Swallowing Wrath Without Letting It Spill - Matthew 5:21-26
Today I’m going to tell you a story that will make me uncomfortable to share. The only reason I feel like I can share it is because it’s been long enough since it happened, but whenever I think back on this story, I feel shame, regret, and guilt. First let me give you a little backstory.
When I was in my last year of high school, I was in a nine-month-long relationship with a girl. For anonymity I’ll call her Jane. Jane and I had what I would consider real chemistry. She was my first long-term girlfriend, and I think I’ve only ever experienced that storybook-like romance with one person. Jane was that person. She and I met in a park, of all places. I was hanging out with my sisters there, and she was walking her dog. We reconnected at Christmas time, and we started texting back and forth almost obsessively. Paragraph texting. The good stuff.
Our first date was a long walk to a gas station mini mart, because we were both broke. It didn’t matter. We were obsessed with each other, and that’s all that mattered. There were really very few low moments in our relationship. I remember it as being almost like a fairy tale. But one day, around the nine-month mark, she broke up with me. I didn’t understand why, it was so abrupt. I came to find out later she had some pressures in life that she was barely able to cope with, and our relationship just became too much for her. I spent the next few months bitterly grieving.
Fast forward to the end of the year, and I was gearing up to go to college. I had heard stories from my grandparents, of how they met each other almost immediately, at their first dance during welcome weekend in college. So now, I was going into my welcome weekend. And of course, my expectations were up. If Granddad found his wife during that first weekend, what was gonna stop me from doing the same?
Well, I was in for a bit of disappointment, as not only did I not meet my wife during welcome weekend, but I didn’t date at all during my first year of college. So, as my freshman year of college wrapped up, I came home for the summer feeling sort of dejected. A month or so after moving back home for summer, I attended my sister’s graduation. And wouldn’t you know it, my ex-girlfriend, Jane, who also happened to go to my sister’s school, was in attendance at the graduation ceremony. As I walked into the auditorium, my stomach dropped. I had forgotten she went to this school. And I could feel my chest starting to beat. I really didn’t want to see her, not because I was angry, but because I was still so emotional about the loss of this relationship.
So, I dodged her like a ninja the whole night. I watched the ceremony with one eye, and watched her with the other, with my heart leaping every time she got up to move. Eventually, the ceremony ended, and I lost track of her. I started to slip through the crowd to get back to my car, thinking I had successfully evaded a super emotionally taxing encounter with this lost love. But then, from a distance, I heard my sister yell out, “Jacob, look, it’s Jane! Come say hi to Jane!”
I was mortified. I went over and had an incredibly awkward and tense conversation with her. This was the nightmare I had been avoiding all night. Now, my sister wasn’t in the wrong at all here. She was friends with my ex, and she was just consumed with the joy of reconnecting with her. But afterward, as we walked out to the car, all the emotions that came with that moment were swelling inside me. And who was the one that had dragged me into that interaction? My sister. When we got in the car, almost as soon as the door shut, I started laying into her. I yelled at her with more intensity than I ever had before. I was angrier in that moment with my sister than I think I had ever been in my life. In fact, I’m not sure I had ever been that angry with anyone in my life before. And I spilled my wrath out on her for about five straight minutes. By the end of my bitter monologue, my eyes were red and my throat was sore. I couldn’t see how much of an overreaction I had just had to the situation. My anger almost entirely blinded me to reality.
I cooled down and eventually apologized. But the damage was done. I had made her cry in the car and had probably made her afraid. This story makes me shudder to think about, but it’s such a good picture of the impulse we are going to read about today in the Sermon on the Mount. Maybe you’ve had an overwhelmingly angry moment like this before. Maybe you’ve had a bunch of them. Maybe you just bottle it all up. But in today’s teaching Jesus is going to talk to us about anger, and the Big Idea I want to share with you today is that Christ calls us to Swallow Wrath Without Letting it Spill.
So to remind you all, we are walking through the Sermon on the Mount, which is Jesus’ longest recording chain of teachings in the Gospel of Matthew. Last week, we talked about the way that Jesus is not only following the law, but fulfilling the prophecy it gives about our need for a new heart.
Now, Jesus is going to turn His eye toward the Law, especially some of the most popularly understood commandments, and He is going to press them to their furthest conclusions, digging into the place where our corruption and sickness really live, our hearts.
He begins with perhaps the most understandable and reasonable of God’s laws: Thou shalt not murder. Take a look with me at Matthew 5:21, “You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’”
Notice, Jesus isn’t directly quoting the commandment here. He is sort of paraphrasing. This tells us that He isn’t actually looking to the wording of the Law itself, but to the way the Law was commonly understood by the people. This becomes even more clear as He digs into other topics in this chapter, like revenge or promise-making. He goes on in Matthew 5:22, “But I say to you…”
Stop there! Notice how He is using a contrasting tool, “You have heard that it was said…but I say to you.” This is a moment where, as the crowds said of Him, He is speaking as one with authority. He doesn’t say, “You have heard the Law interpreted as…but I interpret it as…” He says, “You have heard it said…but I say to you…”
He goes on, Matthew 5:22, “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire.”
A couple of notes on this verse. Firstly, we see that Jesus is making a move that will set the pattern for the rest of His teachings on the Law. He is taking what the Law says to do back to the roots. Sure, murder is wrong, but even the pagans believe that. So, Jesus wants to show that the fiery passion within, the voice in the head, the grumbling in the gut that moves a man to commit murder is equally subject to Divine Judgment. You may think, “Well, I’m not perfect, but at least I’ve never killed anyone.” But in this teaching, Jesus pulls out the stethoscope, and He diagnoses us all as murderers at heart.
Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that the second phrase of this verse is a bit of a smoothed over translation. The NIV for example, translates it as, “Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca’ is answerable to the court.”
Raca isn’t even mentioned in the ESV’s translation. Why would they completely pave over this word? Because “raca” is an Aramaic term that is notoriously difficult to translate. But many scholars will say that it means something like “empty-head.” And so, its meaning pairs well with the next phrase, “And whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the Hell of fire.”
So not only is becoming angry with a brother a breaking of the Law, but even a harsh word spoken against them, something like “idiot” or “stupid,” is enough to send us before the Divine Judge. Jesus is not satisfied with doing the bare minimum. Jesus isn’t only out to catch homicidal maniacs. Jesus is interrogating an area of our lives that just seems human. He goes on in verse 23 and 24.
Matthew 5:23-24, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.”
The context of the Temple and sacrifice is something fairly foreign to us. So, we might analogize this to someone remembering that they have a beef with their Uncle Dave just as they got to the front of the line on a busy day at the DMV. But imagine also that the DMV had the spiritual pressure of a wedding or a baptism. To leave right before offering your sacrifice would have been both incredibly inconvenient and embarrassing. But, for Jesus, broken relationships are no trivial matter.
And I think we also need to hear the priority order Jesus is laying out. Sure, you might find it important to worship and to express your devotion to God, and that’s just fine. But if that comes before actual obedience, before actual love of our neighbor, we need to beware. We might be putting the cart before the horse. As one of my favorite theologians says, “God will not be separated from our brother: He wants no honor for Himself so long as our brother is dishonored.” If we come before God with a respect and honor that we are unwilling to offer to one of His children, He will not hear us. Imagine if I shoved a kid over on the playground and then went up to the teacher to tell them how great of a teacher they were. Is the teacher going to hear my praise without also considering what I just did to the other kid on the playground? I doubt it. As Jesus later says, “Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Sacrifice and ceremony are wonderful, but if they are getting in the way of loving our neighbor, they are a smokescreen.
And lastly, notice that this isn’t about us being angry. This is actually a different relationship Jesus is homing in on. He is homing in on a dynamic in which we are the ones who have upset someone else. So not only do we have to be mindful of our own anger in relationships, but we also have to be mindful of where we have caused other people's anger. Both our brother’s anger and our own anger fall on our shoulders to address.
Finally, Jesus says in Matthew 5:25-26, “Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison. Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny.”
This is an odd passage, because it is highlighting even another relational dynamic. This isn’t just us calling someone a moron on the freeway, or us remembering that Uncle Dave hates us while we have our hands raised in church or while clutching our forms next in line at the DMV. This is us trying to work things out with someone because things have escalated to the point of going to court. And it’s funny, because Jesus seems to be making a pretty plain sense argument here. Settle things before a third party gets brought in, because you might end up paying a hefty fine otherwise. No one wants to have to hire a lawyer.
But many interpreters have wondered whether that last line, that sort of ominous line about not getting out until you have paid the last penny, might be a hint that Jesus is actually talking about the Divine Court. Many have wondered, and I myself think this is the case, if Jesus is saying that we need to settle things with the one who has something against us, because otherwise we might have to face the Divine Judge, who will hold us accountable for the wounds we have inflicted on our brother. God takes the complaints of His children seriously. As I quoted before, “God will not be separated from our brother.” He will come to the aid of a child of His who is hurting, even if you’re the one who hurt them.
Now that we’ve seen the whole passage and dug through it, I want to zero in on one word that sparked a new perspective for me in this passage. We have to go back to verse 22.
Matthew 5:22, “But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment;”
Here we have the root that Jesus is picking at. Anger. But, you might wonder, how do I choose not to get angry? Isn’t anger an emotion? Can I even choose not to be angry? And isn’t anger a feeling that is sometimes justified? Like when we hear about all the innocents who have been dying in the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, shouldn’t we feel anger? Wouldn’t it be strange if we didn’t feel anything at all? And then to further complicate things, we have this same word also used by Paul in Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry, and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the Devil.”
Now this word in the Greek is the same one used by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. And that word, along with its noun form, comes from the word which means teeming or swelling. So, think of something that’s about to burst. And in all the places I’ve looked, I’ve seen that it is usually used to describe someone who is just about to unleash fury on someone else, someone who is about to burst. So it’s used in the Greek Old Testament to talk about Esau’s violent anger at his brother, and it’s also used to talk about Potiphar when his wife tells him that Joseph tried to sleep with her. But, in the New Testament, and this is what caught my attention, the noun form is most often used to refer to the wrath of God.
Here it is translated as “angry,” but having studied this word and how it is used elsewhere in the New Testament, I want to honor the overwhelming sense it has of describing wrath, not just an emotion, but a weighty, looming, building fury that so often leads to decision and outburst. I think I would translate Jesus’ words here as, “I say to you that everyone who is wrathful with his brother will be liable to judgment.” Like I said before, the noun form of the word is most often used to speak of the wrath of God. And wrath has the sense of a form of anger that moves us all the way to the point of action. When I was yelling at my sister in the car, I wasn’t just angry, my anger was in the driver’s seat. My anger was running the show. I let my wrath spill out on her. It may sound funny to say it that way, but there’s one small reason and one really big reason I think it should be translated this way.
The small reason is that I think to confuse this word with anger would make an emotion into a sin. I’m convinced anger, as with all other emotions, isn’t avoidable. We can’t just switch it off. If you disagree with me, next time you stub your toe or your printer spits out a smeared black and white mess, don’t just keep your anger inside. Try not feeling any anger at all. Good luck with that. I think anger is almost an automatic reaction in me. And even Paul says that there has to be a way that we can experience anger, using this same word, without allowing it to lead us to sin. So the first reason is I don’t want to confuse a decision with an emotion. Outlawing an emotion would make discipleship absolutely impossible.
But secondly, and this is the much bigger reason: one of my priorities in interpreting the Bible is looking for how Jesus fulfills what He calls us to do. If we are called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, and even to live in Christ, I think it’s important to trace the commands we see and the way we interpret them back to Jesus’ own life and mission. And I think I see a beautiful parallel here between what Jesus does for us and what He is calling us to do for each other. Like I said earlier, the word here, especially in its noun form, is used consistently in the New Testament to talk about the wrath of God, and many times, to describe the very wrath of God that Jesus was saving us from.
Take for instance Romans 5:9, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God.”
As Jesus nears the cross, He begins making references to a “cup” that He has to drink, that the Father has given Him to drink. It seems pretty clear, especially in Gethsemane, that the cup that He has been given is the same cup that was given to the nations in the Book of Jeremiah, the cup of God’s wrath. On the cross, Jesus endured the judgement and wrath of God. But, you might be wondering, isn’t Jesus God in human flesh? Why did God drink God’s own wrath? Why did God pour out the wrath on Himself?
I think the best analogy I’ve been able to come up with to this question is another story from that same summer when I was back home from college. I was staying in my dad’s home, and my dad is married to a wonderful gal named Syl. One day, while I was bored, I was tossing a bouncy ball around the house. And I was throwing the bouncy ball down the hallway toward a big cabinet. And this was going fine for a while, but there was one throw that went a little haywire. I threw it, and I let go a little too soon, and instead of landing on the cabinet door, it landed about a foot right, and smashed right through an antique window pane my stepmom had sitting next to the cabinet. And it was one of those throws where time almost slowed down as I realized the massive mistake I had just made. And to make matters worse, my parents had told me not to throw stuff in the house before. So I was breaking a house rule, and then I was breaking a window.
Now, when this happened, Syl was at work, and I was so petrified to tell her when she got home. I was pacing around, imagining the talking to I was going to get later. Well, when she got home, she was absolutely mortified when I told her what I had broken. I was confused why she felt this so strongly, until it was explained to me that this window pane was the first ever gift that my dad had bought my stepmom. He bought it on their first date. Whoops.
So I went out on a walk, and I expected to have my stuff out on the lawn by the time I got back. Here I was, living at my parents’ house for free, and I had not only broken a really simple house rule, but I had carelessly destroyed a pivotal relic from Syl’s life as well. I got back about an hour later from my walk, and expected to receive the talking to of a lifetime. I expected the wrath of Syl to fall upon me like a nuclear warhead. And she would have been completely justified in letting me have it. But instead, she forgave me, and never mentioned it again.
Now, was Syl angry? I would be surprised if she wasn’t. But in her anger, she didn’t allow her wrath to spill out on me. How easy would it have been for her to even just let loose a little, “What’s wrong with you? You, idiot!” But no, nothing. She took all the anger, all the wrath, all the things she could have spilled out on me, and she swallowed them herself. That is what God has done for us in Jesus. The Crucifixion was a demonstration of the wrath of God, the desperate “No” of God to all that we had become. And He could have let us have that wrath. He could have poured out a fury and a vengeance unlike the world had ever experienced before. He had the power and the justification, just like Syl had with me, but what kept Him from doing it was His love for us. The cup of wrath that had accumulated over centuries of human disobedience and rebellion was not only never spilled on us, but was swallowed entirely by God Himself on the cross.
And so, of course, as disciples and followers of Jesus, we too are called toward a cross of our own. And the suffering of the cross is not meaningless. It is suffering out of love for our neighbor. Jesus suffered for His neighbor on the cross, even the neighbors who were His enemies!
So now, we come to what the implications are for a teaching like this. For most of us, I think this might feel at first glance like one of the easier teachings in the Sermon on the Mount to accept. We have a unique culture in which outward expressions of anger are not usually tolerated. We live in a very polite society, a society that doesn’t speak its mind, that isn’t quick to jump on people’s mistakes. In fact, we don’t even like to use the word anger to describe what we feel. We might say we feel frustrated, annoyed, irritated, upset, but there is something about the word anger that bothers us. But I think that we have just gotten clever in the ways that we let our wrath spill out on others.
I’ve seen two clever workarounds we “polite people” have adopted for spilling our wrath out on our neighbor. The first one is talking about someone behind their back. Of the two, this one is the more clearly destructive. Everyone has experienced having someone talk bad about them behind their back. It’s one of the most unsettling things to find out. I think this is a particularly bad way of handling our wrath, because it really doubles our sin. Not only are we spilling our wrath despite Jesus’ teaching, but we are also effectively lying about it. We are nice to the person’s face, and cruel behind their back. And oh, how easy it is to get away with. It’s so easy to paint it as concern for their wellbeing or just getting stuff off your chest. And to make matters worse, people want to listen to you rant and vent about your coworkers or family members. They love hearing you spill the tea about what their issues are. And you know the sad thing? They also love hearing other people talk all about your problems. That knife cuts both ways.
But the other way we allow our wrath to spill out is in the silent but deadly way. We internalize the hurt, and we allow the anger to drive us away from our neighbor. We call them toxic, unhealthy, narcissistic, whatever, and we justify putting distance between ourselves and them. We stop answering texts, we block them on social media, we dodge them at parties. We make our interactions shorter and shorter. Sure, we may not be expressing our wrath in a way that they can hear it, but we are still allowing our wrath to motivate our choices. Imagine if God did that with us. Imagine if He allowed His anger to slowly distance Himself from us. What would have become of us then?
So here’s the challenge I think Jesus has for us. Instead of allowing our wrath to spill out in careless comments, talking bad about people behind their back, or slowly cutting people out of our lives, I think Jesus calls us to take all of what we feel and to swallow that pain ourselves. And the first step in that is learning to be honest with ourselves. When you catch yourself upset with someone, call it what it is. Don’t tell yourself you’re just frustrated. Classify what you’re feeling as anger. If you don’t, most likely, you’ll end up stuffing it down, which is a nice way of saying you’ll blind yourself to it, even as it begins gripping the steering wheel. Right before I blew up on my sister, I’ll bet I wouldn’t have called myself angry. I wonder what could have been different if I had been honest with myself. So the first step is honesty.
But the second step is to keep anger’s hands off your steering wheel and to swallow your wrath. And I’ll be honest, it will probably feel way less satisfying and even hurt you to swallow your wrath. It isn’t pleasant. You are effectively maintaining peace on the outside by going to war on the inside. It’s going to feel messy and exhausting, like you are jumping on a grenade so no one else gets hurt. But the beauty of what Christ is calling us to is that, when we can swallow the anger, it allows room for you to be a source of healing for the person who hurt you, just as enduring the cross was Jesus’ way of healing us. Maybe that healing looks like having a careful and sober-minded conversation with the person to ask what in them led them to hurt you. Maybe it means showing them kindness and love in exchange for the hurt they caused you. The possibilities that come from swallowing our wrath can lead to some real tasty fruit in the world. But we have to be willing to stomach what we naturally wish we could spill out on others.
Jesus calls His disciples to stomach all the wrath that they feel welling up inside of them, and to not act on any of it, to let none of it leak out onto the world around them, whether in violent angry outbursts, or the quietest murmur of “you moron,” or even just cutting toxic people out of our lives. And He Himself models this in His life and even in His death. He doesn’t gossip, He doesn’t raise a fist in anger, He doesn’t allow His hurt to distance Him from those who hurt Him. Jesus stays silent as they mock and beat Him, and He offers forgiveness to those who crucified Him. He was the Lamb silent before its shearers, a man gentle and lowly in heart. I have to believe that in any moment of anger, Jesus was taking the swelling feelings of indignation and fury and what we had become, and that He then channeled all that anger into healing love. He swallowed His wrath and used it for our healing. And if we are able to let go of our rights, to let go of our fear, our yearning for control, to let go of our sense of pride, I think Jesus will teach us to transfigure our wrath into a creative and undying love for those who hurt us.
I think that Jesus will teach us how to swallow wrath without letting it spill.
Life Level Application
Why do you think our society is so uncomfortable with using words like “anger”? Why do we opt for words like “upset” or “frustrated” instead?
How do you think the Church misses the mark in dealing with its anger? How have you seen examples of the people in the Church responding to anger like Jesus would?
Where have you seen yourself give into anger, whether by gossiping, outbursts, or abandoning relationships? Who do you tend to be the most wrathful with?
How would your testimony about Jesus be received by those in the world around you if you remained committed to swallowing all of your wrath?