Righteous Anger?

 

“Whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22)

 

Is anger sinful?  There is a Church Father who said: “he who, on just cause, is not angry, is in sin; for an unreasonable patience invites the good as well as the bad to do evil.”

 

Of course the most famous incident in Jesus’ life of justified anger is when he flipped over the tables in the Temple.

 

In 2018, I preached a righteously angry homily against Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.  If I had not preached that homily, then the hundreds of victims who I have been able to help in some small way would have not been helped.

 

Does anyone this morning here like the fact that children and vulnerable adults are sex-trafficked?  The pornography “industry” is the worst sex trafficker of children and vulnerable adults IN THE WORLD!  And they get money every time anyone clicks on an image or video.  You SHOULD allow your righteous anger to compel you to never click on a video or image of pornography moving forward.

 

Priests and religious brothers and sisters pray night prayer every night, and last night we had the reading that we have every Wednesday: “If you are angry, let it be without sin” (Ephesians 4:26) that means, of course, as we have been saying, that there ARE things that we should be angry about, and that “anger” is not sinful but rather there are situations where, if we are NOT angry, that is sinful.

 

Far from being the opposite of “love” there are many situations where “love” DEMANDS being angry.  What are we righteously angry about, and what are we doing this morning to be part of the solution to those situations?