Anger – a chapter from “Mind Fields”
Annas paced back and forth but it didn’t seem to help. His back hurt. It was that particular lower back pain that came whenever he felt really tense. Even in the cold of the night, he felt the trickle of perspiration on the back of his neck. Annas is mad. Really mad. In fact, if he weren’t so religious, he would have told you that he was pissed. The slow boil. What irked him the most was the sheer nuisance of it all. All of the planning, all of the politics, the secret liaisons, the maneuvering. To think that it could have been destroyed by some ignorant, backwoods prophet. No, not even a prophet. A charlatan, a sorcerer, a magician. That would have been enough to get rid of him, but he could never get his hands on the right evidence. And banishing him would not do. It was too late for that. There was only one thing left. That meddler must die. Annas knew that his anger wouldn’t be appeased until he saw this man hanging from a cross.
Annas pacing quickened. He was immune to the chill. His mind and heart were racing now. He could feel the familiar little pulsing above his right eye when he knew that he was about to explode. Careful, he warned himself. Not too quick. Let the trap close.
This was no time to make a mistake. He had thought it all out over an over in the last few weeks. Those blasphemous Romans must be brought into the killing. His hands must be clean of the blood. So much scheming. A chess game to be played by an absolute master, just as he had played the game time and again, keeping the power without revealing his strength.
A temple guardsman appeared in the doorway. “We have him, master”.
“Were there any incidents, anything that I should know about?’
“No, sir. He was cooperative. His followers fled, no reason to chase them. There was only one thing, a minor thing”. Annas raised his eyebrows, signaling the guard to continue. “The Nazarene . . .”, he started, then backtracked. “One of the followers had a sword. He cut off Malchus’ ear but the Nazarene put it back on his head. I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes”.
Annas raised his eyes with slow deliberation until he looked directly into the hesitation of the guard. He knew that he would have to squelch any rumor immediately, especially one that might imply the truth of the Nazarene’s claim. He drew the word out like a snake drawn from under a rock. “Sorcery”. Every Hebrew knew what it meant. Abomination of the evil one. The law required death. “Lead me to him”. The temple guardsman stepped into the dark corridor and Annas followed. The game had begun.
Cement Mixing
I am the “slow boil” type. I hold my anger inside. Sometimes for years. Things that eat at me. Offenses. Hurts. Disappointments. While they fester under my skin, I tell myself that I am in control of these emotions, that I have learned to distance myself from my rages, that I am a rational being. I believe in Mr. Spock.
But, of course, Mr. Spock wasn’t human. Vulcans might have a different capacity for rational control but I have discovered, much to my dismay, that human do not share this passionless life. In spite of our pretense of mind over emotion, we seem to be constantly on the roller coaster ride of how we feel. We can tell ourselves that we should not feel as we do. We can even get angry at ourselves for being angry. But try as we might, we just can’t be Vulcans.
I wonder if we think that we should be passionless creatures because we believe that life would be simpler without the need to exercise emotional flood control. I am sure that our continued insistence on believing the myth of emotional equilibrium has a great deal to do with our equally fallacious beliefs about the need for power. After all, emotional attacks on our well controlled lives leave us feeling powerless. That is the fear behind emotions. If I really let them out, I would somehow be overwhelmed. I would lose control, become powerless, tossed to and fro like a helpless leaf on the great dark sea of my feelings. It seems not to matter that psychologists constantly remind us that our emotions are not only inevitable but essential outlets for proper mental health. They are preaching in the dark. We just don’t believe them. We probably don’t want to believe them. It’s just too scary to think that there could be anything left of who I am if I let my feelings really take over. I feel like I’m standing at the bottom of Hoover Dam with my finger in the leaking hole. If I pull it out, millions of tons of water will surely drown me. So I keep mixing cement, hoping to make the dam thicker. But how can I stop the leak without pulling out my finger?
No wonder we have so much trouble with an emotional God. We are thoroughly Greek in our belief that God cannot be passionate about things (the theological expression is impassibility) . God is the steady rock. The same yesterday, today and tomorrow. God is perfect. And perfect beings, like Vulcans, certainly have complete control over their emotions. Therefore, we reject that Old Testament nonsense about God getting angry or weeping or being sorrowful or laughing or feeling vengeful. Of course we want God to feel good about us. We want Him to hear our prayers with compassion. We want to know that He feels intensity in His love for us. But we are not so comfortable with the other side of the emotional coin. A God of wrath, a God who hates, a God who is jealous – no, I’m afraid not. No, not for us. We’re civilized.
There is a price to pay when we decide how God should be. The first dollar of this tax is excised against our belief about God Himself. When we determine that God cannot have these “awful” emotions, we are half way to a God who cannot have any emotions. Theologians want a God who is impassable (without emotion) because they believe that this protects God’s perfection. But philosophers are apt to ask what it means to say that God is a person but has no emotions. And we simple believers are inclined to dismiss the emotionless God because we need Someone who has compassion on us. But the problem is a little more complex. If God feels sympathy, why can’t He also feel angry?
The price that we pay doesn’t stop with our theology. If we convince ourselves that God either cannot feel emotions or that He can only feel the “good” ones, then we will also have to pay a dollar or two for our concept of ourselves. “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” will come to mean that we should become Vulcans. In fact, we might even conclude that we are required to become Vulcans. No wonder we have so much trouble being alive. We are born human but we should become something else. This is a heavy tax indeed.
How are we to supposed to understand the idea of an angry God?
Blessed Are The Powerful
Annas sat comfortably while Jesus was brought into the room. He could feel the power in the place. His power. The power to control not only the activities of the religious, but to have a stranglehold on everything that happened in Israel, and all in the name of God. Who could question the power of the high priest, a man who spoke for God? Annas let the feeling of total control roll over him like a great wave. He was tense, but this was the tension of anticipation. The cards were all in his hand. He need only play them to win. He let the first card drop.
“You, Jesus of Nazareth, are here because you have defiled the sanctity of the Law. You have taught against the Sabbath, against our Fathers and against the office of the High Priest. And you have taught others to follow your sedition and heresies. What have you to say to this? Step forward and answer me!” He could feel the venom spewing from his mouth. It was such sweet power. Dripping in rage, accusations, barbs, insults. He felt so alive.
The prisoner stepped into the light. Annas was taken back. This was a most common man. He did not appear charismatic. He had none of that leader quality written into the stature of the prophets. There was no burning zeal in him. But there was something else. Annas settled back into his chair, withdrawing his face from the light, in order to study this prisoner.
The man spoke quitely. No shouting. No defensive maneuvers. Annas was stunned. He seemed so calm. “I have spoken openly. Nothing that I have said or taught has been in secret. I taught in synagogue and in the temple for anyone to hear. Why do you question me about what I have said? You should be questioning those who heard me.”
One of the temple officers struck the Nazarene across the face. His lip bled. “How dare you show disrespect to the High Priest! He is asking the questions here”.
The prisoner answered, “If I have lied, bring forth witnesses to testify of my lie. But if I have not lied, why are you striking me?’
Annas head hurt. The worst of all calamities, a jail house lawyer. This was something he had not anticipated. Yes, he knew of the Nazarene’s reputation for knowing the Scriptures, but where had he learned of court proceedings? Annas felt the hook sink into his flesh and the line grow taut. There were already rumblings about the unorthodox nature of this arrest. He could afford no inquiries about the legitimacy of his actions. This must be dealt with quickly before it got out of hand. The strategy would still work, but the prisoner had to be silenced. Annas leaned forward. He exploded with carefully timed artillery.
“There are no witnesses because no witnesses are necessary. We all know that you have deliberately tried to undermine the statues of the Law. We have heard the reports. We have seen with our own eyes the sorcery and magic you have performed. We have no need of witnesses. You are condemned by your own acts.”
Annas lengthened the words for impact. There would be no doubt who was in charge here. He would do what he wished to this man, and no power on earth could stop him. Annas motioned to the officer. A simple signal that brought more blows to the prisoner’s face. Blood dripped to the floor. “Now let’s see what your jail house law does for you,” thought Annas.
The prisoner was completely silent.
“Take him to Caiaphas”. Annas had seen enough. This man would be no problem. He was nothing like the hungry-eyed zealots of the past. Caiaphas knew the plan. He would surely die and be forgotten. Still, there was something.
The prisoner was dragged from the chamber. Annas stood, the chair screeched across the floor. Then it hit him. Fear. That’s what it was. The man was unafraid. A chill ran down Annas’ spine. His prisoner knew he was going to die and he was totally serene. Annas felt the hand of Death on his shoulder and it was not his friend. His back hurt.
An Angry God
What makes God angry? Even if we have trouble with the idea that God has passions, and that He has “negative” passions, we must still confront the Biblical record of God’s anger. Even if it is only anthropomorphism (human foibles ascribed to God), it might be useful to know what makes God mad. The ancient Hebrews certainly thought that knowing what makes God mad was a matter of life and death. They were not anxious to have God’s wrath fall on them because of a careless mistake or an oversight. They remembered when God got angry. It was not a pleasant memory. .
We don’t have the same perspective these days. God does not seem to reach out a strike offenders dead, so we assume that He must have changed His mind (or perhpas gone to therapy). It is difficult to imagine God as the sort of person who needed to be bribed through some concession or sacrifice in order to turn His anger away from us. This picture makes God look like He is no more emotionally mature than teenagers. It would be easy to say that the idea of an angry God just doesn’t fit the modern image of divinity. But there it is, in the Old Testtament and the New, right in the middle of God’s active grace.
In order to understand why the Bible speaks of an angry God, and what God is angry about, we will first have to look at the idea of God’s covenant. We find that the covenant promise has two sides. The first looks toward the new order, offering a blessing to those who are now slaves to self-in-control by providing a ransom from their slavery. The second looks toward the old order, the order of the existing world fallen from grace. This side of the coin judges the spiritual deformity of the old order and condemns it as antithetical to the life of the new covenant of redemption. In the covenant context, God acts as both lawyer for our defense and judge of our condition. God offers the undeserved blessing of pardon even though He finds us guilty of alignment with the principles of the old order.
Appeasing angry gods was familiar to the First Century readers of the Gospel. Their lives were surrounded by divine avengers. Part of being human was attempting to placate or appease the gods in order to insure favor in this world. Consequently, we find innumerable examples of sacrifices and incantations to all sorts of gods when we look at the historical record from the First Century. Even the New Testament acknowledged that this was the prevailing attitude when Paul made his famous speech to an unknown god. Appeasing angry deities has been a common practice since the lineage of Cain.
Today we believe that we have progressed beyond these “silly” rites. We see our ancient counterparts ascribing activities to gods that now fall under the explanations of science. We no longer fear lightening as the displeasure of an angry Zeus. We treat diseases with medicine rather than incantations and amulets. We recognize natural disasters as part of the global cause and effect model. We even consider the strange world of our inner selves to be subject to scientific examination and explanation. We like to live in an intellectually clean and rational world.
But we still show our ancient roots when we go through thoroughly modern rituals of superstition. The “magic” socks needed to win a ball game, the good luck charms, the special medallions, a prayer in the locker room or the belief that stars control our lives all reach back to placating the gods. We try to gain the favor of fate, or Lady Luck, or something out there in order to get things to go our way. Of course, when we are pressed we may admit that it is just our emotions getting the best of us. But soon we are back wondering about the Tarot cards, the fortune tellers and all of the trappings of leveraging the future. Perhaps we have done away with Zeus and Apollo but we have not changed our internal storehouse of mythical beings even if we have taken the names off the doors. We may act like unemotional researchers in the laboratory environment, but we go through modern day equivalents of appeasement just as our ancestors did.
Simply because we still carry superstitious appeasement baggage in our mental inventory does not mean that there really are angry gods out there who need to be placated. Nevertheless, the context of appeasement is not quite as foreign as we would like to imagine. The Biblical writers addressed people who had daily commerce with angry public gods needing to be assuaged. These writers had something much more powerful to say about the one true God. What they said was totally shocking. God could not be pacified into accepting us as we are. He could not be appeased. He would not tolerate any compromise with our petty appeals and trivial bribes. He was sick to death of all the sacrificial smoke without repentance fire. God was mad as Hell and nothing that we could do would change His anger.
The message of the Bible is that God hates sin with divine intensity. God’s wrath will not be satiated until the sinful order and everything aligned with it is destroyed. In the Twentieth Century, to use a verb like hate for a characteristic of God is almost considered blasphemous. We have been taught that God is a god of LOVE. We can hardly picture this same god as “fuming mad” or vengeful. We feel that we have made substantial progress when we recognize that an image of an angry, vengeful god is at best a projection of inferior human qualities. We are content to relegate that anthropomorphic picture of God to the ancient thinking of the primitive people. It certainly does not belong in our modern view of God.
Some Christian thinkers have claimed that the god of the New Testament is an evolutionary (read ‘better‘) development of the old angry god. In our world of self control, we acknowledge that love is superior to anger, that peace is better than hate. Therefore we reason that God cannot be the inferior anthropomorphic being who is ascribed these vile emotions. We believe that those religious fanatics who continue to preach the “fire and brimstone” version of God ought to seek personal psychiatric help to deal with their own dysfunctional emotional controls.
Unfortunately, if we take a hard look at the New Testament documents, we must admit that somehow the notion of God’s wrath is still there. The Old Testament characterization of an angry God does not disappear from the pages of the New Testament. If these writings are to be the normative standard that we use to understand who God is, what He has done and what He is like, then our problem is not proposing an evolutionary picture of God that will help us feel better about ourselves. Nor is it altering the evidence so that God’s emotions fit our notions of self control. It is rather trying to understand what the real picture of God is that the New Testament writers had in mind.
We gain nothing by suggesting that these writers were also in need of psychiatric assistance. If they believed that the terms ‘propitiation’ (meaning a gift that is intended to appease, cf. Romans 3:25) and ‘God’ were somehow linked, we had better do our best to determine what that linkage is.
Modern religion has denuded God. It has decided that the idea of a passionate God who places Himself in the position of potential self annihilation for the love of undeserving creatures is simply wrong. Since God is unlikely to seek professional counseling, the theological community has decided to make a house call. The result is that we have a God who is more removed from our daily life than the God of the deists. We have returned to the “watchmaker” God who stuck around just long enough to wind up the universe but is now conspicuous by His absence.
Demythologizing (a once popular theological word) God only served to leave us without the presence of the divine in our everyday living. All of these attempts to strip away the ‘primitive’ characteristics of God did nothing more than make God something other than personal. And if modern man needs anything, he needs a personal God who is interested in personal problems and personal grace.
We can see how important God’s person is to us if we look at the differences between the Judeo-Christian God and other religious deities. The God of the Bible is a person. God is described in personal language. His being a person entails at least the following characteristics: He remembers, He anticipates, He reflects, He deliberates, He decides, He acts intentionally. If we are going to talk about anything being a person, we would have to admit that at least some (if not all) of these characteristics must be true of that thing. Certainly the evidence of the Bible indicates that God does all of these things, and much more.
In addition, God does quite a few things as a person that we also do, but not exactly in the same way. For example, God creates (out of nothing). God loves (unconditionally). God promises (without contingencies). God believes (eternally). God forgives (unreservedly). And God hates (unemotionally).
What does it mean to say that God hates unemotionally? What we mean is that God is utterly justified in condemning with every part of His righteous being everything that is opposed to the standard of holiness He represents. This is not the sort of hate that we experience. It is not irrational, emotional fervor peaked to evil action. It is not destructive to personality.
It is true that we need to remove our humanized characteristics (anthropomorphisms) from descriptions of God’s personality. But that does not mean that God ceases to be a person or becomes subject to our ways of thinking about a particular personal activity. We are the ones who are the copies of the original, true personality. Our expressions of creating, loving, promising, believing, forgiving, worrying and hating are the imitation versions. Why, then, should we think that God cannot have the original, uncorrupted versions of our own personality expressions?
Instead of worrying about attributing human characteristics to God, we might be better served if we worry about attributing divine personality traits to men. Just like the incarnation, the logic of God’s divine person stands human person logic on its head. The Biblical picture of God is a study in reverse anthropomorphism (perhaps we need a new word like theomorphism to point out the fact the real issue is how we are like God, not how God is like us). If there is anything wrong with the picture, it is that the human copy of the divine personality has become flawed, not that the divine personality is incapable of emotional response.
Of course, we need to be careful here. For centuries, theologians and philosophers have argued about applying human language to God. The usual result is that God-language is considered somehow analogous to human-language. That is to say, God-language is like our descriptions of ourselves in some ways but not in others. Theologians and philosophers typically want to say the our versions of personal descriptions are somehow less than the way they need to be applied to divine characteristics. We are finite, God is infinite. We are limited in power, God is unlimited. We are less than perfect, God is perfect.
The problem is that attribution by analogy tends to lead us to believe that God is only what we are not. If we are distraught, impassioned, temperamental or hateful, these are characteristics of a limited, finite being. God is neither limited nor finite. Moreover, God is perfect. Therefore, the tendency is to go on to say that God cannot be emotional.
Christians vacillate a great deal on this topic. On the one hand, we want a God who empathizes with us, who feels our hurt and our heartache, who really cares that we pray. On the other hand, we are very uncomfortable when we begin to talk about God’s hatred, disgust, jealousy or repentance.
We want a God whom we can talk to in prayer, but we also want Him to know everything about everything, making prayer somewhat redundant. We want a God who interacts with our daily lives, yet we act according to a picture of a God who is little more than a set of lofty ethical rules.
Our first task is to replace our own mental constructions (and constrictions) about God with the record that God left about Himself. We need to return to God’s communication to us if we are to understand what He wants us to know about Him. When we do, we find that none of this abstraction about personality is recorded. What is recorded is an intense sense of the personal presence and dynamic interaction with another conscious, purposeful, communicating beings.
For the people of the Bible, God was so real that they legitimately feared Him. He was not removed from their personal lives. By paying close attention to the encounters that we find throughout the Bible, we will see that there really is a legitimate connection between God and pathos (the Greek word for “feelings”).
God, as the divine person, exhibits His personality through His encounters with human beings and through the self-revelation found in the Bible. If He says that He hates sin, then He means it, whether or not we are able to grasp all that this means to Him. What we know for certain is that the copy of this personality characteristic that we experience when we feel hateful is but a tiny taste of the experience that God must have when He is confronted by the principles of the old order.
We must be sure that we do not sidestep the issue of God’s wrath simply because it makes us uncomfortable. We are not the judges of God’s expression of His own character. As long as we have examined ourselves and know that questioning these emotional descriptions applied to God is not a disguised excuse for our own behavior, then we can seriously ask how these things might be understood divinely. What we really find when we look at the Biblical record is that God’s wrath toward the ungodly (both persons and principles) is the “flip-side” of His expression of love toward the repentant.
If God’s expression of love for a toxic order cost Him the risk of His own being, the humiliation of His Son and the death of Jesus, what better way could He express His repugnance at the continued aggression of the old sinful order than to say that He hates sin? Since God knows that every beguiling activity of the old order threatens the very creatures that He benevolently intends to redeem from their bondage, how could we even imagine that He would not hate such things with all of the passion of His being? This is ‘tough’ love. It cost Jesus his life. It cost God the risk of destruction to His very being. It is God-damned serious business!
Now we can see that God might indeed need to be appeased. He has every reason to be angry. But the New Testament clearly says that appeasement is impossible. We have come all this way in understanding that a God who is a person can feel hatred toward the old order only to find out that according to His own message we cannot placate Him at all.
This must surely have seemed strange to the First Century audience. The Jewish population was seeped in the sacrificial system, trying to gain God’s favor by keeping an ever growing set of moral rules. The non-Jewish world entertained a whole host of vindictive gods, offering everything imaginable in an effort to insure a better life. Suddenly the Christian God broke onto the scene in the death and resurrection of Jesus and announced that He could not be pacified. He was justifiably angry and there was nothing anyone of us could do to turn aside His wrath. Judgement was coming.
What was worse is that this God had the power to carry out His summary judgement. God’s wrath is not the mechanical exercise of some set of absolute ethical principles. It is rather the intimately personal expression of an absolutely holy Being. No wonder the Bible states that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God! According to the Biblical record, someone aligned with sin has an unbelievably terrible and frightful prospect before him.
Why should God seem so intransigent on this issue? The answer is so amazing that it shocked the entire world. God cannot be appeased because appeasement is something that we would have to do to earn His favor. Appeasement would reinstate the very principle that caused God to be justifiably wrathful toward the old order in the first place – a spiritual merit system based on human achievement apart from the gift of love. God cannot be appeased by anything that we should or could do because He has already turned aside His own wrath. That is the message of the death and resurrection of Jesus. If we should try to appease God, we would be making a mockery of the entire revelation of God’s message in Jesus’ life and death. We would be insulting God’s own provision for our release. We would once again be exercising human achievement as a means for gaining God’s favor. We would be right back at square one on the monopoly board of self – leveraging status for me.
The singular message of the Christian faith is that GOD HAS ALREADY DONE WHAT IS REQUIRED for our freedom. Propitiation means finding acceptance with the one who has been offended. The Christian message is that God accepts us because Jesus substituted himself for us. God, the offended party, provided His own means of removing the offense.
Only God could have dreamed up such a solution. On the one hand, the old order is saturated with unrighteousness. It is justifiably worthy of condemnation. Its character must be destroyed and reconstructed from scratch. Therefore, participants aligned with it also receive the just verdict of death. Since it is thoroughly opposed to the holiness of God, nothing done in or through the old principles could satisfy the quality standard of the new order.
But God longs for renewal. He cannot relax the standard of righteousness since that would compromise His very being. He cannot accept appeasement from the toxic waste of the old order since every action of the old order is already permeated with the principle of self. So He creates a plan of substitution. He stands logic on its head and places Himself and His Son at risk. He gives instead of taking. His Son endures humiliation and death as a substitute payment for the judgment on the old order. The sentence has been satisfied.
Therefore, God can accept repentant members of the old order as though they had already met the standard. God provided His own means of reconciliation. His hostility toward the unholiness of the creation was turned aside by His own actions. He can now turn His anger away from its deserving recipients when they come to Him seeking a new relationship. We do not need to practice some sort of ritual hoping to persuade God to change His mind about our fate. God has already taken care of this. He changed His mind about our fate when He thought of the option of Jesus’ substitution. We don’t need to convince Him. He was convinced long ago by His own love. He has already offered us mercy and turned His anger away. We need only to set aside our ‘self-in-control’ living and take up His offer.
God is definitely angry. He is angry about sin. As long as we make our own righteousness the standard of our lives, we automatically come under His wrath. But God anger is a direct result of His love. He loves us so much that it makes Him angry to see how messed up we have become. And He decided to do something about it. Love and judgment go hand in hand. Both are absolutely necessary. The only question now is this: which one will you choose?
