What Made Jesus Mad?

A lot of people think that anger is sin. And, of course, they get pretty angry at people that do it. Okay, just kidding, but anger often feels like it's a no-no. We know that's not the case, though, right? How do we know? Well Paul wrote, "Be angry and do not sin" (Eph 4:26). So what do we know there? On one hand, anger is not, by definition, sin like, say sexual immorality or such. On the other hand, it is dangerous or Paul wouldn't have included the warning. The other way we know, of course, is that Jesus got angry, and Jesus never sinned (2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15). So Jesus serves as a perfect illustration of anger without sin.

What made Jesus angry? On what basis did Jesus, known as the "Lamb of God," get mad? The first, most obvious one was the scenes in the Temple. Twice (John 2:13-17; Matt 21:12-17) Jesus encountered moneychangers in the Temple and flipped out ... literally. He flipped their tables. He made a whip. He chased them out. What made Him so mad? In the first instance He said, "Do not make my Father's house a house of trade" (John 2:16). What did His disciples get out of that? "His disciples remembered that it was written, 'Zeal for Your house will consume Me'." (John 2:17) In the second instance He said, "It is written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer,' but you make it a den of robbers" (Matt 21:13). What made Him mad? It wasn't personal affront; it was disdain for God. It was profaning the holy. What else made Jesus angry? Well, the Pharisees, of course. He reserved the harshest terms for them (Matt 23:13-29). He pronounced, in the vernacular, curses on them when He declared (repeatedly) "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees!" And what was His specific complaint? "Hypocrites!" But there were other hypocrites in Jesus's day and He didn't take them on, so what was it about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees? They were "blind guides" (Matt 23:16, 24). They made proselytes only to make them "twice as much a son of hell as yourselves" (Matt 23:15). In their hypocrisy they misdirected and "shut off the kingdom of heaven from people" (Matt 23:13). There it is again. It wasn't merely that they were self-righteous or even hypocrites. It's that, in their hypocrisy, they misled and blinded those who followed them. Their followers thought they were leading them to God, but they were "fools and blind men" (Matt 23:17) themselves. Yes, their hypocrisy made Jesus angry, but not merely hypocrisy. It was keeping people from God ... just like the moneychangers in the Temple. When He was angry at them for seeking to accuse Him when He was healing the man with the withered hand, it was because they preferred their rules to doing what God commanded (Mark 3:1-6). He was indignant when His disciples kept children away from His healing (Mark 10:13-16). And it starts to all look the same.

Anger is not, by definition, sin. It is dangerous. It easily tends toward sin. Why? Because we get angry for the wrong reasons. Jesus was angry ... always it seems ... when God was slighted. And that makes sense, doesn't it? Anger is almost exclusively due to the perception of rights being violated. Now, if everything belongs to God and God is everything and God is Sovereign, then the only rights of any consequence are His. It is His glory that demands our attention. It was transgressing the Father that irritated the Son. So, yes, there is room for anger in our everyday lives, but since "the anger of man does not achieve the righteousness of God" (James 1:20), we ought to be "slow to anger" (James 1:19) and only about the important things ... you know, like God and His glory.