When we have people in our lives whom we consider our enemies, we can literally be overcome by anger, bitterness, even hatred. Bitterness and hatred are negative emotions so strong that they can make us incapable of knowing how to deal with the person except through repeated arguing, insults, and/or rejection.
But anger is an emotion that can work positively or negatively in our lives. When it is a negative emotion, it does not push us to understand others or ourselves. Instead our anger is a proud wall that isolates us from the other, breaks the primordial bond that we have with every human being because we all have the same identity: we are all sons and daughters of God. Negative anger breeds violence in us so that we respond to others out of a will to hurt them verbally or physically, instead out of a will to discover the roots of our disunity and try to make peace.
If we can step back from a situation or hurtful ongoing relationship in prayer, walking humbly with our God, we can begin to try to understand what is happening in the relationship. There are good and not-so-good reasons to be angry at someone. What are you angry about, to begin with? Be honest with yourself, and ask God to help you be honest. Are you angry because someone has hurt your feelings? Ask yourself: Did the person say or do this deliberately, or did he or she not realize they were being insensitive? Is your anger ongoing because your battle for control with another person is ongoing? Are you angry because someone is stealing the limelight away from you? Are you angry because you are holding on to a grudge over something that happened years ago, something that should have been settled and laid to rest long before now?
If other people's anger and bitterness is directed at you, do you know the people well enough to understand their background, the incidents in their lives that have made them thin-skinned, insecure, quick to anger, dominant? Do you know the ways in which others have hurt them? Remember that you are responsible for your attitude towards them, and if you can begin with understanding the other, that helps to keep or re-make your bond with him or her as a fellow son or daughter of God. Understanding helps us to be patient. Understanding helps us to frame the words we use so that they are a well-thought-out response, a strong, truthful, but not insulting or belittling self-defense, instead of a violent reaction that only hurts the situation. Understanding and patience help us to be non-violent in our responses, and to devise creative, responsible solutions to problematic relationships.
But sometimes, especially if we have become passive or self-defeating, the best response to hurtful relationships is positive anger. Positive anger is an anger anchored in a strong desire for justice, for ourselves or for others, especially if we or someone else is being used and/or abused, physically, emotionally, economically. If we are all sons and daughters of God, then justice says that we all have equal dignity, equal rights. In Scripture, God's anger is a positive, righteous anger, aimed at everyone who uses or abuses others, especially the poor or helpless. Catholic Theologian Elizabeth Johnson (a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Brentwood) says, "Divine anger functions for justice. It bespeaks a mode of caring response in the face of what harms beloved human beings or the created world itself.
"Righteous anger...is profoundly ethical. It waxes hot in moral outrage because something good is being violated. Arising from love, it awakens energy to act to change the situation. Editing a powerful book of photographs of African-American women, Barbara Summers was struck by the creative power of anger of even the most accomplished of these women: 'A truly beautifying discovery for me was to find so much love in anger. It was a fist-up, death-defying love that challenged the unfair conditions of life and muscled in on injustice as it nursed both sides of a nation.' This is not anger with the spirit of murder in it, but fury that is creative of life.'" (from "Creation and the Cross.")
In other words, if we are in an abusive relationship, or enduring an unjust economic situation, we need to be transformed by the power of a positive, righteous anger that flows from love for ourself and our identity as a beloved son or daughter of God, a righteous anger that propels us into positive action for ourselves and others.
But, let's go now beyond our own relationships and our own lives into the unjust situations in our community, our country, and the world. Because, if we have a love for justice, our hearts will expand to feel righteous anger and compassion for all our brothers and sisters in Christ who suffer, even if they are strangers to us, suffer often from unjust laws and prejudice.
Jesus himself operates often enough out of a divine wrath, a divine anger that flows from observing injustice - and Jesus names these injustices - and names his enemies. For Jesus, like his Father, enemies are not people we disagree with. Enemies are not the people we dislike, or those who are different from us. Enemies are the people who support and uphold the structures of terror and injustice. Melissa Florer-Bixler, Pastor of Raleigh Mennonite Church in North Carolina, says,
"Often people outside the Church tell me how they are drawn to Jesus, meek and mild. This caricature misses out on the actual Jesus of the Bible, who lashes out against the religious teachers whom he calls false prophets, blind guides, white-washed tombs, and hypocrites.
"These stories of Jesus lounging with children and lambs leave out that in the next breath Jesus told onlookers that it was better to tie stones around their necks and throw themselves into the sea than deliberately bar the way for children who want to come to him. They leave out that Jesus' anger drove the moneychangers from the temple with a whip.
"This Jesus teaches us that there are right and wrong ways to have enemies. When we look at Jesus' life we see that enmity is born when we recognize that the structures of terror and injustice are held up by people.
"Oppression is enacted by individual human beings, who collectively wash their hands of the matter. Without the participation of people - individuals doing the work - these systems would collapse.
"In the Gospel, enemies are those who make camp on the far side of the line that is justice. And God is beckoning us - all of us - to join God among the oppressed......We can do the careful work of putting ourselves in spaces to hear from those who experience oppression and making their enemies our own, an act of solidarity as we rightly name the world." (from "How To Love Your Enemy," "Sojourners" magazine, Sept/Oct 2019.)
Have we allowed the Holy Spirit to imbue us with a divine anger, a passion for divine justice, so that we can name our enemies? Name the community leaders or politicians or workers who do their will who are offending God by their injustices? Or have we been confused about what God wants from us? We can observe people doing truly evil things, and since we know that Jesus tells us to forgive our enemies, we can misinterpret that as meaning we should absolve people of blame. So we mistakenly mentally back off, assume that they are doing their best, or failing on some things but not on other things, or that they are cogs in a machine and can't do anything else. We don't want to be angry and we don't want to call them our enemies, (because Jesus said to LOVE our enemies) so we say they are simply "misguided" and the best thing we can do is pray for them. But while prayer is important, this kind of backing away from evil - and from legitimate enemies - can lead us into indifference. And it certainly doesn't help our enemies to change their ways!
The prophet Micah tells us to "do justice." For Pastor Florer-Bixler, the oppressed are the Latinx community in Durham, where hundreds have been picked up by ICE, and children wait at the local elementary school for parents who will never show up. "In a recent round of ICE raids in Durham, a young father was picked up while packing his car for work, collateral damage among the targets set by ICE. In a nearby NICU, his premature infant - born at seven months - waited alone. Maria, the baby's mother, recovered from surgery while her spouse sat in a detention center, hoping our community could raise the $15,000 bond set by a judge. Eventually they raised $7,000, securing the rest through a loan. ICE officials 'don't have a heart,' Maria told a local reporter."
Florer-Bixler, full of a just anger and passion for justice, has chosen Jesus' way of battling for justice, the way of non-violent, positive response to oppression. She says, "Jesus reorients our way of having enemies. We do not arm ourselves with weapons to coerce or threaten enemies of God's liberation into submission. Instead we create the world we want. In Durham, this means creating a fund to support families like Maria and her baby in the NICU. It means that strangers sign up for shifts to check on reports of ICE activity in the area. The world we create is one in which religious communities open their doors for temporary sanctuary if a person without papers is afraid to go home. It means we check on our neighbors in ways we did not before. We carve out a life of community amid the terror. It is a life of joy amid destruction. And it is the life into which we invite our enemies."
Catholic priest and peace activist John Dear teaches that
"Practicing nonviolence means claiming our fundamental identity as the beloved [children] of the God of peace. . . . This is what Jesus taught: “Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called the sons and daughters of God [Matthew 5:9]. . . . Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors, then you shall be sons and daughters of the God who makes [the] sun rise on the good and the bad, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” [Matthew 5:44-45]. In the context of his visionary nonviolence—radical peacemaking and love for enemies—Jesus speaks of being who we already are. He talks about our true identities as if they propel us to be people of loving nonviolence. . . .
"Living nonviolence requires daily meditation, contemplation, study, concentration, and mindfulness. Just as mindlessness leads to violence, steady mindfulness and conscious awareness of our true identities lead to nonviolence and peace. . . . The social, economic, and political implications of this practice are astounding: if we are [children] of a loving Creator, then every human being is our [sibling], and we can never hurt anyone on earth ever again, much less be silent in the face of war, starvation, racism, sexism, nuclear weapons, systemic injustice and environmental destruction. . . ."
If we truly love mercy, we will mercifully pray for our enemies to rediscover what it means to be just and merciful - and be examples to them of justice and compassion, even through non-violent protests. Whether our enemy is the relative who tries to dominate us, the obnoxious downstairs neighbor, the cold, rigid Boss, or the politician who seeks to pass unjust laws, we need to stand up for truth and justice - courageously speaking the truth in love - so that we are truly lights in this world. We need to mindfully cultivate a divine righteous anger, a passion for justice, so that we will act against oppression, in the ways that we can and should in our own circumstances - and for our country and for the world.
I will close with Pope Francis' Prayer for Peace at the 2017 World Day of Peace:
"I pray that the image and likeness of God in each person will enable us to acknowledge one another as sacred gifts endowed with immense dignity. . . .
May charity and nonviolence govern how we treat each other as individuals, within society and in international life. When victims of violence are able to resist the temptation to retaliate, they become the most credible promotors of nonviolent peacemaking. In the most local and ordinary situations and in the international order, may nonviolence become the hallmark of our decisions, our relationships and our actions, and indeed of political life in all its forms. . . .
"Violence is not the cure for our broken world. Countering violence with violence leads at best to forced migrations and enormous suffering, because vast amounts of resources are diverted to military ends and away from the everyday needs of young people, families experiencing hardship, the elderly, the infirm and the great majority of people in our world. At worst, it can lead to the death, physical and spiritual, of many people, if not of all.
"An ethics of fraternity and peaceful coexistence . . . cannot be based on the logic of fear, violence and closed-mindedness, but on responsibility, respect and sincere dialogue. Hence, I plead for disarmament and for the prohibition and abolition of nuclear weapons: nuclear deterrence and the threat of mutual assured destruction are incapable of grounding such an ethics. I plead with equal urgency for an end to domestic violence and to the abuse of women and children. . . .
"Jesus taught that the true battlefield, where violence and peace meet, is the human heart: for “it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come” (Mark 7:21). . . . Jesus marked out the path of nonviolence. He walked that path to the very end, to the cross . . . (Ephesians 2:14-16). Whoever accepts the Good News of Jesus is able to acknowledge the violence within and be healed by God’s mercy, becoming in turn an instrument of reconciliation. In the words of Saint Francis of Assisi: “As you announce peace with your mouth, make sure that you have greater peace in your hearts.” .