“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you this: Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.In this way you show that you are children of your Father in heaven. He makes his sun rise on people whether they are good or evil. He lets rain fall on them whether they are just or unjust".Jesus' command to love our enemies could be considered idealist and simply impractical. And yet by saying so, Jesus has become a practical realist. And how do we accomplish such a difficult command? We must first analyze ourselves: why we hate, what causes our anger, then we would better love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.
- Matthew 5:43-45
Christ Cleansing the Temple, by Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1875
Let us now pay our attention to anger. Anger is commonly perceived as a vice, that we think an angry man does not love and a man who holds his anger does not hate. Yet, this statement is only somewhat true, in a way that anger does lead to the disintegration of wisdom and community. In Proverbs 14:29, it is said that "Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly". In anger, we become delusional of what is right and wrong as it distorts our perception. Our sense of objectivity blurs and we despise logic as our actions are driven emotionally. After the conflict cools down, we then recall the folly things we have said in anger. Not only does anger disintegrate our wisdom at present, but it also causes future recurrences of folly decisions (addictive stigma). Proverbs 19:19 states that, "a man of great wrath will pay the penalty, for if you deliver him, you will only have to do it again". This is because, among all negative emotions, anger is an emotion that is most closely related to denial. It is easy for us to admit our sadness, disappointment or worry, yet not anger. Thus, having the stigma of a grumpy man is worse than any other stigmas.
Other than wisdom disintegration, the gospel says in Proverbs 15:18 that anger leads to communal disintegration, "A hot-tempered man stirs up strife, but he who is slow to anger quiets contention". But another disintegration that anger causes is the disintegration of anything that threats what we love. This is why the absence of anger in a community only shows the danger of that very community, for the lack of necessary anger means the lack of love towards the community we ought to protect.
Furthermore, When the Old Testament uses the word patient, the true word in Ancient Hebrew is arek aph, which translates to slow to anger, as opposed to patient. Although arek means slow and aph means anger, the term arek aph is not two terms merged into one like the word pineapple (pine and apple). Hence, it is often translated merely as patient. An example would be in Proverbs 16:32 that says, "Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city". Thus, the Bible never idealizes patience, the absence of anger or an explosive anger, but slowness to anger. Here is an intricacy that we are often indifferent towards, that it is a sin according to the Bible to express anger explosively, yet it is, too, a sin according to the Bible to never be angry. According to the book of Proverbs, a wise man is slow to anger, which is resounded in Ephesians 4:26, "Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger". This is wisdom: go ahead and be angry, but do not sin. Thus, anger is not equal to sin and prolonged anger brought upon sin. In other words, the problem is the duration of being angry, and not the anger itself. John Chrysostom says that "He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. But he who is not angry where he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong".
So why does the Bible uses arek aph as opposed to patience? Because arek aph is God's own attribute, as written in Exodus 34:6, "The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness". Therefore, the glory of our God is not in His absence of anger, but in His slowness in anger. Arek aph is the good anger because we often create a false dichotomy between love and anger as if a loving man is never angry and an angry man does not love, a statement we might not agree conceptually, we live daily. Betty Pippert says, "But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.' The fact is that anger and love are inseparably bound in human experience. And if I, a flawed and sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone’s condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them? If God were not angry over how we are destroying ourselves, then He wouldn’t be good and He certainly wouldn’t be loving. Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference". We now understand that true love always contains anger. Therefore, the Bible views anger in its purest form to be an expression of love that acts to protect the beloved against its threat. This is the last disintegration that anger brings: the disintegration of the threat that threatens the beloved. Our problem today is that we tend to disintegrate what needs not to be disintegrated. Anger, before the fall of man, in its purest form, is an expression of love. In this sense, anger is very useful to understand oneself. Think of the circumstance which arises your anger the most and asks the question, "what threat are you trying to protect your beloved against? And what is your most beloved?" This is true not only in the personal sense but also social. Why do we find the society's action towards injustice pleasing? We often encounter injustice and attempt to flee, but the true danger is encountering injustice without arising and protesting in anger. Thus, we could simply analyze the political perception of a community simply through understanding what angers them, and in understanding what angers them, we could finally understand what their most valuable thing is. And in this case, the absence of anger in a community is very threatening for it is a sign of an exceeding comfort.
We could understand our God the same way. Jesus' anger towards the Pharisees and the merchants who conduct transactions in the temple could only mean that He was simply attempting to protect His beloved against a threat. The object of His anger is not the Pharisees and the merchants, but the threats that they cause towards His beloved, His people, the church. And this threat is always more important than to whom the anger is directed to. In the old testament, we see that God often punishes an individual instantly, as if He is not a God who is slow to anger (See 1 Samuel 2:12-36, 2 Samuel 6:1-6, Jeremiah 28:12-17). We could say that these are very rare recurrences. If there is a mistake that God has done (if any!) it would be that He is too slow to anger. For instance, He prolonged His damnation towards Canaan and in Psalm, we often read words like 'How long, O, LORD until you condemn my enemies?' and not 'Why do You haste to condemn my enemies, O, LORD?" The first thing we can understand from this is that God rarely condemns so instantly like the verses in bold above. The second thing is that if these events are so rare, we could discover a similarity among these events, that is only one: these are sins that offend the Holy Temple (the church). It is also written that "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16). So those sins were punished so instantly because those sins greatly threat the church. And because we could analyze God's anger the same way we analyze ours, we may then ask "what did He attempt to protect that He punished so instantly?" The answer is the temple, the LORD's church. Understanding this, we could easily guess what is at the top of God's ordo amoris. That is you and I, His temple, His beloved. This also answers why He demands greatly from us, that is because of His greater love towards us.
Today, we understand anger in two cultures: the western and the eastern. In the west, anger should never be contained and in the east, anger is always badness and angry people are bad. The Bible is neither both cultures. The Bible always views both the fallenness and the goodness of anger. CS Lewis, in his illustration, states that “there is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages". The question people nowadays ask is "how do I unite or connect nature with my will"? The answer is technic, either technology or magic. The Biblical wisdom according to Bruce Waltke is 'inter-relation / in tune with reality'. We then must ask the question, "what is reality"? A reality in the Bible could only mean two things: the fallenness and goodness of creation. Those who claim that good people are never angry and vice versa are people who are reductive to the reality of fallen creation. While those who claim that anger must be expressed by venting and physical expressions and avoid anger repression are reductive to the reality of good creation (without the fallen creation perspective). The Bible does not view anger in either perspective, but both, hence the term 'in tune with reality'. This means that wisdom is not merely a skill that you must obtain to face the intersections of life. Understanding this, we can conclude that the problem of anger is anger is not the anger itself, but the problem of anger is how we express it.
This idea is better explained by an Augustinian order, Ordo Amoris (The Order of Love). This order explains not who we love or hate, but how much do we love or hate. Ordo Amoris, too, explains why we often do something not because we wish to do so, but because we would lose something more valuable or lovable to us otherwise. A plain example would be you giving up your wallet to a robber with a weapon. You do not give your wallet to the robber for the sake of that action, but because we would rather lose our wallet than lose our life. In this case, our life is above our wallet in the order or priority of love. When someone says, "Go ahead and shoot me for I would rather die than lose my wallet", now we know for certain that his wallet is on top of his order of love. Our problem is not that we love the wrong things, but our problem is that we incorrectly love. We misplace things in our order of love. This is why Augustinus said that the root of all sin is idolatry because idolatry means to love something in place of God, which is supposedly at the utmost top of the order of love. This explains why when we sin, it does not mean that we do not love God. The problem is not whether or not you love God, but the problem is how much you love Him, what do you love most in life, and where is God in your order of love? Marriage disintegration often occurs due to the displacement in the order of love. From the order of love, we could then learn that the things that cause disintegration do not necessarily have to be bad. In the Augustinian system of ordo amoris, the true causes of disintegration in human life are not bad and evil things, but how we use the good things. In fact, the better in goodness something is, higher the possibility for it to be our idol in life. This is why repentance in Christianity is different from any other religious repentance. The religious repent from their wrong-doings, while Christians repent from the good things in their lives. We can use this system to understand anger, because anger is not mere evil. If it does, we could quickly conclude that we shall not be angry. But anger could be a positive thing, which makes this system suitable in understanding anger. Behind anger, there is something that we love. But what causes our anger to be perverted? Because we are angry towards the wrong matters. Again, the problem is not that we express the wrong anger, but the problem is a disordered anger (anger that is not in order). We could view this disorder in three perspectives: the cause, proportion, and role. We are not as angry when the Harvey hurricane took many lives a while ago than when our best friend disappoint us. This is the first kind of disorder. The second is the proportion disorder, which could also be explained by the above example. The inconsequential things anger us more than the things that matter. The third is the role disorder. Our role is not to disintegrate another's folly, but to disintegrate another.
In the practical how, we could use ordo amoris to overcome our anger. Proverbs 24:29, "Do not say, “I will do to him as he has done to me; I will pay the man back for what he has done”. The question is "who is he directing these words to?" To himself. The Proverbs teaches us that what angers us is not merely the situation that happens to us, but what we say or perceive to be happening to us. What angers us is not the fact that somebody else is holding on to something away from us, what angers us is the fact that we continually claim that we want and need that something desperately. This causes disordered love. Thus, when we are angry, we need to analyze what we are protecting, which could be misplaced in the order of love. Then this anger would turn into shame in your realization that this something that you protect is usually your pride, ego and self-worth. The next step is transformation. For it is written in Proverbs 25:21-22, "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you". The new testament version of this verse is Matthew 5:43-45 (see top of this post). The life of parents and their child is a great example: The biggest change in our lives does not occur before we raise a child. Because although we are mediocre parents, we have to attempt to sacrifice and sacrifice and sacrifice. We sacrifice our sleeping hours, we sacrifice our feeling of disgust. Our lives that used to revolve around ourselves now revolve around the child. Then one day, the child grew to become a teenager and inevitably, there will come a day when the child rebels. We only ask them not to do something that any other sensible people would agree to, that is immensely terrible, and that may harm the child. And this makes the child angry and say things like, "you do not love me, you hate me. And I hate you! You've destroyed my life! You've never done anything for me!" Although we are aware that we are not perfect parents, we do realize that these are unfair accusations. A parent will sacrifice for his child whether he likes it or not. And to hear this from a person whom we have sacrificed so much to, and to be stared at and told that we have never done anything for him,......." This is the most disordered and disproportionated circumstance and it is the most hurtful feeling. Therefore, this too is the most valuable test for the parents, for there are three choices that the parents could take. The first, they could back out, which will only result in the child's havoc in his own folly and they will lose him both figuratively or literally. The second choice is for them to return the child's anger. And because of their years of word fights experience, they would most probably win the fight. But you will, too, lose the child. This also means that both the child and the parents are fools. The third option—that is the most challenging option and the only option to save the child—is to approach and take in the child's anger without returning their anger. We only approach to dissect as far as the scalpel cuts. For a parent who fails to take in a child's anger or without returning his anger, does not deserve to be a parent. An experience such as this is a valuable opportunity for the parents to better understand the heart of God. Because in God's eyes, we are the angry children, and God is our Parent. What is the evidence of our anger towards our God? When He became man, when he was in a form which we could hurt him, we killed him. Thus, on the cross, He approached us and took in our anger sincerely. He is not a God that back out from us neither is He a God that returns our anger. And not only did He take in our undeserving anger, He also took in the anger that we deserved by dying for our sins, by saying on the cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Now we understand why Proverbs suggests that wisdom is not our knowledge of something, but our relationship with someone. Being wise does not mean you become wise, but it means you are in relation with the Wisdom Himself. Now that you know that God has done these for you, when somebody hurt you, you would have the strength to do just what He did. You would say, "I've been hurt, that is true. But I too have hurt God, and His response was to approach me and take in my anger. Do you now see that if you have experienced the real love of God in your life, you would realize that there is absolutely nothing that you love that exceeds this. What happens next is that everything becomes alright and in order. You will still be angry, but you will not be angry the way you wanted to be previously. Your disordered anger will eventually become ordered. If your concern now is that this is impractical, that is the very reason why this impractical thing has the power to change the world. If your concern now is that this is a command too impossible to be done, that is the very reason why this impossible command has the power to change the world.
Martin Luther King Jr. in his speech states:
" I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up against our most bitter opponents and say:
"We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering.We will meet your physical force with soul force.Do to us what you will and we will still love you.
We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, so throw us in jail and we will still love you.
Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you.
Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you.
Send your propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, but we will still love you.
But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory".
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Summary has not been revised by the speaker
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More by Martin Luther King Jr. :
"Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, "Love your enemies." It is this:
that love has within it a redemptive power. And there is a power there that eventually transforms individuals. That’s why Jesus says, "Love your enemies." Because if you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. You just keep loving people and keep loving them, even though they’re mistreating you. Here’s the person who is a neighbor, and this person is doing something wrong to you and all of that. Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long. Oh, they react in many ways in the beginning. They react with bitterness because they’re mad because you love them like that. They react with guilt feelings, and sometimes they’ll hate you a little more at that transition period, but just keep loving them. And by the power of your love they will break down under the load. That’s love, you see. It is redemptive, and this is why Jesus says love. There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies."
-Martin Luther King Jr.
In Christ,
Alice
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