Healing Anger

By Sharon Nearhoof May
Mark 1:40-45
Scottsdale, Arizona

Moved with anger, Jesus touched him.

I probably ought to start with a confession. I don't like it when God gets angry. I don't even like to think that God gets angry. So like many people in the world, I read much of the Old Testament and some of the New with a handy little hermeneutic that filters out the wrath of God and explains it away as the wrath of people claiming their rage in the name of God. My God doesn't wage wars. People wage wars in the name of God. My God doesn't strike people dead for lying or demand death as a punishment for everything from adultery to being a rebellious son. People demand punishment and people destroy themselves and others by committing adultery and lying without any help from God at all. My God does not promote genocide as an appropriate way of keeping the faithful people 'pure.' That distinction belongs to very human militaristic psychopaths and their minions.

Now, I heard about the wrath of God when I was growing up, but it wasn't a common theme. And as far as I've been able to figure it, the first time I considered a God of wrath was in tenth grade English class when Mr. Merriman passed out a copy of a sermon written by one Jonathan Edwards. He said it was one of the finest sermons ever written, and it was called "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." How many of you have read it? For those of you who haven't, it's strong enough to curl you hair. Here's one of the more memorable passages—and this may have been the beginning of my arachnophobia. According to Jonathan Edwards: "The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his Wrath towards you burns like Fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire." Nice, huh? It gets worse.

I remember sitting in class staring at that sermon, feeling a little bit sick. The formula was clear and obvious. I was a sinner. God abhorred me. God was filled with Wrath (capital W). God was ANGRY! In fact, according to Edwards, God was angry with me literally "every day and every night." And I only had one hope—come to Jesus. Get washed in the blood. I was barely 15. At 15, I didn't yet have the theological chutzpa to evaluate and make my own judgements about the adequacy and soundness of Edward's theology. I just took it all in and filed it away as one of many lessons on anger in my lifetime—and this is what I learned: Anger is bad. Anger is terrifying. Anger is destructive. If someone (like God) is angry with me, it is only the stiffest self- control that keeps them from destroying me, demolishing me, dropping me into the pit of hell. Anger is at the heart of broken relationships—like the broken relationship between God and people—and anger can only be sated by blood—by death—by sacrifice—like the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Someone's angry? Someone's gotta suffer. Someone's angry? Someone's gotta pay. Is it any wonder I ended up fearing anger—both my own anger and the anger of others?

Is it any wonder that eventually I started reading God's anger right out of God? Who can have real faith or real trust in the fear of that kind of rage? I couldn't live with it so I focused on the gospels and for the most part, reading the gospels is quite a relief on this count. Except for that business of Jesus cleansing the temple by abusing some furniture and some occasional name-calling thrown at the Pharisees, Jesus is pretty nice. He puts up with an incredible amount of abuse, inconvenience, and incompetence and offers healing, forgiveness, and salvation to the sinners that cross his path. Jesus was not the kind of God who dangles people like spiders over the pit of hell. Jesus was not an angry man.

So imagine my surprise this week when I was innocently reading the lectionary scripture for today and I came across the news of those other manuscripts—the ones many scholars think preserve the original story and read "moved with anger, Jesus touched him." The more I stared at those words, the more I thought about them, the more confused I got—because first of all, what is Jesus angry about? There are no Pharisees, no unjust moneychangers here . . . only a sick man who professes faith and asks for healing. And second of all—how is it possible that Jesus' anger moves him to reach out and touch that man? How is it that anger — that seemingly destructive, scary emotion — somehow moves Jesus to heal?

I'm not sure I have any real answers. I do have some ideas, though. Perhaps it begins with the man in this story—the leper, himself. We don't know much about him—where he came from, where his family was. But we do actually know quite a bit about him. He was a leper—and that says everything we need to know. One day, one ordinary day, he woke up to notice that there was something wrong with his skin. It was not leprosy as we know it today—in first century Palestine, leprosy was a word used to describe a whole host of different skin diseases. But what exactly it was doesn't matter — it was a skin thing—and skin things were bad news in those days. The bad news can be found in Leviticus 13 and 14, where people with certain forms of contagious skin disease are declared ritually 'unclean', forced to tear their clothing, uncover their heads, and yell "unclean, unclean" as they walk about so that everyone knows they are a leper. They must then keep their distance from 'clean people', and live outside the 'camp.' The leper was not allowed into places of business, or places of worship and was a social outcast—separated from friends, family, and all public life. Many of them lived in leper colonies near population centers, where they haunted the margins of the city begging for food and sustenance. Lepers were like the walking dead—cut off from life, sick, hungry, condemned to cling to the edges of a community they could no longer enter. And there was not much hope for lepers—unlike many diseases, it was common belief that only God could heal leprosy.

So it happens that Jesus is out walking one day and this leper—this outcast—comes and kneels down before him. And the leper has already broken one of the rules by approaching Jesus, a clean person, in the first place. Jesus doesn't say anything and after a moment, the leper says, "If you want to, you can make me well again." —which is really a confession of faith that Jesus is God because only God can heal leprosy. And Jesus looks at him—and Jesus does not see just the man before him—he sees the entire situation that has brought this man to his knees in this place—and Jesus is . . . angry. Angry. For here is a sick man, a human being who is suffering, who is in pain, who is sick—through no fault of his own. And look what the people did to him—look what they did. They took his business away. They kicked him out of his home. They forced him to walk around with a scarlet 'L' on him—the torn clothes, the uncovered head. They forced him to remind himself a hundred times a day that he was 'dirty', that he was unacceptable, that he was untouchable by yelling 'unclean, unclean' and backing away any time anybody else came near. And, worst of all, they did it in the name of God, through the 'law' of God. They even banned him from the House of God. He lost everything and what did he do to deserve this? He got . . . sick. And in every way they could, out of fear, in the name of protecting themselves, and in the name of God, they destroyed him. The sickness plagued his flesh, but they plagued his spirit. They cast him out. They erased existence as he knew it. They wrenched apart his family just when he needed them most.

What God, standing in front of a human being so treated could be anything but angry—not at the sick man, but at the world that would treat that sick man like a mere disease instead of a human being needing care, needing love. Evidently our God was angry—so angry that he was willing to reach out and break a law of his own—Jesus reached out and touched that leper and in that touch restored not only the leper's skin, but his very life. And then Jesus sent him on his way back to the very people who had cast him out so they could see God's mercy, so they could be judged by God's anger, so they could welcome him back from the dead.

It makes me wonder—is there an anger that heals? Is there an anger that is not scary and threatening, that has not fermented over time into the consuming bitterness of rage, that springs to life in us and signals that something dreadful is wrong and inspires us to make it right. Is there an anger that moves us to reach out and touch people who have been treated unjustly, unfairly, inhumanely? And is there an anger that sometimes moves us to reach in and decide and act for our own health when we are being treated unjustly, unfairly, inhumanely? Is such healing anger of God, God-like, Godly.

I don't really understand God and I don't suppose in this life, I ever will. But I'm not so afraid of God's wrath anymore. I don't see God's 'anger' demanding our destruction. I don't see God's wrath as demanding payment, vengeance, or blood. In fact, I've come to think that if we are indeed like spiders dangling over the fiery pit of hell, and if it is God who is holding on to the thread that keeps us suspended there, then God is holding onto us for dear life, furious at the powers in our world that keep trying to convince us to throw each other down into that fiery pit or to give up and let go and fall to our own deaths.

I think that God gets angry—and that God uses that anger to heal us, to work against the injustices we impose upon each other, and I think that just maybe God wants us to get angry sometimes too. Because what happened to that leper happens all the time in our world. We are still casting people out. There are still powers in our world that still create and punish the 'untouchables.' And not enough of God's people talk back. Not enough of God's people talked back when voices started crying that people with AIDS were being punished by God. Not enough of God's people got angry enough to act when "Christians" from a right-wing church in Kansas City went to Wyoming to picket the funeral of Matthew Shepard, that young gay man who was beaten within an inch of his life just because he was gay and then hung up on a fencepost, exposed to the elements for days before a rancher found him and got him to the hospital where he died. The protesters carried signs that said, "God hates gays." I was so angry, I shook inside. I can only pray that God's anger carried healing in its wings. And those are just two glaring examples—every day we make assumptions about who's in and who's out in the name of God. There are still wars raging, there are still people wandering the margins of our society and our churches, unwelcome because they are not 'clean' like us.

You know, last but not least . . . why do you suppose that Jesus told that leper not to tell anyone that he had been healed, but to go directly to the priest, to the power that had cast him out in the first place, and perform the sacrifices that would declare him clean? It's a strange and stern command — to silence instead of spread the gospel. I've started to wonder if it's not a very focused, directed command because the real lesson here—the real gospel here—is not so much that a human being has been healed and there is healing for us all, although that is true. The deeper message here is being sent directly to those in power—to those who control the keys to the city and the keys to the house of God and who think they have God's command and blessing to do so. I think that God is saying something to them—something born of anger but for the healing of all the world.

To the powerful (and that's most of us) God says, "you can ban the lepers from my House, but you can't keep me from getting under their skin. You can cast the 'untouchables' out, but they will find me and I will touch them and I will bring them home. You can call them 'unclean', and you can make them believe they are 'unlovable' and "unacceptable", but I will love them and I will accept them and I will make them whole." Perhaps we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God—but if so, maybe that's good news and not bad news—for God's anger holds healing and God's hands are strong and good enough to bring us all home.

Sharon Nearhoof May
Scottsdale, Arizona