It's not that complicated

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Thus, the beginning of John's Gospel, known overall as being the impenetrable, mystical one. The Gospel where it doesn't start with the birth of Jesus, or the ministry of John, or the family tree of Christ. All easy things to get your head around. No, it starts with the concept of Logos, the Word, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. 

That sort of mystical stuff is really at the core of what the Christian faith is all about, the nature of God becoming flesh and dwelling in the midst of his people, but this sort of doctrinal content can be accused of being at least semi confusing and baffling, especially to the outside. But there is a separate type of content that is exclusively baffling to people on the inside of the church, namely things like we have in our epistle reading from Sunday. And Christians are notorious for this: having a good grasp of esoteric and arcane aspects of the nature of God, but are very bad at having a firm grasp on things that are so easy that we teach them to children. 

Of course, this isn't exclusive to Christians, but you would be amazed at how easily the average Lutheran at least can wrap their heads around the concept of a six day creation or the real presence. And my standard go-to line is always this: if you can believe that a 2000 year old man is literally there made of bread and wine on the altar at this suburban church, if you believe that "Is means is," then why are you having a hard time with a lot of what the Pauline epistles say about how to behave?

I mean, I know why. We are a Sola people: Faith alone, Grace alone, Christ alone, that kind of thing. And we like to avoid anything related to works righteousness. And the best way to avoid works righteousness is not to do any works, right Lutherans? Can't feel righteous in your works if you didn't do any, you know? Okay, I know I'm being a little facetious, but not much, to be honest. Lutherans resist the preaching of works out of an abundance of caution about self righteousness, but we have to remember who Paul's letters were written to: The Christians in any given area. The church in Ephesus, the church in Thessalonica, the Church in Rome, that kind of thing. These are people, who, like you, are already Christians, already baptized, already washed clean by the Holy Spirit, called by the grace of God, and given life and salvation. But you're not done at that point: There's still a lot of living to do, you know. You believe, you have been baptized, you have faith in Christ, now what? And the answer is what you find in the Pauline letters.

Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, isn't confused about salvation. He's not perplexed about what works and grace are, you know. He wrote that doctrine down, codified it, and made sure that we would know that it is by grace we have been saved, not by works, lest any man should boast. So if that's true, and you trust Paul with that, then why don't you trust him when he tells you not to let any corrupting talk come out of your mouths? 

I know why, of course. A lot of ink has been spilled from not so well meaning philosophers who have gone to a lot of effort to try to convince you that the essence of not just Christian but all morality is for you to do nothing differently from what you would have been doing normally. The goal of the theologian now is not to tell you what God wants you to do, but rather to tell you that God wants you to do what you're doing. 

It just ends up being this: you want to hear from friends, family, acquaintances, even God himself that you should stay the course, and that you're doing super. And you want to have a pastor, a church, a theology that echoes that loud and clear, so that when you church-shop, you're looking for a church that will tell you that what you're already doing is what God wants you to do, no matter what it is.

But that drives you headlong into the salvation problem. For if God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, then what are you being saved from? If John 3:16 tells you that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life, what's he saving you from? Jesus can't cheerlead you on with every decision and also save you from your sins. And deep down, you know that you're not supposed to be doing the things you're doing. When Paul tells you what to do, he's shining a light using the law on your current behavior, and demonstrating to you two things:

1 - what good behaviour actually would be, and 

2 - what you need to be forgiven of. 

The combination of those two things means that you have a guide on how to live, that you don't water down the word from Paul, but that when you examine yourself, you will find that the voice that wants you to stay the course, that you're doing super, gets drowned out by the voice that proclaims the grace of God.

Faith and bread.

 Jesus talks to those who are following him around, and tells them that they are following him because they have eating their fill of the bread. This is true. For people will do a lot for those who are supplying them. 

This is true not just in matters religious, but in all matters. You will tend to give loyalty to things and people who provide for your needs. But we're short sighted, by and large, and so we tend to follow around after things that meet our immediate needs. Our needs to unwrap the book for Christmas, not to read it. Our needs to bring home a puppy but not want to walk it. Our needs to have new relationships, money, attention, all that for a moment. And once that moment is gone, we tend to look for what is new, what is exciting, and we pursue novelty, new attention, new blessings. 

The people of the ancient world were no different, because they were people. And as people, they tended to do what people do. Jesus showed up to a world where even bread was difficult and time consuming. There was a reason that His miracle of feeding so many was such a big deal, because back then, you couldn't just go to the store and get a McDouble, even the idea of getting such a thing would have been laughable to a first century middle easterner. Remember in the parable of the prodigal son, how the complaint from the older brother was that the fattened calf had been killed, but that he never got even a young goat to celebrate with his friends? We're at the point now where the average person in Canada would consider eating goat to be beneath them "Goat? No thanks!" And in the Gospels, that was a treat, a treat that the older, obedient son never even got to have. Meat was way off the table for the most part, only for a really special occasion. And bread was the standard of the day. Flour, oil, water, baked in to cakes, as the scriptures say, but that takes time and effort. You don't get to go to the store on the way home and spend 1/6 of one hour's pay on a loaf of bread. If you want bread, you have to make it.

Day in, day out, the same routine, same flour, same oil, same water, same bread. And because it took hours to do, a generous portion of someone's day was going to be spent just keeping the family fed. Slow. Over coals. Every day. When Jesus gets on the scene, and multiplies the loaves and the fish, it's a giant miracle for the people who are following him. Surviving takes work, and lots of it. Just like the BeeGees remind you, over and over again, Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive. 

So when Jesus shows up and makes bread seemingly out of nothing, when the fish multiply without being caught, and the bread is pulled out of thin air, people take notice. Imagine if a quarter of your day was freed up, and the chore that defined your daily routine which, if you didn't do your family would starve, was just taken care of. Imagine that. You can bet that this is something worth paying attention to. But Jesus' work is not to be John Galt and to make an infinite energy loop here. He hasn't come to earth to be a source of food without labor. He's on earth to do bigger work than that, and this is just what the Bible calls a sign.

But signs aren't things. Yes, I took literary criticism in University, and once again, I'm about to make use of that expensive degree. The idea behind a lot of literary criticism and search for literary meaning is to understand that an awful lot of what we think is pre-determined is actually fairly open to interpretation. Not only is the meaning of the story as a whole subject to interpretation, but the language itself is open to interpretation as well. Words aren't anything concrete, they just point to concrete things. But the words themselves are nothing at all, only useful insofar as they point to things. As signs do. In the same way, the miracles of Christ, the signs that they see, work in the same way. They're only useful insofar as they point to what they point towards. 

The people who came to listen to the preaching of Jesus sat down and were filled with bread. Real bread. And their real tummies were filled, all fine so far. But if you stop at the sign, you'll never get where you're supposed to go, you know. If you assume that the sign is the thing, you'll never move past the sign. And the multiplying of the loaves and the fish was there to be a sign to point to the bread of life. But people got focused on the sign, wanted the sign only, and not what the sign pointed to. And you can see what happens, where Jesus does a sign, then tells people what the sign points to, and then they get angry and walk away: "This is a hard teaching, who can understand it?" But your job as the Christian is to understand what are the signs, and what the signs are pointing to. When Jesus talks about himself as the bread of life, he does so as something that will satisfy eternally. That is, the source of eternal life. 

Bread is transient. You labor for it, bake it, it's necessary for life, but you burn it and then need more. That's the cycle. And people of the time understood their relationship to God in the same way. You sin, you need grace, you sacrifice, you go back and repeat. Over and over again. And it never satisfies. Jesus used the hunger in the stomach to talk about the hunger in the heart. You hunger and thirst for righteousness, for life, and that hunger and thirst can be satisfied. Don't follow me because of the bread in the wilderness. Follow me because of the bread of life. 

Heads up!

 "Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a platter."

That's the signing of John's death warrant. He is going to be taken out and killed, based primarily on a whim. Herod promises his stepdaughter that he will give her anything, up to half his kingdom. A rash promise, but this is in a time where your word, you know, meant something. And if you made a promise in front of all your friends, you were going to pay for it. And that's exactly how it went. Herod promised his daughter that she could have anything, and she asked for something he didn't want to give. Bound by his rash promise, he was stuck with the offer he had made. Bad negotiations. 

But if you think about it, Salome who danced for Herod didn't really want the head of the Baptist either. Of what concern was it to her? Nah, the instigator for this murder wasn't Herod, nor was it Salome. It was Herodias, all the way. 

For what reason? It all comes back to John telling her that she was wrong. And that's the kiss of death, really. John had the absolute temerity, the audacity to say that she had done the wrong thing. So she straight up kills him. 

This shouldn't surprise you, of course, because you and I have the rank temptation to do the same thing. But we only do this for things that we are insecure about, that we think we might be wrong about. If someone were to come up to you and criticize you for eating all those vegetables, you'd roll your eyes and walk away chuckling to yourself about how silly that person is. But if they say 'you know, you probably shouldn't have seven beers,' you'll get mad. Why will you get mad? Because you know you shouldn't be having seven beers. And that's what matters. There's a great bit from the movie 'the swan princess' where the the evil sorcerer Rothbart says of his plan to marry the princess 'if you steal something, you have to fight forever to keep it.' If he marries the princess, he can have the kingdom legally. If he steals it from the existing king, he will have to fight to keep it forever, for his rule will always be illegitimate. 

It works the same way with almost all morality. If you are doing something that you know is wrong, if anyone brings that up, it stabs a pin through your self perception. And that's why we do horrible, unspeakable things to each other, in order to keep that self perception alive. We surround ourselves with enablers, yes men who will agree that we have only ever done the right thing. We will always keep up with only so many people, who will back up what we do and say and perpetually echo the refrain we need to hear 'you did the right thing.' And the abandonment that people who disagree with us encounter is legendary.  

But we don't have much power, not really. If you kill someone, you go to jail, so you do what you can, and what you typically can do is to cut them out of your life, not cut their heads off. You don't have tetrarch power, the power of life and death over people. If someone scolds you, or makes fun of you, or tells you that you were wrong in some way, the most you can do is to cut them out of your life completely. Unfriend them, block them, stop talking to them, so that you can preserve that self image. So you can think of yourself that you are good, and have nothing to change. But that comes at a terrible cost. The story of the beheading of John the Baptist is a start warning to all of us, a warning of our fragility, of how little it takes to go to an extreme. And it's a caution to us, who may be horrified and disgusted by the story of the death of John, to reconsider not just his death, but also his words. When John says to us 'bear fruit in keeping with repentance,' part of what he means is that he seeks to make things right between God and us, and between us and each other. To repent is to look sincerely at the life that we've made, and to understand that our boasting comes from Christ, not from ourselves. So when someone mentions to us casually that we shouldn't do what we are doing, which we are well aware that we shouldn't do, we don't have to respond by fighting to keep our self image. We can instead respond that we know we shouldn't and we struggle with it all the time. 

For this is honest, it is repentance, and it is good for us to continue to do. For the sake of ourselves, those around us, and our relationship with God. Heed the words of John, and see what happens if we ignore them. 

Thorn in the side

 It should be clear that a thorn in the side is aggravating. Most of us don't come into contact with thorns that often - this time of year it might be a thistle in some undergrowth, or when you're trying to pick a raspberry, that kind of thing, but most of the time, you're not going to be running into thorns all that often.

Most of that is because for a lot of us, we're not in thorn places all that often. Thorns are for the plant to protect itself against animals that might try to it, or from you for trying to stamp on it, pull it, or get it out of the way somehow. For a lot of human history, you would be navigating through the world through things like old goat tracks, fields, forests, that kind of thing, and not through roads cleared of any kind of natural hazards. In the time of Paul, people would have been moving around on Roman roads, which were a big deal for this reason - cleared of obstacles, cleared of hazards, level and easy to walk on, that kind of thing. Most other routes would have been in varying degrees of overgrowth, tough to make it through easily or cleanly. And if you're navigating these routes, you're going to end up with thorns, thistles and burrs that will poke, impinge on and irritate you. 

Now, if you have a splinter (or sliver) stuck in your skin, how do you get it out? Likely you would sterilize a needle, or get out some tweezers, and pluck that back out again. Do you legitimately think that in the time of Paul, people had access to the tweezers and such that we have now? Not likely. More likely than not, you would end up with a thorn stuck in your flesh, and no real way to pull it out. 

A thorn in your flesh, a pebble in your shoe, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant. Every step is uncomfy, and you really want to stop and remove it. Pebble in shoe, easy; thorn in flesh, harder. The thorn in your flesh digs in, and reminds you with every movement that something is jabbed into you. And this what Paul wants to propose to you as an image of what he has to deal with. He has to deal with weakness in his flesh. What is that weakness? Paul isn't real clear, and it doesn't matter. It's not important what his weakness is, it's important to know that he has a weakness. And his weakness keeps him humble.

Even though he has had surpassing visions, has been able to see Christ, and has had doctrine and grace be communicated to him, even with all that, Paul needs to remain humble. As do we all. One of the problems with what happens now is that things are, for a lot of people, too good. People have money and time, hot and cold running water, access to all the world's information in a second, information beaming into their brains constantly, that kind of thing. And as such, to quote Network - "all necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized." We have the luxury now of being concerned about missing TV shows, not about surviving until we turn 15. And so when people are asked about their faith in the living God, and their thoughts about the life to come, they are naturally not too concerned about it, and in fact they believe that God owes them an explanation for why things are the way they are. After all, they're the main character. Even God himself should answer to them.

But you're neither Peter nor Andrew, James nor John. You're not Paul, and you're not Barnabas. You're you. And you, like the rest of us, do need to be kept humble. Paul understood his humility as being important, even crucial. A thing that he had to have to stop him from falling out of his need for the love of God. It's easy to think that you're everything, to lose all conception of anything beyond yourself, and to think that you are the measure of everything. So in his wisdom, God occasionally sends to us all a thorn in the flesh. What is it? It could be anything for you, but a reminder, certainly, of your frailty, something to keep you humble, and to remind you of your desperate need for the Lord Jesus, who is there to redeem the frailty of his fallen creation.

lay down your life

 I'm perpetually bemused by cheap grace.

It's a Bonhoeffer concept in which he says that people are in love with cheap grace. The idea that any discussion of law, of sin, can be easily watered down to the point that it doesn't say anything anymore. You, as the Christian, would read the word of God about how you are to lay down your life for the brothers, and your conclusion would be that you should practice self care. This is not an uncommon view, you understand, so how do you get to that point? 

Cheap grace.

The idea that you don't worship a Christ who forgives sins, but rather a Christ who tells you how to live. And the advice that you would get from most people who would tell you how to live is that you should do things like practice self care, drink water, get rest and exercise, that kind of thing. People who want to give you practical advice for life rarely tell you that the best thing for you to do is to lay down your life for someone else. That gets frowned upon in self care circles really quickly. 

But Jesus isn't a self care guy. His advice is to lay down your life for your friends, to show the greatest love you can have. Now, as I mentioned on Sunday, the odds of you having to be killed for your brethren are low low odds. It may come up, and we all have to be prepared for what that would mean, to be sure, but it's not really likely that you would have to literally die for your friends. Rather, what's likely is that your friends may need your help, your time, your input, etc. They will likely at some point need your money. Not a lot all at once of any of those, but they'll sure need a lot over time.

And believe it or not, your time, your money, those things are your life, really. In bite sized formats. That's what your life is composed of, minutes, hours, days, etc. In many ways we like to think of our life as being separate from our lives, which is strange to say, but think about it. You don't think of your day to day (getting up, drinking coffee, taking a shower, eating breakfast, driving to work, etc etc) as your life. You don't think of those things as your life. That's just some stuff. But in reality, that's a lot of your life. And we don't think about how we treat the people we see everyday as indicative of how we treat people, but that is how you treat people. You may think of yourself as being calm and patient because you would totally good samaritan someone that you saw beaten by the side of the road, but for most of us, how you would treat a beaten gentleman is not a very good indicator of how you treat people, given that you typically see almost zero beaten roadside gentlemen in an average week.

The story we tell ourselves is that we would totally spring into action if called upon to do the right thing, but the need for us to do the right thing just never comes up, fortunately for us. We would treat people well in one grand gesture, but won't treat them well on a daily basis. We would absolutely lay down our lives for our friends, but won't pick up the phone when we know they need help moving. That kind of thing. And that line of thought is awfully pervasive in things - we always assume that we could handle an act of supreme sacrifice if called upon, safe in the knowledge that it's not going to be an obligation for us anytime soon. 

But Christ dictates that you should be laying down your life for your friends. And that means that you are going to be asked to die for the brothers, yes, but also to spend your life bit by bit on them. And that will come up on a regular basis. After all, we forget that the injunction from Jesus in Matthew 25 (When I was sick, did you take care of me, when I was hungry did you feed me, when I was naked did you clothe me) apply to the sick and vulnerable but also to those who need your help on a regular basis. Because that's your actual life. The people you need to feed and clothe and take care of on a regular basis, that's how you actually treat people .That's the nature of your sacrifice, the nature of you laying down your life for the brothers. Thinking about this means that the way you treat people on a regular basis is how you treat people. Your life is the sum of what you do on a consistent basis. You can't claim a moral good on how you would act if a grand gesture would come up and you're never required to do it. Rather, you laying down your life for your brothers will be laying down your time and resources for them nice and regularly. 

It seems like a lot, which it is, which is why you need grace as much as you do. Have you laid down your life for the brothers? Probably not as much as you should have. Have you given until there's nothing left? I doubt it. And that's why you need Jesus, who did all those things, and imbues you with that same righteousness. Which is good, because that gulf between what Jesus asks for and what you can do is why you need his grace.

The Good Shepherd

 The goodness of the shepherd is understated. 

Things from the Bible take on a life of their own after a while, one of the more notable is the story of the Good Samaritan. In common parlance these days, we only use the word 'Samaritan' with the qualifier 'Good.' And if someone were to refer to someone as a 'Samaritan,' you would assume that the person in question had done something good or charitable. You would assume that the 'Samaritan' was by definition good.

But hold on, gang, because the reason that the story was so surprising was that the audience was not expecting the Samaritan in the parable to be good. They were expecting the priest or the Levite to take care of their own, to do the good thing. They weren't expecting the Samaritan to do that. So the surprising part of the parable is that the Samaritan is good, though he is not expected to be, though he has no motivation to be. He doesn't owe the beaten man anything, they're natural enemies, but he still does the work to take care of him, nurse him back to health, at his own expense. 

So the Good Shepherd works the same way. We would expect a good shepherd to be good at the job of shepherding. That is, does he keep track of the sheep, does he take appropriate bathroom breaks, does he show up to work on time and give 110% while he's at work? Does he show up 15 minutes before his shift, and leave no earlier than 10 minutes after his shift is over? What a good shepherd. 

We think of a good employee at being good vis a vis his employer. Does he do his job to his employer's satisfaction? Or, we can look at it from the other direction, does the employee give great service to the customer? Is the waiter attentive to the needs of the diners whether the manager or owner cares or not? Where we don't tend to think of it is the question of how does the employee treat the goods? That's a much lesser concern, and one that doesn't factor in to the decisions of big capital. Are you good for the boss or the customer? Not are you good for the product. 

But the good shepherd is set apart for the goodness that he has for the sheep. Not for the employer, nor the end customer, but for the sheep. And that's unexpected, because the feeling of the livestock very rarely factors into decisions. Who cares if the sheep are enjoying themselves? The average farmer or rancher, though caring and conscientious, won't die for the livestock. The livestock are an investment, a store of value, something to help you live your life. They're there to enable you, not for you to enable them. There's no sense in you laying down your life for the sheep any more than there would be sense in you laying down your life for your work truck, or your toolbox or whatever. Those things are there to help you in your livelihood, which is harder to enjoy if you're dead. 

The Good Shepherd is there for the sheep. He cares about the sheep far FAR more than he should. He doesn't view the sheep as a store of value, or as a means to an end, he views them as important in and of themselves. This is much more of the way a person would view a pet than livestock. There was a time where people would view dogs as a working animal only, to live outside and do their jobs. And nobody would lay down their life for that. But perception of dogs changed over time, they became companions and friends, and eventually family. And as family, they were the sort of thing that people would lay down their lives for that animal. Why? 

The dog didn't change. Dogs haven't changed much time since we viewed them as tools, to be sure. But what did change is how we viewed them. We changed our perspective on them, changed our view of what it means to live with dogs, and then changed how we treat them and behave around them. All that was required was a change in our perspective, not a change in the dogs. We decided to view them as family, and therefore they became so. If a shepherd decides to view the sheep as family, as worth more than an financial investment but as family, then he would then treat them as such. If the shepherd declares them as family, they therefore would become family. The shepherd decides. 

So what that means is that you have a rare assessment. The sheep get to decide if the shepherd is good or not. The hired hands are deemed to be bad based on the fact that they would choose to desert, to leave the sheep defenseless. But the good shepherd is viewed as good by the perception of the sheep. It's rare, to be sure, for the sheep to get a vote, but they do. And if sheep could vote on the quality of a shepherd, what would they vote on? They'd vote on whether the shepherd makes them down to lie, leads them beside still waters, restores their souls, leads them in paths of righteousness for his name's sake, etc. It wouldn't be a vote on whether the shepherd is efficient, or prompt, or anything like that. How does the shepherd treat his sheep.

It's rare then as now to consider the possibility that a shepherd would care so much for the sheep that he would die, but that's the difference between a shepherd and a good one. That he would declare the sheep as worth it, and then would act accordingly. 

Righteous anger

 Okay.

We know that Jesus is without sin. That's sort of a definite part of the Christian faith, Christ as a perfect, sinless man, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. If you don't think that Jesus is perfect, that he was sinful in some key way and that his perfection isn't real or important, then skip ahead a few paragraphs, because certain things in the Christian faith remain true whether you believe in them or not.

If Jesus is sinless, which we believe that he is, then what he does is sinless by definition. That is, he can't do anything sinful, since it would be mutually exclusive with his perfection. If he's sinless then he can't commit any sins by definition. Now that we've covered that, we can get into his outrage in the temple. You need to understand that when he is clearing people, sellers, animals out of the temple, he's not doing it calmly and placidly. He's angry. Zeal for the house of the Lord consumes him. It's a matter of him looking at injustice, looking at people standing between humanity and God through exploitation and profit seeking, and did something about it. 

Now, I'd like to offer the following hot take: It was good for Jesus to clear the temple. I know, I said that something Jesus did was good, wow, very brave. But hold on a moment, it's worth discussing that you don't have to make any apologies for Jesus clearing the temple. If anyone says something like 'Jesus was angry and threw people out of the temple by driving them out with whips' your response as a Christian should simply be 'Yes.' 

Yes, Jesus did clear the Temple. Yes it was necessary, and beyond that, yes, it was good. Don't make excuses for it, and don't minimize it. And don't minimize the anger of Christ either. This is one of a very few parts of scripture in which Jesus shows and displays anger, and we should, as the kids say, let him cook.  

If you saw the movie 'Inside out' from Disney, which was a while ago, the essential message was that all the core emotions that you have are good and good for you, they just have to be used correctly. Anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, they're all good in the right way, and place. They're all helpful, and none of them are 'bad'. This is true in the case of Christ too. His anger isn't misplaced here, it's a good thing. He is rightly angry at the division between God and humanity, and sought to address that injustice by driving out everything that would stand between people and God. 

But then what?

That's the big question that lurks at the base of it all, isn't it? The big question that lurks behind everything is the question of what does Jesus do after he's done driving everyone out? He doesn't just cast them all out with whips, once he's done that, he stays in the temple to teach. And that's a real difference right there. This is what law and gospel looks like in practice. If there is sin, it has to be addressed and corrected. This is the law part, and this should be the best reminder to anyone that it's not as though old testament God is mean, and new testament God is nice. In the New Testament, there is still law. God, in the form of Christ, is present, and rightly angry. He wants to see the behavior stopped, and stopped hard. But he doesn't replace that bad behavior with nothing though. He replaces it with gospel, which is the point. 

Jesus sits down in the temple and teaches from that point on, you know. He teaches about grace, the Gospel, forgiveness and life. The purpose of anger isn't anger for its own sake, rather the anger is to remove what divides, and to replace it with reconciliation and forgiveness. The problem these days is that you're told to just keep everything under wraps, to not have discussions of any topic that matters, and to let people drift away if holding the relationship together becomes too difficult or taxing. But anger isn't a sin, you know. It's not inherently sinful. But it should be used for a good and fruitful purpose. That is, your anger should be used to move through sinful behavior, and towards reconciliation. Reconciliation that would not be possible without the anger.

Do you think for one moment that if Jesus had been passive in the face of the commerce in the Temple that they would have stopped? His anger was right and justified, and served to put grace back in the temple where there had been only works before. Properly considered the anger is the surgeon's scalpel, the dental drill, the thing that removes the death and rot so that healing can happen. Your anger hopefully is the same. Anger isn't a sin, but it is supposed to drive forgiveness, grace and reconciliation. You're supposed to be angry but not sin, to be impelled to make things right, to insist that forgiveness is there, even though sins have to be repented of. As Christians, you're not supposed to ignore injustice, nor to dismiss it, or claim that it doesn't matter. You're supposed to deal with these things head on, and to be angry where anger is required. But that anger must lead to repentance, and that repentance must come with forgiveness. This is a Christian absolute. And if that's the case, you're not going to be as tied up in knots about whether anger is or is not sinful, but to ask what the purpose of that anger is, and to ensure that it moves into a good direction.