Concerning Anger
Sermon on the Mount # 4

a sermon on Matthew 5.21-26
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama


When God rejected Saul as King of Israel, back during Old Testament days, he sent the prophet Samuel to find a replacement. God told Samuel to go to Bethlehem, to the house of Jesse. One of his boys would be the next king. God would tell Samuel which one it was.

When Samuel told Jesse what he was doing, Jesse brought out his seven sons. He forgot little David, who was tending the sheep, because he was certain God would pick one of his older boys. In fact, the oldest was a fine, strong, handsome young man. Even Samuel expected him to be the one. But he wasn’t. God explained to Samuel: “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the LORD does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” [1 Sam 16.7].

This simple truth stands behind the way Jesus explains the law in his Sermon on the Mount. Today we continue our sermon series on Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 5—7 with the first of those little passages in which Jesus says, “You have heard that it was said (then he quotes a commandment from the Old Testament), but I say to you (then he makes obedience a matter of the heart rather than actions alone). In doing so, he makes the commandments much harder to keep. I am confident I can restrain myself from murdering anyone. But how can I never get angry? I can love my friends and hate my enemies. Who can’t? Yet Jesus seriously expects me to love my enemies?

Five times Jesus does this, raising the bar on murder, adultery, honesty, retaliation, and hatred. He takes commands most of us might have a good chance to keep, and he places them on a higher shelf out of our reach. He is not trying to set us up for failure. Instead, he is simply explaining something that had always been true. God sees the heart. This means our obedience, our righteousness, our love for God, is a matter of the heart. We cannot grudgingly walk just inside the line and call that love for God. Nothing less than wholehearted devotion will do. Sure, it is a lot harder than checking off a list of rules we manage not to break; but if we think that sort of behavior gets us anywhere with God, we are kidding ourselves. The heart is what matters. If you get that right, the rest follows. If your heart is not right, it doesn’t matter if you fail to accomplish all its evil desires, you are still far from God.

Once some Pharisees criticized Jesus because his disciples were not washing their hands properly before eating. The Pharisees were not afraid of germs. Their concern was ritual purity. I have mentioned before how the Pharisees took the Old Testament laws about how priests should act in the Temple, and applied them to everyday life. A Pharisee wanted to be as holy all the time as any priest standing before God. That sounds impractical to us, but they were actually very political. They believed that if God’s people were holy enough, God would free them from Roman occupation. Victory through piety makes sense to die-hard believers. Honestly, they got a little carried away. In fact, they often got so carried away that they made all the little rules they had invented more important than the things God cares about, such as justice, mercy, and the condition of our hearts. When they criticized Jesus, he explained how he saw things: A person is not defiled by what goes into the mouth, but rather by what comes out. Because what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this is what makes us impure. “For,” Jesus told them, “out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile” [Mt 15.19-20].

Being right with God is not about observing certain rituals. It is not even a matter of regular worship attendance, prayer, and Bible study—important though these are. It is about what is in your heart. If your heart belongs to Jesus Christ, then worship, prayer, and Bible study will be joyful ways you grow closer to God and more like him. If your heart is not right, however, no amount of good deeds or pious practices will do you any good. You can put on a religious show and impress your friends. God sees the heart.

OK, now you know what Jesus is doing in our passage today. He is teaching us that obedience to God is a matter of the heart. Right away we face a problem: If obedience is a matter of the heart, how can we tell the difference between temptation and sin. To use today’s passage as an example: If I get angry with someone, and let’s assume I have good reason to be, does that make me a murderer? Suppose someone does something really bad to me or to someone I love, and rage overwhelms me for a while—maybe it takes me a long time to come to terms with my anger—and let’s say I have thought about how I ought to pay that person back, but then I don’t follow up on any of my ideas. Am I just as guilty in God’s eyes as if I had carried them out?

Your car gets stolen, and you suddenly wish you could push a button on a remote control and blow it up along with whoever took it. Is that temptation? Is it natural human emotion? Is it sin? Does the thought make you a murderer?

This is an issue I wrestled with over a number of years. Not about the car. About the whole question of where you cross that line between natural reaction and temptation into sin. Some scholars and theologians are lenient. We cannot take Jesus at face value here, they claim. Following his instructions is simply too hard. In the middle ages they found a clever way to get around the difficulty. Monks and nuns could be holy for everybody. They would follow Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Ordinary Christians were not expected to, because frankly, it was just too hard.

Other theologians have been quite strict. Even to have the thought is the same as doing the deed. The line between temptation and sin blurs, and everybody goes around with a heavy load of guilt. I am convinced Jesus was not trying to burden us with guilt. He wanted us to know what was important, and yes, we are going to need grace. We need his help. But he is not being unreasonable.

So the first group says Jesus’ teaching is too hard, so don’t bother trying. The second group says it is too hard, so you’d better be on guard every moment. I answer the riddle by going back to the idea that the heart is what matters. And here is how I define the difference between temptation and sin: If you are tempted to kill someone, that is not the same as murder. If you would kill them if you could, then it is. I’ll make the same distinction when we come to what Jesus says about lust being adultery in the heart. If you find someone attractive, that is not the same as adultery. If you would sleep with that person given the opportunity, that is adultery. The question is always: What is in your heart?

Go back to Jesus’ controversy with the Pharisees. Jesus said the heart is evil, and that evil works itself out in our actions. In today’s passage and the others like it, he is saying we are guilty of the evil even if in some cases it does not manage to turn into action. There are all sorts of reasons why it would not. Suppose you hate someone. You loath—you despise this person—and you wish they were dead. You would gladly do the honors. But of course you do not kill them. For one thing, you are afraid you would get caught. Are you, therefore, holy because you are a coward? Of course not. You are guilty because your heart is evil. For another thing, you are afraid of what people might think, even if you could get away with it. Or perhaps you do not have the opportunity. You hate the dictator of North Korea, and you would kill him if you could, but it’s not likely you’ll have the chance. Maybe the person you hate is dead. A father once confessed to me that he would like to kill the man who molested his daughter, but the man was already dead. In that case I would have been guilty too, because I would have been sorely tempted to give the father an alibi. I suppose in God’s eyes that makes me a perjurer. I hope you are not too troubled by that, by the way. Your pastors is, after all, a sinful human being who relies on God’s grace. God is not finished with any of us yet. And to be honest that sort of thing makes me angry, but then again maybe it should.

I digress. My point is: What would you do if you could do whatever you want? If you had the power and the opportunity, what would come out of your heart into your actions? If murder is in your heart, you are a murderer. If adultery is in your heart, you are an adulterer. You might consider that harsh, but that’s what Jesus said.

We have another big issue to deal with as we move into this section of the Sermon on the Mount. This issue is exaggeration and figurative language. Throughout the gospels, Jesus says some things that may, or may not, be exaggerations. How we take them makes a big difference. For example, when Jesus makes adultery a matter of the heart, he says, “If your eye causes you to sin, tear it out.” Is he exaggerating? Surely he does not expect us to really do that? A very few Christians have taken that literally. Most recognize it for what it is, hyperbole.

In today’s passage Jesus says that anyone who calls a brother or sister a fool is in danger of the fires of hell. He also says to leave your offering and go be reconciled to a brother or sister if you have a broken relationship. Think about that. Jesus’ disciples were from Galilee. The Temple was in Jerusalem. That’s about a two-week trip. Did he mean literally to leave your offering in the Temple, travel two weeks, fix the relationship, travel two more weeks to get back, and then offer your sacrifice. The poor lamb would starve before then. Jesus exaggerates. The trick for us is recognizing when he is exaggerating and what he means. If we are too literal, we do harm. If we are too quick to call something an exaggeration, we make excuses for our sin.

I think I know why Jesus used exaggeration: because our hearts are hard of hearing. We human beings are so good at deceiving ourselves. We can convince ourselves black is white and down is up, if it suits us to believe that. So Jesus has to talk loud if he wants to get through to us. His exaggerations are loud talk to nearly-deaf hearts.

On the plus side, his meaning in our passage is clear enough. Anger is deadly to your soul. In fact, anger is so dangerous that just holding on to it makes you guilty. Giving vent to it—even in a relatively minor way, such as saying bad things about someone—puts you on the road to hell. See how the exaggeration helps? We consider anger to be trivial, so long as you keep it under control. If your blood pressure stays within acceptable limits and you don’t yell at your spouse or throw Coke cans at the little league ref, then you don’t have an anger problem. Therefore, it is OK to harbor a little grudge. Who cares if you hate someone, or even some group of people? So we coddle our anger or pretend it doesn’t exist, and all the while it is an acid, eating away at our souls.

All humans get angry. It is a natural emotion, and you do more harm than good by pretending you don’t ever feel that way. Some things should make us angry. But when you give anger a permanent place in your heart, it becomes sin. Anger is meant to be a passing response to evil and injustice. It is when you embrace it and hold on to it that it becomes deadly.

Jesus pointed out the sickness. He also prescribed the cure. Maybe he was exaggerating about leaving your sacrifice beside the altar and running off to reconcile with someone, but his intention is clear. Let go of your anger and bitterness and be reconciled. That’s what disciples of Jesus do. They should never be at odds for long. They kiss and make up. As Jesus says in the Lord’s Prayer, which comes later in the Sermon on the Mount, “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Jesus even told a parable about that. A man who owed a fortune was forgiven, but because he did not forgive another fellow who owed him a small sum, he was punished. God does not let us hold on to our differences with others. Not if we want to live in his kingdom.

At last we reach our third and final problem with this passage: Jesus has stopped preaching and gone to meddling! When he tells me how blessed I am despite my problems, I am happy. When he challenges me to be the light of the world, I am eager. When he says that God is faithful and he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets, I rejoice. But when he begins to make all of this practical, and starts telling me how to live, I immediately get uncomfortable. If Jesus had written the Sermon on the Mount down before teaching it and asked me to look it over and tell him what I think, I would ask him to leave this part out. I would beg him. “You can’t be serious? You honestly expect your followers to get along? And you see no reason why we cannot reconcile when something comes between us?” That’s what I would say, but I would be thinking, “Wow, Jesus must not know many Christians.”

Yet of course he does—better than we know ourselves. Reconciling with our adversaries is apparently both possible and expected of us. That certainly hits home for me, and I expect it does for nearly all of you.

Be honest. Is there someone in your life you hold a grudge against? Someone you won’t talk to? Someone you cannot get alone with? When Jesus uses the word brother in today’s passage, he meant a fellow believer (although we dare not limit what he says to believers only; we had better take it to mean all people); but it works pretty well if you take it literally, because ironically most people who hold a grudge hold it against a family member. Most of the time it is your mother or your father, your son or daughter, your brother or your sister, or your spouse with whom you share a broken or strained relationship. Of course it could be anyone. Who is your person? Or persons?

If we take Jesus seriously, we would stop the service right here, skip the next hymn, and all get on the road or our cell phones—trying to get in touch with that person with whom we need to reconcile. We are not actually going to stop the service, but I hope we will all take what Jesus says to heart. Do not leave here and forget all about it. I pray that Jesus’ hard words will echo in our hearts until we act on them.

God sees the heart. The heart is what matters. The human heart is not big enough to hold both love for God and anger, bitterness, and grudges. Something has to go. Praise be to God, he not only sees our hearts, he changes them. Jesus is just getting warmed up in the Sermon on the Mount, and already we are squirming. We need grace, and lots of it. The beauty of what Jesus offers is: not only does he wipe the slate clean by forgiving our sins, he gives us a new heart. As I always say, his work is never finished while we live this life. Sin is deeply rooted and must always be fought. Yet even now his Spirit is working to change our hearts. Our part is to cooperate. Let go of the anger and hate. Be reconciled. Ask for a new and right spirit. You can become more like Christ, little by little, as you live for him and he lives in you. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com
October 15, 2006