THE ANGER OF CHRIST
‘And … Be … looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts.’
Mark’s narrative has many notices, not only of what Jesus said, but also of how He looked, or what He felt in saying it—touches that irresistibly suggest impressions made on an eyewitness. Here we have one. It pained Him to be angry, albeit with a wholly righteous anger.
1. How was this anger roused?—The Pharisees had been attacking Christ, through His disciples, for non-observance of the Sabbath, and in the case of the man with the withered hand, He challenged them with the question, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath day?’ But they kept silence—a silence partly of shame and inability to answer, but more perhaps of calculated subtlety; they would ‘lie low’ and let our Lord commit Himself. Then He looked round in anger, grieved for their hardness of heart, and by one short, sharp utterance rent all their subtle toils. ‘Any touch would have been a work, a formal infraction of the law; therefore there is no touch, neither is the helpless man bidden to take up any burden, or instigated to the slightest ritual irregularity. Jesus only bids him to do what was forbidden to none’ (Bishop Chadwick). No wonder they were filled with madness and foolishness, and actually took counsel with their old enemies, the Herodians, how they might put Him to death.
II. How far does anger at evil cause any grief to our souls?—‘Those,’ says Archbishop Trench, ‘whom the truth mightily takes hold of, who are content to be fools for Christ, who would be content to be martyrs for Christ, who love the good with a passionate love, who hate the evil with a passionate hatred, are few: while yet it should be thus with all.… Is the sin which is in the world around us a burden to our souls and spirits?… When we look abroad on the world and see the works done against the words of God’s lips, does this fill us with any heaviness, with any indignation? Is it any part of the burden of our hearts, the sorrow of our lives? Or do we rather feel that if we can get pretty comfortably through life, and if other men’s sins do not seriously vex, cross, inconvenience or damage us, they are no great concern of ours, nothing which it is any business of ours to fight against?’
III. What is there in us akin to the Pharisees’ meanness that stirred our Saviour’s wrath?—They were ruffled at being reproved and worsted in argument. Their own little grievance filled all the foreground of their view; they wanted to avenge it. When unclouded and unbiassed they may have been individually kindly gentlemen. But they had no eye to human misery because they were preoccupied with petty pride; that sometimes happens to ourselves. We miss a good many clear opportunities of well-doing, because we are concerned about our dignity more than about the needs of other men. And do we never sneer at goodness displayed on lines that differ from our own? Are we not just a little pleased to find weak points in it, something at least that will prevent its seeming to entirely eclipse our own?
—Rev. H. A. Birks.
Illustration
‘Let us seek grace that the emotion of anger in our breasts may more closely assimilate with the emotion of anger in Christ’s—a holy anger against sin, blended with a loving, yearning compassion for the sinner. Such is the Divine precept: “Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath” (Ephesians 4:26). When this emotion springs from zeal for God, His truth, and worship, and glory, and when it prompts us to seek, in the spirit of meekness, humility, and love, the good of those whose conduct we condemn, it then becomes in us what it was in Christ, a holy, amiable, God-honouring emotion, unmixed with sin and self, and throwing no shadow of sadness upon the mellow light of evening, when the sun goes down at the hour of prayer. If, on the contrary, you find this emotion rising in your bosoms, in its sinful, fleshly, and corrupt form, lose not a moment in bringing it to the Cross, that by the love, the sufferings, the last prayer for the forgiveness of injury of Him who died upon its wood, that species of anger which dwells alone in the bosom of fools, may be crucified and slain in you. Seek not mercy from thy fellows, and ask not for forgiveness from thy Father, whilst unholy anger against a brother or a sister finds a moment’s lodgment in thy heart.’