“What is the relationship between forgiveness and anger? Can I forgive someone while still remaining angry at them?”
a sermon by Robert J. Faser
20th February 2011
Matthew 5: 38 - 48

A definite FAQ (frequently-asked question) put to many ministers and priests is this: “What is the relationship between forgiveness and anger? Can I forgive someone while still remaining angry at them?”

Briefly,
• Forgiveness is an ethical choice. A person chooses to forgive someone else.
• Anger is an emotion. No one can choose to be angry or not.
It is very possible to forgive someone while still remaining angry, either at the person or at the person’s actions.

For example, in the lesson we’ve heard from Matthew’s gospel today, from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught his disciples – and the assembled crowds - to reject the temptation to retaliate against others when they do bad things to you; or, in the (somewhat ungrammatical) words of the old Blues classic, when someone else has “done you wrong”. Jesus quoted the old saying of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and he rejected the mentality behind that saying.

The way that whole thing of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ developed is interesting anyway. Back in the caveman days, if someone “did you wrong”, you got back at him to whatever extent you could get away with. So, if Joe Neanderthal and Charlie Cro Magnon had a fight over, say, the ownership of a sheep, and one man’s managed to poke the other man’s tooth out, well, the victim could get his friends and relatives together and grab the offender and sell him into slavery, if they could get away with it.

So, this law about “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was developed among the Jews in the time of Moses to limit punishment to the equivalent injury at the most. If one man poked another man’s tooth out in a fight, the very most that could happen to the first man was to have his tooth poked out.

And then, in the process, a tradition developed among the Jews that a victim could request a lesser punishment for the person who wronged him. A person who did not insist upon “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was considered a tzaddik, a righteous person, a good individual. Someone who insisted on “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” was not considered a very good person.

And that’s where the situation was at the time of Jesus. By that time, among the Jews, it seemed to be only a handful of ultra-conservatives who insisted on “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. When Jesus rejected the whole mentality of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” he was making a very mainstream Jewish comment.

This is something to remember. Much of the great, radical ethical teachings of Jesus were very much mainstream Jewish teachings when he travelled around Galilee teaching. Once these teachings crossed the cultural divide between Jews and Gentiles, then they became radical indeed. All this forgiveness stuff – love your enemies and all that – this was very radical once it reached the Gentile world.
• You didn’t tell ancient Greeks to forgive people.
• You didn’t tell ancient Romans to love their enemies.
The mainstream Jewish ethics that Jesus taught became very radical once they reached the Gentile world because, in that context, they were very radical.

But let me repeat, when Jesus rejected the whole mentality of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” he was making a very mainstream Jewish comment.

There are many people in the world today who still argue in favour of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” as a standard for punishment, and not only people who list “no religion” on the census but even some Christians. There possibly may even be some people sitting here today who believe in such an approach. If this applies to you, just remember this one thing and make no mistake about it: “If you happen to believe in ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’, … Jesus disagrees with you.”

Back to the lesson. Jesus spoke in terms of forgiveness as a choice. He told the disciples and the crowds to choose to turn the other cheek. He told them to choose to walk the second mile. Forgiveness is an ethical choice. We choose to forgive. It is not, essentially, a matter of our emotional response to a situation.

We choose to forgive when we make the decision that we are still committed to the well-being of those who have “done us wrong”. And this can happen both among individuals and on a larger scale. And I’m going to give some examples in terms of the life of nations.

For example, at the end of the US Civil War, Abraham Lincoln did not want to punish the Southern states for slavery and for the war. Lincoln wanted to rebuild the South as a prosperous, democratic, and contemporary society. After Lincoln was murdered, leadership passed to people who wanted to punish the South. And that’s what they did. This led to a legacy of hatred between North and South, and between Black and White, in the United States that is still not fully healed after almost a hundred and fifty years. If Lincoln’s plan was allowed to go ahead, many things in American history may have been different.

To give another example, after the First World War, most of the Allied leaders gathered for the Versailles conference wanted to punish Germany, and the countries that fought on Germany’s side. They particularly wanted to humiliate Germany. And that’s what they did. Within less than fifteen years, Germany was led by a man named Hitler.

At the end of the Second World War, the Allied leaders took a far different approach to the Axis powers. Even though the Axis powers did us all wrong, don’t humiliate them, but rebuild them as prosperous, democratic, and contemporary societies. And that’s what they did. By doing so, by taking toward Germany, Japan, and Italy the approach Lincoln wanted to take toward the South rather than the approach Lloyd George and company took at Versailles, the Allied leaders served future generations well.

It was an ethical choice. Almost everyone in the world was still angry at the political and military leaders of the Axis powers. The leaders of the Allied nations could have made an emotional decision on the basis of their anger toward the powers responsible for Auschwitz or Changi, responsible for Dachau or the Burma Railway, responsible for the bombing of Coventry, Pearl Harbor and Guernica. And the legitimate anger remains for many people who lived through those years, particularly for those who fought in these conflicts, for former POWs, for Holocaust survivors.

But, even given the legitimacy of that anger, the world can thank those leaders who chose not to act on the emotions of their anger, but made the ethical choice to forgive, the ethical choice to be committed to the well-being of those who “done us wrong”.

Now, anger is a normal human emotion. When we read the passages about the cleansing of the temple in the gospels, we know that even Jesus got angry. He was annoyed. And he acted on his anger. He threw the money-changers out of the temple. In John’s account of the story, Jesus even used a whip to do it. Now, that’s what I call angry.

We all get angry. Jesus got angry. Anger is a legitimate human emotion; and, particularly if the anger is caused by your reaction to injustice or cruelty, anger can sometimes be a good thing, as long as it leads to positive action, rather than just taking its toll on your blood pressure.

Anger is an emotion. You or I cannot choose to be angry at someone or not. Anger just happens.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, is an ethical choice. We forgive someone who has “done us wrong” when we make the ethical choice to be committed to that person’s well-being, whether or not we are still angry at that person in our emotions.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

(Copyright: Robert J. Faser, 2011)