Have you been caught off guard by the anger of Jesus?
There you are, peacefully meditating on the Gospels, or flourishing under a favorite preacher. With great comfort, you’re finding Christ to be master of every situation. He wields concrete images, asks perceptive questions, and seems unfazed by conniving opponents.
Then flashes some surprising flare of his holy anger. He makes a whip and clears the temple court. He sighs aloud in frustration. He is reported to be annoyed, even indignant. He “strictly charges” men and women he has just healed. And you recall how often he rebukes, not just demons and fevers, winds and waves, but also his own disciples.
Sweet (and Sovereign) Emotion
We might shy away from the English word rage, but just a century ago the eminent B.B. Warfield (1851–1921) thought it a fitting term in his study on The Emotional Life of Our Lord. Perhaps the word’s connotations have shifted enough today that we reach for other language, but it could do us some good to see what many faithful eyes have dared to see in the life of Christ. And if anyone could rage with a holy, God-honoring anger, would it not be Jesus?
Sinless as he was, Jesus had his manifestly emotional moments as he dwelt among us. Doubtless, he was a man of composure and self-control, but it would be strange to presume he was unemotional when he whipped the temple clean. Or when he wept at Lazarus’s tomb. Or when he prayed, in anguish, with loud cries and tears. Typically, the Christ we encounter in the Gospels is a man of stunning composure — a model of the kind of poise and equanimity, in the face of the world’s chaos, that his people want to grow in by the power of his Spirit. And we may learn, as well, from his holy anger. Even his rage.
Slow to Anger
The children of Israel had celebrated their covenant-keeping God as “slow to anger” (beginning in Exodus 34:6). Slow to anger, let the record show, does not mean without anger. God clearly stood ready to punish the guilty in time. Yet, given the rebellion of his people, which was often outrageous, he was remarkably patient and markedly “slow to anger,” as prophets and psalmists alike would cherish (Nehemiah 9:17; Joel 2:13; Psalms 86:15; 103:8; 145:8).
So too Jesus, in the days of his flesh, was slow to anger. He knew how to keep his wits under pressure, when the moment required it, and he knew how to give vent to his emotions, with self-control, in the proper time and place. Typically, the Christ of the Gospels is conspicuously calm, unprovoked in the face of worked-up foes. Yet the divine Son entered a world of sin and sinners, under the curse — a world in which injustices abound. And it would not be virtue, but vice, as Warfield observes, “for a moral being to stand in the presence of perceived wrong indifferent and unmoved” (50).
Lest we feed a wrong impression, let’s draw on two quintessential Reformed voices for help. If you thought Reformed theology’s appreciation of the mind necessitated the diminishing of emotion, let Warfield, along with John Calvin himself (1509–1564), set the record straight. Sure, some may have skewed anti-emotional in the name of Reformed theology. But they are mistaken. We can hardly find voices more reasonably Reformed than Calvin’s and Warfield’s.
To do so, let’s address several key anger-revealing texts in the Gospels and consider what lessons we might draw as Christ’s disciples today.
1. Jesus experienced our anger.
Jesus, truly man and truly God, was capable of human anger, and this was (and is) a feature, not a bug. This human emotion is an analogue of divine wrath in the image-bearer. As such, it is good, a God-made gift, to help us in a world where we encounter sin, death, and injustice. Yes, indwelling sin corrupts our anger, and anger is especially dangerous because it is such a powerful emotion, by God’s design. But anger itself is not the problem. Our sin is the problem.
In the Gospel of John, the first flare comes as early as chapter 2. Jesus is manifestly angry at those who have made his Father’s house into a house of trade, for material profit rather than Godward prayer. Yet the attribute celebrated here is not called anger but zeal. His disciples remember that it was written (in Psalm 69), “Zeal for your house will consume me” (John 2:17).
Anger rises naturally, even if slowly, in healthy souls. We need not cultivate anger. It comes as a function of some greater love. What we want to cultivate is zeal, for God and his honor, and for others and their joy in God. Christians want to boil with holy affection for Jesus Christ (Romans 12:11). And as God’s word and his people and prayer feed and form our zeal, our anger will flare less at the wrong times, and more at the right times.
We do not typically use the word anger for this more constructive emotion we call zeal. Zeal is the white-hot flame of Jesus’s love for his Father, and so for his Father’s house. Anger is our term for the zealous response toward those who are treating his Father and his house with contempt.
2. Jesus’s anger was without sin.
The life of Christ shows us the possibility of holy, righteous, good anger, even on this side of the fall. Jesus felt anger that was an appropriate response to the sin and evil and injustice he encountered. He also felt anger at appropriate levels of intensity — not too little, not too much, not too frequently or too quickly, and not too slowly or infrequently.
Even as we observe our remarkable solidarity with the Son of God in his sharing in our humanity, we keep in mind that great qualifier “yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). What might it be like to experience the God-given emotion of anger, but without the corruption of sin?
Calvin guards us against any naive attempt to imitate Jesus’s anger without owning up to our own weakness: “If you compare his passions with ours, they will differ not less than pure and clear water, flowing in a gentle course, differs from dirty and muddy foam.” Our anger is not pure and clear like his. If I’ve never done a righteous deed that wasn’t sullied in some small way, surely the same is true with my anger. Yet that should not keep me from doing righteous deeds or from listening to the God-designed emotion of anger, no matter how prone such a power is to the influence of indwelling sin. Every thought, every feeling, every act of sinful humans in this age is sin-infected in some sense, but this does not keep us from doing real good works, pursuing good thoughts, and feeling good, helpful emotions.
Jesus’s pure, clear anger is a summons to us to cultivate Christlike zeal. His emotions encourage ours, and even enjoin them. As Calvin adds, Jesus’s life “ought to be sufficient of itself for setting aside the unbending sternness which the Stoics demand.”
3. Jesus made use of his anger; then he put it away.
Jesus didn’t stuff his anger, and on several occasions in the Gospels, he allowed his anger to become observable. He was noticeably angry. And he made use of that anger: He took its prompting, and energy, to move into justice-remedying action.
But, note well, Jesus did not stew in it. The key moment is Mark 3:1–5. On a Sabbath, he encounters a man with a withered hand. The Pharisees look on, ready to accuse him of Sabbath-breaking. Jesus asks them, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” He’s right, and they won’t admit it. They remain silent, with an evil, cowardly silence. Then verse 5:
And [Jesus] looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored.
Mark tells us Jesus is angry and looks at them with anger. And as we’ll see again in John 11, this holy anger coexists with sorrow. Their hardness of heart both grieves and angers him. But his anger, having come slowly, does its work quickly. It flashes, and he perceives it, is inspired to righteous action, and then puts it away in holiness. It was brief, and then, not suppressed or forgotten, it prompted his next (anger-less) action: to heal. (We find similar examples of brief anger or frustration leading to a fitting response in Mark 7:34; 8:12; 10:14.)
As Paul would charge the Ephesians, so had he heard from the life of Jesus: “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26). Perceive the powerful burst, but let it not move you into sin but inspire righteousness. Which leads to a fourth and final lesson.
4. Jesus wept and raged.
John 11 is famous for “Jesus wept,” for good reason. But the more surprising revelation there is his anger. And it’s not subtle. Uncomfortable translators have tried to take the edge off it, but John is even clearer about Jesus’s anger than he is about his sorrows. Tears we might expect; anger we do not.
In John 11:33, we find a holy soul in holy anger. Jesus doesn’t lash out. He doesn’t bash anyone or say something he will later regret. Tears flow alongside his anger and so offer a revelation about both grief and anger (as we glimpsed in Mark 3:5): Godly anger goes with tears, and tears can flow with anger.
Don Carson emphasizes Jesus’s anger, alongside his grief, in John 11. The word translated “deeply moved” in verses 33 and 38 (Greek embrimaomai) “invariably suggests anger, outrage or emotional indignation” (John, 415). And he insists,
The same sin and death, the same unbelief, that prompted [Jesus’s] outrage, also generated his grief. Those who follow Jesus as his disciples today do well to learn the same tension — that grief and compassion without outrage reduce to mere sentiment, while outrage without grief hardens into self-righteous arrogance and irascibility. (416)
This is a double lesson for us wonderfully emotional and tragically sinful humans. We are not whole if we experience no anger — or only anger. Some need to cultivate the love for fellow man (and God) that leads to holy grief; others need to cultivate the zeal for God (and man) that leads to holy anger. As Warfield captures it,
He who loves men must needs hate with a burning hatred all that does wrong to human beings. . . . Jesus never wavered in his consistent resentment of the special wrongdoing that he was called to witness. (75)
So, with Christ as our one mediator and perfect model, we seek to see our spirit increasingly come under the control of his Spirit.
See the Flash of His Love
Jesus indeed knows the experience of human anger. And we do not yet know the experience of sinlessness. As we watch his righteous anger, and learn the features of our own humanity in looking to him, we do proceed with caution, recognizing the distinctive power of anger, and knowing ourselves to be sinners across all our faculties.
And whether you call it rage or not, see that the root is love. The righteous anger of Christ is a function of his holy zeal — for his Father, his word, his holiness, and his people. For those who are safe in Christ, these flares of his holy anger are full of gospel wonder. He is righteous, and righteously angry with his enemies, because of his great love for his Father and his friends.
Desiring God