Seven Deadly Sins (2) Anger

Ira, translated as Wrath or Anger is an unusual sin, as in some manner it is experienced by God. God's anger is different to sinful human anger - Isaiah tells us that wrath is the 'strange work of God.' (Isa.28:21)

In Luke 12:49 Jesus enthuses about the future day of his wrath. In Mark 3:5 Jesus was angry at the Scribes, and every gospel records the anger Jesus brought to the Temple money changers. Christians are often accused of defending an Old Testament God of Wrath - all the wars and bloodshed he commanded in anger.

All of this puts Christians in a tricky position - we appear to have our work cut out for us if we want to affirm the sinfulness of anger. One way this has been demonstrated is that when Oxford University Press published a recent series of books on the seven deadly sins, they asked a Buddhist to contribute the volume on anger. The reason was explicitly given that Christians were too compromised on the issue and unable to speak out on it. Sadly, when you read the book by Austin Cline you discover that his Buddhist philosophy has no moral resources to deal with anger. All he can encourage is a redirection of angry feelings to more positive ends:

“Our goal surely is to conquer anger, but not destroy the fire it has misappropriated. We will wield that fire with wisdom and turn it to creative end”

Despite appearances to the contrary, only the Christian scriptures offer substantive resources for dealing with anger. Simply telling people to will to change and redirect energies, is woefully insufficient. Anger by its nature is the experience of overwhelming passion, it cannot simply be redirected by effort. The heart that is easily set alight by irritation or crossing, needs to be calmed and melted by God's Spirit. There is need for more than mere environmental control; interior renovation is required.

The reason mere willpower is not enough to overcome anger, is of course that we enjoy being angry! (I speak from experience!) Despite the damage it does us and others, it is an enjoyable liberating experience of freedom and righteousness. Righteousness because, in exaggerating the appropriate feelings of injustice to anger, a wrathful person is sensitive of nothing other than the pleasure of being in the right. Our human experience of anger is sinful to the extent that it is a putting of ourselves in the centre of our experiential universe. It is a self-justification and as such an extraordinary powerful form of works religion.

The simple difference between human sinful anger, and God's holy anger, is that he is truly and rightly at the centre of the universe. When we give into anger, we are worshipping ourselves and taking his place. We are failing to 'leave room' (Rom. 12:19) for God, who in time will exercise wrath in the right and good way only the true God can do. This was, of course, the original sin -Eve set herself in the centre of the universe adjudicating right and wrong. She took the place of God and ushered in a fallen world. It is deeply ironic, that today we can repeat the same error - and do so in response to things that are in themselves wrong and offensive to God. The tragedy of the Fall is that good and evil are both used to bad ends.

The ultimate resource for dealing with anger is to invite God to displace me from the central position in my desires and life. I am no longer to expect others to keep in step with me - rather I am to keep in step with the Spirit.

And finally... Here is a postscript CS Lewis added to a personal letter on the topic of anger, in 1960:

PS - It's also useful to think, 'Either x is (or is not) so bad as, in my present anger, I think. If not, how unjust I must be. If so, how terribly x needs my prayers.'