of the day in verse six is this. It says, then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus. Think about that. They are upset and angry because Jesus did something that they did not approve of.

They held their law, their standards above healing and grace and life, and they were more focused on judgment and death. It was their anger that consumed them to that point, which is why Jesus talked about anger in the Sermon on the Mount. So Jesus preaches and teaches this sermon. The Sermon on the Mount is what it became known as. It was likely a moment for Jesus to teach people, but also these same themes were carried on throughout all of Jesus's teaching. As we have been looking specifically at this Sermon on the Mount, we have been referencing other stories throughout the life of Jesus in order to help us connect and understand that the point of this sermon is not just a once and done sermon. It is a set of teachings that Jesus carried out in a variety of different ways throughout his time teaching on earth.

And the reason why we are spending so much time on the Sermon on the Mount is because we believe that this is the most important and comprehensive set of teachings that help us understand what does it mean for us to live out the way of Jesus in the world. So at the end of this sermon, as Jesus is drawing it to a conclusion, he says, all of these things that I have spoken to you about, he says there is a narrow way. And few find it as we have been talking about this narrow path and what does it mean for us to walk down the narrow path? That word narrow might have some negative connotations to it. We might think of like close-minded. We might think of the term narrow-minded, and that's certainly not what Jesus is talking about here. Jesus is talking about it being narrow because there are only few that find it.

And then out of that few that find it, there are few that live on it because it can be a difficult and hard way. So if there is a narrow path, then one could assume there is also what other kind of path, a wide path or a broad path, narrow and broad. It's interesting when we look back, so the history, I was thinking about that this week that we often find we're often very comfortable in ways that would be considered the broad path. We think about some of the sayings that we have in our society, sayings that make a whole lot of sense to us in the way in which the world functions like the lesser of two evils. We can often be guided by that. When we think about the callings of Jesus, the standards that Jesus had for us to operate by, and then we think about whatever are our natural responses, we can often more easily identify with the ways that lead on the broad path than the narrow path.

But the interesting thing about that is as we look back on our lives, as we look back on the history of the world, every war that has been started was because of people on the broad path. Every injustice that has been committed, every bit of isolation and loneliness, every bit of hopelessness. These are all results of people making decisions centered on the broad path. Now you might say, well, Jonathan, wait a second. There were Christian Crusades. There were lots of atrocities that have been done throughout history by Christian people, and that is accurate, that is truthful. There have been horrendous offenses that Christian people have committed. However, if you will think back to what we've been talking about as we've looked at the Sermon on the Mount, is that this sermon is not distinguishing Christians and non-Christians. That's not what Jesus is doing here. Jesus is talking about something more, not just about believing in Jesus, but

about following in his footsteps, following down this way.

So when a Christian does something that is out of sync with the ways of Jesus and make that a pattern of their lives, they may be a Christian in turn, but they are not following the way of Jesus as instructed us. And the narrow way presents Jesus as the hope of the world. And then Jesus takes that mantle and puts it on the church and he calls the church to be salt and light. So what we talked about last week, this witnessing community of what does it mean to be salt and light? How do we witness the ways of Jesus to the world? Jesus juxtaposed this with what he called the righteousness of the Pharisees, the righteousness of the Pharisees. The Pharisees were the religious leaders of his day, and they struggled seeing themselves as righteous and others as not. And so that's what we're going to get into today. Last week we read a story where the Pharisees brought before Jesus, a woman who was caught in the act of adultery and they placed her before Jesus and they demanded that Jesus pass judgment on her.

This woman was not viewed as a woman. She was viewed as someone who had been tainted. She was viewed as rebellious. She was viewed as worthless On the other side of the equation, she was just simply someone who was used to fulfill another person's gratification and sensual desires. But Jesus saw through all of that and he saw what was before him, a child, a daughter of God, and he dismissed her accusers. He removed the labels from her and he set her free. The righteousness of the Pharisees condemned this lady, but Jesus being salt and light saw through the labels that she was saddled with, freed her from those burdens and set her on the narrow path. Moving forward, if we are serious about being a community of salt and light, now I want you to hear this and let it sink in for a minute.

We must live descended from the one who was forgiven and set free rather than the ones who deemed themselves righteous enough to judge if we are serious about being salt. And we must see ourselves as descendants of the one who was set free rather than the ones who thought then that they were righteous enough to judge. One of my big concerns for the church today is that we have allowed ourselves as a whole to live into the righteousness of the Pharisees, where our primary concern is judging our neighbor rather than doing what Jesus instructed us to do, which is to love our neighbor.

So we need to consider the ways in which the broad path of judgment is in our lives and change that in instead for the narrow path of Jesus where we see people who we interact with on a daily basis as children of God because that is who every person is created to be. So from now on, we are sort of getting in the weeds of the Sermon on the Mount, and it's easy for us as we're going through this to feel like maybe Jesus is holding us to a standard that we can't live up to, or maybe there's just too much going on, or maybe it's just an area of struggle that we have and we don't really know what to do with it. But the reality is first of all, that God would never call us to do something that God would not also give us the strength to do.

So we know that first and foremost. Second is that we need to understand that we are God's beloved children. And as His beloved, God extends grace upon grace, upon grace, upon grace to us. We don't have to be caught up in things that we have done or left undone. We can be set free for them and move forward in the way of Jesus. Your past does not have to dictate your future, and there is no reason for us to be downcast when we live in the forgiveness and freedom of grace. So Jesus says, here's where we're getting into the weeds. He says this, you have heard it said to people long ago, you shall not murder. Right? I think we're all with Jesus there, right?

But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to a brother or sister Raha is answerable to the court. Remember that word raha. And anyone who says You fool will be in danger of the fire of hell. Now, sometimes we read scriptures such as this and we have a lot of times one or one of two responses. The first of that is the response of defense. We get defensive like, this is way too much for me. I can't handle this. We make excuses. I'm only human. Don't. This is too much. First of all, we get defensive. The second thing that we might do is responsive denial. This is where we sort of all become thesauruses. Well, I'm not actually angry. I'm just disappointed. I'm not actually angry. I'm just upset. I'm not actually angry.

I'm just frustrated. When I was in college, there was something that another person did that affected me in a major way causing me to question a lot about myself and about what I was doing in college, about what I was doing in school. And it was not the right thing for that person to do, but they did it anyway. And me trying to be a good Christian, having a misunderstanding of what Jesus was saying here, I buried my anger and would say it's a bad situation, but I'm not angry about it. And I just buried it, buried it because good Christians are people who bury their guilt and shame and act like it's not there. But it was there and it frustrated me. And every time I thought about it, it came back to my mind and I would just try to push it back down.

For a year and a half, I would say, I'm not angry, I'm just fill in the blank. I was in southeastern Europe in Kosovo for a summer, and the missionary and I who we were working with we're sitting down one night late, we played games or something and we're sitting around talking to each other. And for whatever reason this situation came out. I told him about it, told him how wrong it was, and then I said, my traditional line, I'm not angry. I'm just, and I couldn't speak anymore. My words just would not come out. And I sat there for a few minutes and he gave me the gift of also sitting there for a few minutes. A lot of times we think we have to immediately say something. Sometimes the best gift that we can give to somebody is just to sit with them in silence.

And when an appropriate amount of time passed, he said, you know, Jonathan, it's understandable that you would be angry. And those words were like a key to the prison that I have been living in for a year and a half when it came to this issue. And the prison doors flung open and the emotions of that started to settle down. And I began to move into what is the third way? We can be defensive. We can go into denial or we can do the third thing. We can confess that anger. We can speak it and invite God into it. So the question for us today is what are you angry about? What is it that is bothersome to you? One of the most important spiritual disciplines that we can participate in is reading the Psalms daily. And one of the big reasons for this is because the Psalms run the gamut of human experience.

They're psalms of wealth and poverty, psalms of contentment and want psalms of peace and anger. And I want to read to you this Psalm, Psalm 12. This is one of these Psalms where the psalmist was angry, and here is how they cry out. Just listen to these words. Help Lord for no one is faithful anymore. Those who are loyal have vanished from the human race. Now, God, I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. No, this is a cry out. Everyone lies to their neighbor. They flatter with their lips, but harbor deception in their hearts, Lord, silence the all flattering lips in every boastful tongue. Those who say by our tongues, we will prevail. Our own lips will defend us. Who is Lord over us? And then the psalmist gives you the reasons for why they're upset. It's because somebody didn't hold the door for me when I was going to the grocery store.

No, it's because the poor are plundered. And the needy groan I will arise now, says the Lord. I will protect them from those who maligned them. The Psalm is saw an injustice and they were angered by it. Because anger can be one of two things. It can be a destructive gift or it can be a redemptive power. And when it is a destructive gift, it will destroy. But when it is a redemptive power, it will testify to the witness of the church as salt and light anger as a destructive power. We don't have to explain this, right? We all know this. We get it. We've experienced it. We have sat with it. Dallas Willard, who is a philosopher and theologian who I admire and try to read as much of his work as I can. He talked about anger. He talked about it as anger, as a redemptive power or get redemptive gift or destructive power.

And one of the things that he said is that people who find themselves dedicating energy to keep their anger alive are in danger of being out of sync with the teachings of Jesus. Here in Matthew chapter five, we live in a RAA world. That's that word that I told you to remember with what Jesus read. You say, well, Jonathan, I'm not a Greek scholar. I don't know what the word RAA means. And you might not know the direct interpretation, but I promise you the word raha. Raha is the word that the religious leaders or the idea that the religious leaders used to discount this human being, this woman, and place her before Jesus demanding him, judge her. RAA is the word that we use to put ourselves in a position of above someone and someone else below us. Raha is this word that we use to dehumanize people. And Jesus is saying that when we use this word or we think of others in this way, then we are out of sync with the way of Jesus. But the thing for us is that we need to pay attention to is that some of us, when we are angry, when we don't express the anger properly, we will spend our energy stoking that fire of anger because that's something that helps us to feel alive.

The term misery loves companies. Sometimes we feed off of our anger and feed off of another's anger, not as a redemptive gift, but as a destructive power. And before you know it, we've created a circle of people who are angry enough to treat others in ways that they know that they shouldn't, simply because they didn't deal with the anger properly. So if anger can be a destructive power, it can also be a redemptive gift. It is legitimate for us as followers of Jesus to experience anger, but in the kingdom of God, there's no legitimate reason to allow that anger to consume you. And one of the dangers if we carry anger with us and we don't deal with it appropriately, is that that anger will begin to impact our relationship with God. In the passage that Jeremy read and Mark, it says that Jesus experienced anger, but Jesus dealt with that anger in a way that brought life, not death, that brought peace, not destruction.

He was led by his anger to action, not bitterness. And so a couple of things as we wrap up that we can do in order to help us sort of decipher through whether our anger is a redemptive gift or destructive power. First of all, pay attention to what your anger reveals. What are you feeling? What does your anger tell you about what's going on and what's happening in the situation? What does it tell you? How are you feeling in that moment? Then take that anger and confess it to God, right? I'm angry because God, here's what I'm frustrated by God. This is something that happened that I don't agree with or I don't want, or I don't like. Confess that anger to God. And then don't try to hide your anger. Share it with a trusted friend. If we try to bury our anger at some point, it's going to come out.

And I can promise you, and you probably know this too, if compressed anger comes out, it's not going to be a good thing for anyone. When I was studying for ministry, it wasn't uncommon for professors to pray at the beginning of class, but this one day in particular was unique because the prayer that my professor offered, he walked into the room, he stood in front of the class and he prayed something like this. God, I am angry. You know why I am angry, and honestly, I'm so mad that I don't even want to speak to you. Amen. I'm sitting there in my chair looking around, looking at everybody else and be like, okay, I'm not saying amen to that. I'm not identifying with that prayer that's like lightning's about to strike kind of words, and I'm not about to pray that.

But looking back on that experience, I don't know what it was, but there was something that my professor was dealing with that was obviously angry. It caused anger in him enough to feel that way. And in my lack of wisdom, in my maybe lack of ability to process emotions well and my emotional immaturity and my spiritual immaturity, I left my brother hanging. He expressed his anger, and instead I went into denial. I went into like, that's not me. I'm not about that. That's not where I'm at. But what he needed in that moment was for somebody to come alongside him and carry that load with him. That's what's beautiful about the church, about the community of the church, is that when we find ourselves in a situation where we are dealing with intense disappointment or anger or bitterness or frustration, we don't have to carry that alone.

We carry that together. We can join in with one another and share those burdens and place them before God together. Part of how we are a witnessing community is how we show up for one another. When someone has an issue, when someone has a fear, when someone is angry about something, we don't just say, Hey, good luck with that. See you next week. We jump in with them and help carry that load together. It's one of my favorite things about prayer Sunday is that we get to do that here with each other. We get to come forward and share our burdens, whether it be an illness or something that we're upset about or wisdom that is needed. We get to share those burdens together and pray for one another as Jesus has instructed us. And that is one way in which we live as a community of salt and light.