The Things I Love About Jesus: His Anger Is So Clean & So Appropriate

One of the things I love about Jesus is that He clearly shows us how anger is supposed to exist in a healthy person. Much of our culture today strongly manipulates people to become passive... as if all anger is bad. Jesus does the opposite. He is deeply angered by evil and passive about things like people's appearances or station in life. He doesn't give more respect to a person who is influential or wealthy than a poor person.

In Mark 3 Jesus enters a Synagogue presumably to teach. There was a man there who had a deformed hand that was shriveled or withered. The Pharisees and other leaders of Israel were present because they wanted to accuse Jesus and destroy Him. They are waiting to see if He will heal someone on the Sabbath which they feel is breaking the Law of Moses. Jesus knows all this.
Jesus calls the man with the deformed hand to step up and stand before everyone. The man does. Jesus then presents a question to the entire crowd and all the leaders that are conspiring against Him, "Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life and or to kill?" The biblical text says that all the leaders kept silent!

Wow, don't you think even a child could answer that question? Surely God did not invent the Sabbath Law, that provides rest for people 1 day a week, to forbid that someone would get healed on that day? Any child could see that it would honor or glorify God to have a miracle happen on the Sabbath. But they kept silent.

The text says Jesus "looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts." He then turns to the man saying, "Stretch out your hand." And the man is instantly healed!

What I love about Jesus is that He is angry about the right things! He is angry that their hearts are so hard and un-yeilding towards caring about others. They are so committed to their religious system that is bringing shame to God's name. As if God was more concerned with a rigid and legalistic application of the Law than healing one of His humans! Their attitudes grieve Jesus! He is not passive about their attitudes. Jesus looks them all in the face clearly showing the anger on His face!

Much of our culture would pressure us to conceal our anger in this situation. We are told to "be tolerant of all people." Our highest standard is being "nice" not honest. We are manipulated by our culture to not fight for what is right but to go limp and passive. Jesus doesn't do that. He stands up to the entire crowd.

Most of the time our anger goes wrong because what we do with it is sinful. It is right to feel anger when someone is abused, manipulated, cheated or hurt. But how we act or react with this anger is the issue. Jesus doesn't swear, He doesn't rant or rave, He doesn't hit people or physically injure the leaders. He is angry and He doesn't hide it. But He maintains the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) called Self Control. Then He heals the man!

Jesus' anger reveals God's anger. Jesus' emotions reveal God's emotions. Remember the verse in John 14:9 "If you have seen Me [Jesus], you have seen the Father!

Immitation alone is not the main way we will change our emotions to be like His emotions. This is good, but the real power of change and transformation lies in the Holy Spirit. The Cross of Christ and the subsequent indwelling of the Holy Spirit are ways God deeply changes us. Our efforts to immitate Jesus are definitely required by scripture but we need to rely or lean on the Holy Spirit to bring the changes to pass. He is the One (based on what Jesus had done for us) that transforms our emotions and makes us like Him!

Our anger can be clean AND serve the good purposes of God! Think of some of the followers of Jesus who actually got angry enough about injustice, abuse or poverty and actually did something about it?