Righteous Indignation?

Sitting on an angry chair
Angry walls that steal the air

Stomach hurts and I don’t care [1.]

Anger is the emotion that always has some controversy through the religious and secular sphere. We can see throughout our current culture that it seems to be running a mock with no end in sight. What do we do with it? We have numerous amounts of data from the scientific and medical fields that are helping us to react to anger.

Neurologists are discovering that when you change your beliefs about a situation, your brain changes the emotions you feel. This method is called reappraisal:

As famed researcher Albert Ellis said: You don’t get frustrated because of events, you get frustrated because of your beliefs. If you’re trained with reappraisal, and you know your boss is frequently in a bad mood, you can prepare yourself to go into a meeting,” Blechert suggested. “He can scream and yell and shout but there’ll be nothing.”[2.]

This is great news! This data basically proves that we can avoid anger altogether if we train our state of mind. Anger, for me, has always been something that I struggle with in how to not be plagued by it. Is training the mind with the reappraisal approach also a spiritual method? Is the righteous indignation just a farce? From a Christ-lens perspective, how we can react in loving and healing ways when our anger hits?

Throughout the history of the christian tradition, the majority have said that righteous indignation is vindicated through godly acts. When Christians used this definition of anger, some pretty evil shit has happened (one of the travesties of this is the concept of Just War Theory). When looking at the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, we find a mix bag–from the priests and prophets to the apostles. When we come to this fork in the road, it’s time to go to the red letters of Jesus and let the Holy Spirit do Her thing.

So…

Did Jesus use righteous indignation?

On the service, it seems like Jesus did commit some anger-driven acts. We see this from the cleansing of the temple and interactions with the Pharisees. But, this all comes down to interpretation and context. Theologian Greg Boyd sheds great insight in regards to the cleansing of the temple by Jesus:

We need to understand that Jesus wasn’t throwing an uncontrolled tantrum. Most scholars agree that this was a calculated prophetic, symbolic act on Jesus’ part. Based on Old Testament prophecy as well as the widespread knowledge of the corrupt priestly system, most Jews of Jesus’ day believed the coming Messiah was going to restore the temple and make it God’s house once again. By cleansing the temple, therefore, Jesus was demonstrating that he was the Messiah.[3.]

When it comes to Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees, we have to put on the interpretive lens of “the truth in love” (Eph 4:15, cf. 25). We cannot contradict the whole life of Jesus that showed love to all and say he was a dick to just a few. God so loved the world, right? Again, Boyd puts this into great perspective:

If the Pharisees were in fact as steeped in spiritual darkness as Jesus claims, than Jesus’ offensive language can be understood as a desperate, love-motivated attempt to shock them into realizing their dire situation, not unlike a parent who screams to get their child’s attention to keep them from danger.[4.]

We can see that Jesus was strategic and loving when it came to interactions with others. From using the reappraisal method, we can see that every act that we can commit, we can learn to harness it through discipline and practice. From my day-to-day life, the more I lash out due to my anger the more I see that nothing good comes from it. The scripture says it best:

Human anger does not produce the righteousness God desires

Anger doesn’t work because The Divine Abba of Jesus (and you and me) doesn’t operate in that stratosphere. The God of the universe is love and all that flows through him is driven by that agape motif. When we see the damage that anger produces, we can see that God takes no part of righteous indignation. The fruit of the Spirit is temperance NOT anger. Let us strive to put this into practice throughout our daily lives so we can be people who heal and liberate, not people who damage and imprison…

Unfortunate events though potentially a source of anger and despair have equal potential to be a source of spiritual growth. Whether or not this is the outcome depends on your response. [5.]