It’s
almost never a good idea to try to lead people away from their rage. This is a hard lesson, because as children we
learned that unholy bitterness can be destructive. So, it’s natural for us to get stressed out
in the presence of another’s righteous anger and suffering.
We tend to want to cheer such people up.
We
might even try to explain away their pain.
I’ve heard people tell grieving parents to find God’s “silver lining” in
the loss of their children. This is not
just terrible poetry; it’s bad theology.
Nobody truly standing in the darkness that descends over the cross will
have the audacity to tell Jesus, “cheer up and live in the sunshine.” The only songs the suffering Jesus can manage
are laments--“My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Christian faith teaches us to explore our
disappointments. The path to healing and
releasing our bitterness is through anger—not around it. In light of the clergy scandals in the last couple
weeks, it’s perhaps timely for me to acknowledge that the victims of sexual
violence, whom I know, are relieved that I think they have every right to be
enraged. They’re surprised, I think,
because religious types have too often silenced and buried their protest, cut
lament out of the Bible, and made worship a perpetually cheery concert led by
“praise teams.”
Yet,
if the church maintains a place for God’s anger, then it will be more acceptable
for us to explore our own. We can
discover that our anger is righteous because a standard of right has really
been violated. Following our anger to
its source, we will find that this Standard of Right must be at least as angry
as we are. This is why it’s actually
“right” to be mad at injustice. For, if
the world were purposeless, then our expectations would be meaningless,
too. In such a world we could not expect
anything but meaninglessness. So, if
we’re allowed to really mull over our disappointment, we’ll realize it takes a God
to validate our anger.
