Righteous Anger
by Paulist Fr. Rich Andre
March 6, 2018

Leer en español/Read in Spanish

Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 3rd Sunday of Lent (Year B) on March 8, 2015, at St. John XXIII Parish in Knoxville, TN. He preached a similar homily in Spanish at the Minimum and Medium Security Block of the Knox County Detention Facility the night before. The Spanish text of this homily is available at the bottom of this page. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; and John 2:13-25. 



Today, our readings are about jealousy and anger. Surprisingly, it is God the Father and Jesus who are expressing these emotions!

So today, we face an interesting question: if God describes himself as jealous and punishing, and if Jesus gets angry enough to throw things, is it OK for us to be jealous or angry?


In the season of Lent, Catholics often give up certain luxuries – such as eating chocolate – or they take on certain extra activities – such as volunteering at a soup kitchen. I had originally intended to take up several little disciplines for Lent this year. But as Lent began, I realized that God was calling me to work on a part of myself deep inside of me: my inner critic. Often, my inner critic is the first and loudest part of me to react to any situation. He finds fault with everything I do. 

For the first eleven days of Lent, by the grace of God, I was successful in keeping my critic from taking over. When I woke up, I would take a few extra minutes for prayer, and somehow, I was consistently able to center myself in a spirit of thanksgiving. Once my critic woke up, he would start complaining as usual about how I had done everything wrong in the previous 24 hours. But I was able to stay centered. The Holy Spirit and I would calmly listen to the critic, and then gently point out how unreasonable he was being. It was wonderful! My goal this Lent is to give myself the same compassion that God gives to me.

Compassion. That’s a strange idea to consider on a day when we hear about Jesus getting angry. Did Jesus really act this way? Yes. The early Christians would not have made up a story like this. This story is so inconsistent with our image of Jesus that it MUST be part of what Jesus really did. 

What are we to make of Jesus getting angry? Anger itself is not a sin. It’s an emotion. Emotions are God-given gifts. If God didn’t want us to have certain emotions – including the scary ones, such as anger, anxiety, arousal, envy, fear, loneliness, and sadness – God would not have made us capable of feeling them. To grow in holiness, we need to learn to recognize our emotions. So many of us have spent a lifetime trying to ignore our emotions, so it can be hard to recognize them.

However, when we feel angry – or anxious, aroused, envious, afraid, lonely, or sad – we have to find healthy ways to channel our anger. We need to make a choice: are we going to let go of our anger, or are we going to do something about it? A lot of us claim that we’re letting go of our anger when we have every intention of holding onto it. There’s a word for doing that: resentment. Resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. It doesn’t work!

If we can’t let go of our anger, we must choose healthy ways to act on it. Sometimes it’s simple. We just need to wait until we’re calm. Then, we ask the Holy Spirit to guide us as we talk with the person we’re mad at. Sometimes it’s more complicated. If the situation that makes us angry will not change, the best solution may be for us to remove ourselves from the situation. 

At first glance, Jesus’ anger doesn’t seem especially healthy or holy. But did you notice that Jesus does not destroy anything in his zeal? He spills the coins and overturns the tables, but it will probably take the moneychangers only a few minutes to pick things up. He drives the sheep and oxen out of the temple area, but the merchants can quickly round them up. But John notes that Jesus did not release the doves from their cages. Recapturing the birds would have taken considerable effort, and the merchants would have lost a lot of money doing so. 

So, what are we to take away from this? John is the first to point out that “[Jesus] himself understood [human nature] well.” When we are angry – or anxious, or aroused, or envious, or afraid, or lonely, or sad – that does not separate us from God. Jesus Christ felt these same feelings, so we should not ignore them. And like Jesus – and like countless saints who came after him – we can channel these feelings in ways that don’t inflict damage.

My luck ran out on the twelfth day of Lent. My inner critic woke up first, and it wasn’t pretty. Even as I prayed, my critic wouldn’t stop complaining about the choices I had made in the previous days, forcing me get up extra early to go to work. Actually, I was waking up to work on this very homily that you’re hearing now! I finally realized how silly I was being when I wrote this in my prayer journal: “Help me to not be so mad at myself, Lord – especially since I need to write this homily on [properly channeling] anger!” My anger was inflicting damage, damage on myself.

Lent is a time to remember that we are all sinners, but that’s not the main point. Lent is a time of growth. So, the question to reflect on today is this: how is God inviting you to have more compassion for yourself?

Can we look at our sins in the same way that God looks upon us? Self-loathing is a lousy motivator, and self-loathing certainly isn’t a gift from God. Our dissatisfaction with our sins should not motivate us to hate ourselves, but to see ourselves through the loving eyes of God.