Hilton Head Island, SC – June 12, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Matthew 5:38-42; Matthew 5:21-26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall, be liable to judgment, whoever insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the hell of fire.” – Matthew 5:22 (RSV)
From Matthew 5:21 through 5:48, Jesus reinterprets several of the Old Testament laws. In so doing, he deliberately put himself at odds with many of the religious leaders of his time. The authority with which he made these pronouncements came from within himself, and not from his understanding of scripture. This was, therefore, an intentional departure from the way the rabbis and scribes interpreted the Bible. As time went on, this pattern would get Jesus into deeper and deeper trouble with those who were widely considered to be the religious authorities.
In these verses, five times Jesus directly quoted laws from the Torah, and then provided his understanding of extensions that he felt should be given to those laws. Today we hear this from him: “You have heard that it was said to the men of old, ‘You shall not kill, and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment, and who insults his brother shall be liable to the council, and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ shall be liable to the fire of hell” (Mt. 5:21-22).
Those words were --- and are --- so revolutionary, so incendiary, that they require explanations. First, when Jesus used the word “brother,” he was not speaking literally of a sibling. He was speaking in a generality. Everyone is our brother or sister. We are all sisters and brothers to one another.
Secondly, when Jesus indicated people who are angry at other people are subject to judgment, apparently he was referring to judgment by both God and qualified human judges. Everyone in first-century Judea lived in a culture like that of twenty-first century Orthodox Jews or the American Amish. In those situations, if anyone breaks any of the strict laws of those ultra-conservative societies, they may be forced to stand trial before the elders of the synagogue or church. In that type of community, the religious elders (virtually always men) are also the civil authorities. So Jesus was implying that anger can result in angry people being hailed before both God and the governing council of the village, which consisted of all the elders in the synagogue.
Thirdly, when Jesus said the things he said in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, he spoke with an authority above and beyond that of the most respected on the local elders in whatever locale they lived. We have all experienced such authority ourselves. When certain politicians, preachers, teachers, or business leaders speak, we listen to them more than to all other such leaders. The 1930s through the1960s were the heyday of American preachers. When men like Harry Emerson Fosdick, George Buttrick, Ralph Sockman, and my mentor, Elam Davies, spoke, people listened very carefully. None of these men was an authoritarian, but they were all authoritative, and their authority clearly sounded through what they said, and was widely affirmed.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke with an authority which sounded entirely new to his listeners. He reinterpreted words they had heard many times before in a new way, and it changed how they viewed the power and the wider breath of scripture.
It was revolutionary to hear anger equated with murder --- and it was very frightening. Who never gets angry? Who are always so even-tempered that they never lash out at someone who has hurt or wronged them?
In these verses Jesus is not talking about whether we are justified in being angry at someone. Rather he is telling us what happens when we become angry at someone. Anger injures relationships. It weakens them. It can even destroy relationships altogether. Literature and history is filled with stories of how anger led to disasters. Revenge is a popular theme in movies. Those who strike out in righteous anger are applauded. But is anger ever righteous?
Over the years, on occasion parishioners have told me of severed relationships they had with someone because of angry exchanges which led to them never to speak to one another again. This is particularly common among close relatives. For example, it is safe to say that the relationship between Donald Trump and his niece Mary Trump is probably quite fractious. When close bonds are severed by anger, both sides may want somehow to repair the fractured connection. As a pastor, on rare occasions I have been asked to try to referee the effort to heal wounds. Out of either wisdom or cowardice, I almost always declined the offer, and suggested that they needed to work it out themselves. From these encounters I learned how painful it is for highly valued relationships to be broken by angry behavior, and how much people may regret the sad outcomes of their wrath.
Most anger, fortunately, is short-lived. It quickly flares up, and just as quickly it dies down. Sadly, however, some people seem to be perpetually angry. It isn’t necessarily that their anger is constantly expressed, but it is constantly just below the surface, ready to erupt at anyone in any moment because internally, it is always there; it never dies out.
Since its inception, the United States of America has been a society in which far too many people turn to violence when they become angry. This tendency has risen to such a degree that every year, thousands of Americans are killed by firearms in the hands of thousands of other angry Americans. Anger can lead some people to murder others, but Jesus takes us back to the time before that happens. He says that if we are even angry at someone, mentally we may have murdered that person in our minds and hearts. Some people may have become enraged by watching the Thursday even presentation of the House January 6 Investigation Committee, and in their hearts they may have murdered some of the invited and indicted witnesses who appeared before the committee over the past year or so.
Anger can also turn libelous. The actor Johnny Depp has just gone through a very expensive libel trial against his ex-wife. Apparently it was followed on television and on the internet by countless thousands of titillated people who wanted to see what the ultimate monetary judgment would be. Such spectacles elicit oodles of anger by the principals as well as the gawkers.
Anger can become a malignancy to those who allow it to consume their minds and emotions. As it seeps farther and farther into their inner being, it metastasizes in tumorous clumps of unchecked inner rage.
However, anger erupts far more frequently in some people than in others. Some small children seem to exhibit displeasure far more readily than others. Some kids are always placid, while others are like lighted firecrackers, ready to explode at any moment. Why that is true no one can fully explain, but it is true. It is also true of adults. Some are always potential hand grenades, and we never know whether or not they have pulled the pin. We just know they are grenades.
The observations Jesus made about anger are undeniable. Those who succumb to anger are inevitably judged by everyone else; is their anger justified or unjustified? If anger is sufficiently volatile, it may result in the angry person being hauled into court for his actions. In the end, says Jesus, God will judge all of us for the fact of and the level of and the results of our anger. Did it hurt us, because people learned to avoid us? Did it hurt others? Did it anger God toward us?
It seems evident that Jesus was not declaring that anger is never justified. Either on Palm Sunday or the day after (depending on what Gospel you happen to be reading), in a memorable moment of pique, Jesus overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple. He proclaimed that they had turned the temple into a den of thieves. Those were the angry words of an angry man. Symbolically, Jesus wanted to make a powerful theological statement by his action, and visibly he was memorably successful in what he intended, although no doubt it was also one of many factors which led to his crucifixion. Still, Jesus is warning all of us that uncontrolled anger is an enemy of a smoothly functioning human community, and we need to be very careful that we do not allow it to take control of us rather than our taking control of it.
Our first reading this morning, Matthew 5:38-42, will be read again next Sunday, when we will focus on the theme of enemies. But it also has relevance for the theme of anger. Jesus quoted a notion that is found in three places in the Torah: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” Those words are found in Exodus 21:24, in Leviticus 24:20, and in Deuteronomy 19:21.
There is a Latin phrase which describes this law. It is called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation. What it says is that if someone attacks you and knocks out a tooth, you may retaliate by doing no more than knocking out one of his teeth. If he hacks off your foot, you may cut off only one of his feet, not everything below his knee or his whole leg. In other words, we must not exact more punishment against those who have wronged us than they exacted against us. The occasions for employing the lex talionis are fortunately very rare, but it is intended to put limits on retaliation, and that is a very sound principle of humane law.
Next week I will say more about the lex talionis, but for today, I only want to suggest that if anyone knocks out the tooth of anyone else, he does it in anger; he did just take a whack at somebody with no reason at all. Only insane people would do that, and the law makes exceptions when insane people commit such irrational acts.
Anger can cause people to take actions they deeply regret immediately afterward or later, when they have time to reflect upon their uncontrolled behavior. Violence against another person often prompts unanticipated regret and shame. Having taken the violent action in the first place, however, we may be unable to repair the damage we have inflicted on the other person. That is why anger is like a malignancy. It may spread in ways we did not foresee and cannot prevent.
At the present time we are seeing an appalling case of anger turned violent, and it is affecting the entire world. After the Soviet Union imploded in 1991, Vladimir Putin declared it the greatest disaster of the twentieth century. World Wars I and II were far worse disasters, as was the Holocaust, a colossal example of massive genocide made possible only because World War II kept the world from stopping it in in its early stages.
President Putin concluded, with very slim historical support, that Ukraine, which for a time was part of the Russian Empire and then a part of the Soviet Union, was always part of Russia. Clearly that is not true. He invaded Ukraine in February, and war has been devastating that beleaguered nation ever since. It all happened because of Putin’s irrational and unchecked nationalistic anger. Ukraine is paying a terrible price for that anger, but many western nations, and even the entire world, has been drawn into the conflict as well.
The anger of one person can have enormous consequences for millions of other people. We saw that in the early 1940s with Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo, and in the late 1940s with Mao and Chiang Kai-shek. Still later it was observed in Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. It is bad enough when individuals take out their anger on other individuals, but when autocrats direct their anger against millions of innocent people, the cancer of anger can become lethal to millions.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is telling us that anger, which is a natural response to perceived injustice, must nevertheless be controlled. For almost all of us, that is a very hard thing to accomplish. But if we are to establish God’s peaceable kingdom on earth, it must be done.
In late 1917, when Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg, these nine words were the first words he uttered: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” That turned out to be a murderous and horrendous enterprise, driven by anger and the desire for retribution. Let us, now, proceed to establish God’s peaceable kingdom.