By: Basil McLaren, FBB Contributor

I was recently reminded of a short Christian movie from the 1960s entitled The Gospel Blimp. (You can view it here.) And I’m old enough to remember when it was famous in church circles. 

I was five or six years old and I remember hearing my dad all of a sudden snap. Something, probably something rather small, had set him off and he was furious. This memory is not an isolated one. For many who have had similar experiences, it may bring an uneasy feeling to the stomach. It is not difficult to think of this childhood experience and to be filled with a thick anger, where judgment quickly rises in my heart. 

However, perspective is amazing! Now I am a father and getting angry at my three hooligans comes too quickly. Invariably, it is most often the little things they do, or don’t do, that set me off as well. I must say, my intentions are often good. I do not want my boys being rude to adults, disobeying, fighting, not looking when they cross the road, and the list continues ad infinitum. 

Despite anger having a bad rap in my own mind and surely in the public consciousness as well, my wife, and every psychologist out there, reminds me that the emotion of anger is perfectly normal - and should be normalized. It is what we do with our anger that counts. I remember famed Pastor Emeritus, Timothy Keller, tell a story on how anger is about protecting that which we love. He gave the modern parable of being punctually delayed. Instead of recognizing it and taking responsibility for our time mismanagement, we rather take it out on the waitress we perceive to be holding us up by not delivering our food in a speedy manner. In reality, the anger is really a love, or a protection, of our own reputation for being on time. So, in anger we blame the waitress for making us late for the next meeting rather than accepting our own responsibility.

I wonder if we took this sensible lens of anger and applied it to Jesus - what would we find? An angry Jesus, or a loving Jesus? Recently, I remarked to someone that hell doesn’t really come up in the Old Testament, rather Jesus brings it up. They were shocked for this did not fit their paradigm of angry Old Testament God, and loving New Testament Jesus. 

This popular paradigm, among some, may have a new form but it is certainly not new. Perhaps the term Marcionism is no longer well understood - and we should change that now. Marcion of Sinope (85-160 CE) was a second century Christian heretic. Why? Because his interpretive lens for Scripture was black and white, or absolutist. According to Scholar John Barclay, Marcion distanced the God who is purely and entirely good from any hint of judgment. He goes on to explain that Marcion had radicalized and purified the concept of God’s goodness to such an extreme that anything not befitting was chopped off. (1) The Church Father, Tertullian, mocked this simplistic understanding when he wrote, “A better god has been discovered, who never takes offense, is never angry, never inflicts punishment, who has prepared no fire in hell, no gnashing of teeth

in the outer darkness! He is purely and simply good.” (2) This sort of lens fails to perceive the complexity of the biblical narrative, which often accentuates the tensions in God’s character. The tensions are there not only to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between love and judgement (for what is love without justice?), but to see a favouring of one over the other (mercy triumphs over judgment).

 If it’s true then, that anger is a healthy human experience that we should normalize – though it matters what we do with it – and, if anger is really an expression of protecting the things we love, then perhaps it isn’t surprising at all that Jesus, being fully human, expressed anger too.

Let’s look at one illustrative example, one of Jesus’ most intense moments. Jesus strode in fury through the Temple Courts throwing tables and lashing his whip. This story is told in John 2:13-25. First, some background to help us understand what Jesus was on about.

The Jews celebrated their peak spiritual ritual, the Passover, but once a year. As a scattered people many of them made the long pilgrimage from far-away lands, as far as Persia, to come to the special place, Mount Zion in Jerusalem, where the Temple of the Lord stood proud after 46 years of Herod the Great’s extensive renovations.

For traveling pilgrims, bringing unblemished animals to sacrifice was impractical. It was much easier to purchase the sacrificial animal at the Temple. Here’s the rub, to purchase a sacrifice with the image of Caesar in the Temple courts was idolatry.  Therefore, the money needed to be exchanged for Temple shekels and the exchange was anything but fair. This is why Peterson’s Message calls the exchangers ‘loansharks’. The money exchangers not only were cunning business men, but spiritually abusing the people and subverting the purpose of worship at Temple. In sum, exchangers were loansharks, merchants selling animals were padding the prices and taking advantage of the pilgrims, and the religious leaders were charging a Temple tax. And finally, whereas the land was supposed to be evenly divided between the Jewish tribes, one scholar estimated the Chief Priests and their families owned 70% of the available private land in Judea. (The Levites - the priestly clan - was the only tribe that was not supposed to own land). The people were being abused in the name of religion by their own religious leaders.

Perhaps surprising to some people, when the Old Testament is read, one thing becomes quite clear: God is on the side of the poor, the oppressed, the abused, and especially the spiritually abused (Isaiah 10:1-3; Pro 17:5; Amos 5:11). This is why Jesus is hard on the Pharisees (Mt 23). Claiming to speak for God; they do the opposite of God’s will.

If there was one thing, then, to awaken the ire of Jesus, this was it. To protect that which he loves - His Father’s house, and His Father’s children who in their efforts to commune with God at Temple, were being blocked by proud people. 

Looking at this story afresh allows us the opportunity to ask some pertinent questions: What is the purpose of anger? Is it always bad? When I am angry am I protecting my ego? Here Jesus’ example is instructive. Rather than using anger for ourselves, we should align our emotions with God’s heart and pray that the kind of things that make Him angry would be the things that make us angry. In the end, it is not anger qua anger that is the problem. Rather, what makes us angry demonstrate where our heart are. 

The dichotomy is too simplistic and in fact false. It is not loving Jesus or angry Jesus, it is both. His anger is an expression of his love for the abused. May we be more like Jesus.

1. John M.G. Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015), 67. 

I was alerted to this quote and the one below by Matthew Lynch’s article Perfection and Speech About God’s Character in the Old Testament in Crux Quarterly Journal, Fall 2021 Vol 57, No 3.

2.  Tertullian, “Against Heresies” 1.27, in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Peter Holmes, ANF 3 (1885; repr. Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2000).