In the name of God ☩ Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
We have an anger problem in our society. A few weeks ago, I was driving our girls to daycare. I was heading into town on Innes Street and was driving through Catawba College, through the 25 mile-an-hour zone. Well, for the man in the pick-up truck behind me, that wasn’t nearly fast enough. So I drove through the campus with him about a foot behind my bumper, watching him screaming and gesturing at me. When I turned off Innes, a barrage of horn beeps sent me on my way. This wasn’t just another incident of an aggressive driver, as I was actually worried that he was going to follow me to the parking lot of the daycare to confront me. The disturbing part of this incident is that this sort of interaction is common in our society. We have an anger problem.
Anger management, as a discipline, hardly existed a few decades ago, but has grown exponentially in recent years. Turn on nearly any talk show or news outlet and you’ll likely encounter someone yelling, and it doesn’t matter which side of the political spectrum you have in your mind right now, anger is a bipartisan issue. Who hasn’t seen, in recent memory, an incident of road rage, or heard an obscenity yelled, or seen someone berate a restaurant server, or heard a story of screaming at a customer service representative in order to “get my way.” And we all do it – some of us are better at keeping the anger inside, but the fire burns all the same. We have an anger problem in our society. Gone are the expectations of civility, rare are acts of kindness, few and far between are the examples of peacemaking, and lamentably absent are instances of our God-given mission of reconciliation.
Holy Week, which we enter today on Palm Sunday, is a week rooted in anger. In the gamut of readings from Mark today, we see the dangers of being consumed by anger. I do want to acknowledge that our marking of Palm Sunday is a bit different than the way Palm Sunday is often done. Instead of placing the Passion in the middle of the liturgy, we heard a Gospel narrative of one of the events that happened after Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. It’s an important bridge that allows us to linger in Palm Sunday before rushing ahead to the Passion. But it also provides the context for the Passion. Jesus did not go from hero to scapegoat for no reason, and that reading helps us to enter the story more fully. We will conform to the Prayer Book tradition of hearing the Passion today, but it will be heard after the Eucharist, and in placing the Passion at that point in our liturgy, it has a deeper impact and sends us out into Holy Week in a more profound way.
The first example of anger that we see today is actually a healthy one. Anger, in itself, is not a bad thing. Anger tells us that something is not right. Anger is what keeps us from tolerating the intolerable. As Jesus rides into Jerusalem on the donkey, the crowd shouts “Hosanna!” which in Hebrew means “Save us.” It was a sense of righteous anger that inspired Jesus’ actions in Holy Week and summoned the crowd to greet him as he entered the Holy City. The Romans had occupied the land and were literally taxing people to death. The Temple authorities had become complicit in this Roman oppression, meanwhile the poor were being neglected. And so the people were justly angered and ready for things to change. These things were not right, they were not God’s will. And that is the mark of holy anger. If our anger is rooted in things not being as God would have them, we know that our emotion is righteous anger. This sort of anger is what fueled the prophets of the Old Testament, it what undergirds Jesus’ condemnation of the Temple, it is what inspires us to demand that all people be treated with respect and dignity.
But there is another kind of anger, the sort of poisonous anger which infects our society and our souls. This unrighteous and unholy anger is not rooted in instances when it is not God’s will that is being done, rather this harmful anger is rooted in instances when it is not our will being done. You are running late and that car in front of you just isn’t going fast enough. You ordered a side of mixed vegetables, not French fries. You think lower taxes are the key to economic growth but your conversation partner thinks that funding the government at higher levels leads to such growth. When you don’t get your way, you get angry. That’s a natural and human reaction.
It is this sort of anger that consumes and confuses us. When things do not go as we want or desire, our powerless, our inability to make other people do or think what we want, our fears, our unknowing all translate into anger. And it’s an incredibly egotistical and self-righteous sort of anger. Who are we that we should be the ones to dictate what other people think? Who are we to get bent out of shape when we are inconvenienced, because that’s mostly all it is, an inconvenience. Very rarely does someone actually wrong us, generally, they simply frustrate us. But don’t they know who I am? Did they not hear my impeccable logic?
It is this second sort of anger that starts to brood in the second passage we heard from Mark. Jesus tells a parable about the vineyard of God, rooted in an image from Isaiah. The parable is told against the Temple authorities, indicting them of being the wicked tenants in God’s vineyard. The chief priests and scribes don’t take kindly to having their respect called into question. All of this is unfolding during the Passover celebration, and Jesus is throwing a wrench into their plans and they get angry. Mark notes that after this parable, they wanted to arrest Jesus. For what? Speaking the truth? Their anger blinds them from seeing their sins, the things that they’ve overlooked, the ways that they need to change.
And where we see this anger coming to a head in in the Passion narrative, particularly at the trial. When the Passion is read later in our liturgy, pay attention to the words, to the emotions behind them, to the ways in which unjust anger leads to great evil being done. There’s a fascinating part of the trial scene that shows us what anger can do to us. We will hear that Pilate had a custom of releasing a prisoner at the festival of Passover. Scholars and historians are a bit skeptical about the historical evidence of such a custom. For one, it just doesn’t make sense. Why would you release a prisoner, especially an insurrectionist murderer? But also, if this was a custom, it seems odd that no other ancient sources mention this practice of the prisoner release.
Now, I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that the Barabbas incident is a fabrication, but I am wanting to read it as a parable. Parables have meaning that is independent of their historical accuracy. The historical truth of a parable isn’t what gives a parable its meaning, but rather what the parable points to is where it derives its authority. And certainly, the Barabbas story tells us something about unholy anger.
The reason why reading this trial scene parabolically is warranted is the name Barabbas. Barabbas means “son of the father,” obviously, Jesus has been referred to in that way. He’s identified as an insurrectionist, the same charge against Jesus of Nazareth. And in Matthew’s version of the trial, it’s noted that this prisoner’s full name is Jesus Barabbas. We actually betray the text if we don’t read this as a parable. There are two men before the crowd, both are named Jesus, both are guilty of insurrection against Rome, both are identified as sons of the father. One though, of course, is being unjustly condemned, the other has committed murder. One takes the place of the guilty, the other goes free by no action or merit of his own. One dies because the crowd shouts “crucify him” because they are full of anger that their version of the truth isn’t being promoted, because things are not going their way, because it is convenient to eliminate this inconvenience from Nazareth.
We do need to be clear, the way to understand this parable is not to put ourselves into it. It is not our choice to choose between Jesus Barabbas and Jesus Christ. That choice has already been made, and we confirm that choice every time we give ourselves over to anger. Daily, through our anger, through our sins, through our actions and inactions, we shout “crucify him.” Holy Week isn’t about deluding ourselves into thinking that we would have been on the right side of history. Jesus’ disciples all betray him, we would have fared no better.
Rather, what we can do in Holy Week is to pay attention. We pay attention to what Jesus’ death exposes. Jesus is scapegoated while Barabbas is released. So we can pay attention to the ways that we still blame others in our unrighteous anger and frustration that things aren’t going our way. We can pay attention to the anger that boils up in us, because it is the same anger that nailed Jesus to the Cross. We can pay attention to the fact that Jesus died in our place, the guilty. We can pay attention to the fullest revelation of God’s mercy – the Cross of Christ. We can pay attention to our prayers – asking God to create in us a clean heart and renew a right spirit within us. We can pay attention to the ways in which our anger implicates us in sin, and then confess those sins to God instead of spewing that anger at ourselves and others. We can pay attention to the fact that we have an anger problem. And we can pay attention in Holy Week by giving thanks that we have a loving and merciful solution to that problem. Amen.
