Be Ye Angry, and Sin Not

A boy shows up near the battlefield, bringing food for his brothers. There he sees a strutting giant of a man, taunting the armies of Israel, who stand ashamed, afraid to take him on. The boy gets his dander up. “What’s the reward for the man who kills this Philistine and removes the shame from Israel? Who does this foreskinned Philistine think he is, defying the armies of the living God?”

Seized by the Spirit, a young man is granted a vision of the Kingdom of God. He leaves home, indeed turns away from life as any sane or righteous person would know it. He lives in the wilds, where he keeps body and soul together by grubbing up insects and digging out the honey from beehives. People come to hear his straight preaching: “Repent! The Kingdom of God is near.” But when the pillars of the religious community show up, he suddenly dispenses with the gentle language he had used for the common people and the tax collectors and the Roman soldiers. “Snakes! Who has gone and told you to flee the wrath to come?”

The tireless apostle, stoned and whipped and shipwrecked, arrested and beaten yet never cowed into submission, finds himself checked not only by the pagans but by false followers of Christ. These undermine his work by preaching that unless a man is circumcised, he shall not be saved. The apostle has already argued, at exasperating length, that to preach the circumcision is to preach salvation by a human work. Finally he cries out, “As for all those who preach circumcision, forget about their skins -- I wish they’d have their testicles cut off to boot!”

I’ve been taken to task recently for a notebook entry in Touchstone, wherein I discussed the irascible faculty of the soul, that ally of reason whereby we strive for what is noble and beautiful, and, when it is called for, rise up in anger against the unjust and the ugly. “Where is such a faculty to be found in the Bible?”

In such places as above, I guess; and in the account of David’s full-hearted dancing before the Ark, and in the tale of the three Hebrew youths who defied the King of Babylon, and in a hundred other expressions of zeal and high spirits -- for anger is only one of the many manifestations of this faculty.

But does the Bible have to spell out what is common sense? When Jesus knotted that rope of cords, we must deny his real humanity to suppose that he did so without any surge of adrenalin. And if his whipping the moneychangers was an act of genuine love (and we would deny his divinity to suppose it was not), then it is hard to see how that love could have been unaccompanied by the severe pleasure of seeing justice done.

Sometimes Christians are cowed into speaking as if Jesus were, in a minimal sense, justified in what he did; as if circumstances excused the anger. Thomas Aquinas saw it differently: the anger (and I am not talking about the deadly sin of wrath) is, properly understood, a gift of God to man, indispensable to many a welt-raising act of charity.

I’ve also been challenged to show why this “anger” is proper to the exercise of true manhood. Common sense, again: whose bodies are made for soldiership? Who enjoys the fight? Or are Christian soldiers supposed to fight with clothespins over their noses, condescending to mixing it up a little, but determined not to like it?

Yes, women possess the same irascible faculty, and when the security of their persons or their children is threatened, they are as fearless as lions. But in general, the zeal of the good woman will show itself in her wanting to keep herself and her children as far away as possible from the wrong. Nor is there anything sinful or shameful about that; it is her wholly admirable modesty in action.

Men are called -- sometimes -- to soldiership at the front of the battle. And for that, we need to train boys to meet the challenge. But no society has ever succeeded in fashioning such gallant knights without sometimes -- sometimes! -- separating the boys from their mothers and sisters. Must we really spell out the psychology of boys to show why? Are we afraid we might fail? We fail now. We are afraid we might succeed.