ANGER AS HOLY LONGING: FROM RESTLESS HEARTS TO COURAGEOUS ACTION
Anyone who has experienced loss—whether through the painful absence of a deceased loved one or the erosion of personal agency in the face of corrupt institutions upheld by seemingly untouchable figures—will likely describe the unsettling reality that the world continues to spin even as their own feels like it is collapsing underfoot. It is telling that obituaries often speak of the departed being ‘survived by’ their loved ones, who may, in truth, be wondering if and how they will survive such a devastating loss.
Among the complex set of emotions that arise when the stark contrast between how things are and how they ought to be becomes intensely personal, anger often takes hold—whether directed outwardly at people and events or turned inward. Anger can be constructive, energizing people as they navigate and rebuild a new world from shattered fragments. It can empower trauma survivors to reclaim boundaries and reassign responsibility. Conversely, when suppressed or mismanaged (as it is often wont so to do), anger can manifest itself in destructive ways, such as internalized guilt and self-deprecating behaviors. At its most extreme, anger can be siphoned into authoritarianism or the impulse to weaponize Christian identity to justify socioeconomic control and suppression, and thus manifest as Christian fascism; frustration might be redirected into the enforcement of rigid moral and social order, where systemic inequality can be masked with apparent divine authority. The old maxim of post-traumatic remaking holds true: that which is not transformed is transferred. Anger must be channelled productively.
Christian tradition, perhaps unexpectedly at first blush, provides rich resources for this transformation. One obvious example is John the Baptizer, whose central place in Advent homilies probably remains fresh in our minds. John follows in the footsteps of the prophetic tradition, where anger often serves as the energy of righteousness. Vision and frustration are often synonyms.
Yet Saint Luke’s portrayal of John is of a much gentler revivalist than we might expect. He does not demand extreme acts of self-denial or elaborate penitential rituals but rather calls for smaller, everyday virtues that benefit others—generosity from those with abundance, honesty in the accounting of taxes, integrity in the conduct of the armed forces. This, perhaps surprisingly, was received as good news. Yes, those confronted would remember being called a ‘brood of vipers,’ but they were just as likely to be moved by John’s humility. Not every celebrity preacher openly declares himself unworthy to untie the sandals of his own relative! In first-century Judea, only Gentile slaves performed such a task, which explains the disciples’ shock when Jesus later did the same for them. At the heart of John’s proclamation is longing and preparation for God’s coming salvation in Christ.
Further insight comes from the Confessions of the fourth-century bishop from North Africa, Saint Augustine of Hippo, one of the most famous works in the Christian library. Its most famous passage, often translated as ‘Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee,’ speaks to a deep sense of longing. A more contemporary translation puts it more directly: ‘Our hearts find no peace until they rest in God.’
“The whole life of the good Christian,” Saint Augustine writes elsewhere, “is a holy longing.” He continues: “Let us long because we are to be filled.” John Burnaby describes this as the dominant theme in Augustine’s understanding of Christian love. In Latin, it is desiderium—"longing, sense of loss, want.” Burnaby describes it as “the unsatisfied longing of the homesick heart.”
Another frequently cited quotation, although its attribution to Saint Augustine is rather dubious at best, runs as follows: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.” Whatever its source, the insight is prescient: anger at injustice is a perfectly natural consequence of being created in the image of a Just God. The longing for God which Saint Augustine speaks of surely involves a sense of anger at the brokenness of the world. Christianity, simply put, allows paradoxically for both a radical solidarity with the victims of suffering and at the same time the hope of all things being made new.
Jesus is the human person par excellence and models productive ways of expressing this anger, particularly in the Gospel according to Saint John. Jesus is depicted as being angry on two occasions: first, when he cleanses the temple immediately after performing his first miracle at Cana, and second, at the death of his friend Lazarus. In John 2, he reacts to the moneychangers defiling the Jerusalem temple; in John 11, he expresses anger at death itself defiling the temple of Lazarus’s body. Both instances prompt transformative action. The tyranny of injustice and the ultimate tyranny of death make Jesus angry.
Immediately following the wedding at Cana, Saint John’s Jesus enters the Jerusalem temple, the center of pilgrim life and faith. There, he finds moneychangers and animal sellers exploiting the faithful and obstructing worship—particularly in the Court of the Gentiles, as we read in the Synoptics, the only space where non-Jews could pray. His actions demonstrate not only his role as God’s Christ but also his authority to bring judgment upon the temple. Unlike the Davidic kings who restored the temple before Passover, Jesus’s actions signify something greater: an eschatological turning point—God’s judgment on the institution itself.
At the news of Lazarus’s death, Jesus experiences deep inner turmoil, likely a combination of multiple emotions: grief for his friend, anger at death’s presence in the world, fearful anticipation of his own death, and frustration at the unbelief around him. These emotional responses are not mutually exclusive but rather part of the complexity of human experience, to which Jesus is no stranger.
Scottish divine Thomas Chalmers provides insight into the transformation of anger. He famously took to a Glaswegian pulpit to preach a sermon on what he called “the expulsive power of a new affection.” Although it might sound like a rather complex concept, it is surprisingly straightforward. When someone first falls in love with a person, all their time and effort become orientated towards that person. They invest a great deal of time figuring out their interests and what pleases them, sometimes even to the extent that they, however unintentionally, alienate members of their friendship group in the process—a reality that has undoubtedly animated many Best Man speeches! Chalmer’s point, simply put, is that this should describe our relationship with Jesus by analogy: we should be so concerned with what pleases him that it drives out all other impulses not of him. Our anger is to be refined in and by the fire of God’s love in Christ: What makes Jesus angry, and hence what should make us angry?
While transformed anger may break the tyrannies of our world, untransformed anger fuels dangerous ideologies, such as Christian fascism, which cares about divine justice only insofar as it can be made to serve human tyranny. Anger—even righteous anger—can be corrupted. When corrupted, it becomes a tool for oppression rather than liberation. The call to holiness is inseparable from the call to justice; ignoring or suppressing righteous anger in the face of corruption is also a betrayal of the Gospel. For the Gospel to be good news for some, it must be good news for all; and for the Gospel to be good news for all, it must be good news for the oppressed first. Anger that is transformed does not lead to destruction—it fuels change. Hope, accompanied by her daughters, anger and courage, begets transformative action. Loss compels us to act, even as God’s love is making all things new.
