Day: April 10, 2025

Sermons

Lenten Programme IV: Anger

The Deadly Three: Lenten Meditations on Pride, Envy & Anger
Lenten Programme IV: Anger

Christ Church, Windsor, NS
Fr. David Curry 2025

“Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God”

Anger is the third of the Deadly Three and follows upon envy. The Gospel for Passion Sunday highlights the sin of anger. “And when the ten heard it, they were moved with indignation against the two brethren.” Indignation here is anger.

Pride is certainly the deadliest of the seven deadly sins and is what is deadly in them. Envy is certainly the ugliest of the seven deadly sins and is ugly and unattractive to all. But anger? Well, anger is certainly the most common of all the seven deadly sins.

Like all the seven deadly sins, anger, too, has its complement of related terms: wrath, ire, rage, resentment, vengeance, and indignation. The Latin term is ira, the shortest and smallest of all the terms used to capture this commonplace sin, the deadly sin of anger.

So common is anger that in the culture of the self-obsessed, the neurotic culture, as it were, anger is the most frequent problem that psycho-therapists deal with in their counseling practices. We live in an angry world full of angry people; we are the angry people. “I am as mad as Hell and I won’t take it any longer” is a slogan for our age. And perhaps, more than any other sin, we try to justify it, to redeem it, as it were, under the rubric of righteous anger. It is not too much to say that our culture is the culture of anger as much as anything else.

But Scripture advises us differently and quite insightfully. “Let not the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4.26), Don’t always be angry and don’t hold onto your anger. Notwithstanding there is a deadly danger in all our anger. It too is a powerful force. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, I will repay” as Hebrews puts it (Hebrews 10.30), recalling a host of Old Testament passages about divine justice and divine wrath.

The paradox is that the vengeance, anger or wrath of God is very different from our anger. To speak of divine wrath is itself a form of human speech applied to God which is really about what in us is opposed to God’s goodness and mercy. It is a kind of antidote to our anger because it leaves judgement with God, first and foremost. But this is something which we often forget and in so doing fall prey to the very thing that lurks in all our anger. Ultimately, all our anger at the world, at one another, even perhaps at ourselves, is really our anger at God. We are angry because things are not the way we think they should be. We lash out against God in all our anger, essentially blaming him for the way things are. Damn you God! This is what we mean in our anger.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 10 April

Not knowing what we want or do?

Passiontide is the term for the last two weeks of Lent in the western Christian traditions. Quite often the cross is veiled, at once present and known yet obscured and not fully known. It symbolizes an important principle that belongs to the educational project. Knowing that we do not know impells the quest to know. Our knowing is at best partial and at worst misguided and erroneous.

In a remarkable scene in Matthew’s Gospel read this week in Chapel, the mother of Zebedee’s children comes to Jesus “desiring a certain thing of him.” He asks her “What do you want?” She says, “Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom.” She seeks what she thinks is best for her children. No doubt all parents do and, no doubt, all of us seek what we think is best for ourselves. But do we always know what that is? What does her request mean? It means positions of privilege and power, of status and prestige for her sons. But that can only mean something for them at the expense of others. It is simply a desire for power for some over others.

There is a truth in her request but only insofar as it recognizes the power and truth of God in Jesus. But it is incomplete and misguided. How does Jesus respond? With the simple words, “ye know not what you ask.” It is at once gentle and devastating and a direct and clear statement about an important aspect of our humanity.

“There are known knowns,” Donald Rumsfeld famously observed in 2003 as the US Secretary of Defence. “These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know that we don’t know.” This was, as the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek pointed out, a piece of amateur philosophizing which leaves out what is most significant. What is that? The “unknown knowns,” the things that you know but don’t know that you know.

Socrates’ great insight was that “I know that I do not know.” This is the beginning of wisdom; the complement to the biblical idea that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Our not knowing belongs to our desire to know but in the recognition that there is always more to know and that the more we learn the more we realize how much more there is to know. This is not to suggest that knowledge is simply quantitative, a mere adding up of bits and bytes of data or information. There are also ethical implications.

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