I just feel so angry

For the final few days of my half term holiday I have been forced to confront the issue of anger. Both within myself and all around me every time I turn on the tv or listen to the news.

There is a sense of building anger within and without and unless it is addressed I fear….well I think we are already beginning to see the results of anger.

It has made me think about a particular scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Harry has had so much happen to him that it is all kind of just spilling over. He is getting angry all the time. Sometimes it is righteous anger at the way he and others are being treated and other times it is petty vindictive anger because he isn’t getting his way. Harry does though recognise that his anger is becoming a problem and he worries that something has gone wrong inside him so he speaks to his godfather Sirius about it.

Harry: This connection between me me and Voldemort, what if the reason for it is that I'm becoming more like him? I just feel so angry, all the time. And what if after everything I've been through, something's gone wrong inside me. What if I'm becoming bad?
Sirius: I want you to listen to me very carefully Harry. You're not a bad person. You're a very good person, who bad things have happened to. You understand?
'[Harry nods his head] '
Sirius: Besides, the world isn't split into good people and Death Eaters. We have all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the power we choose to act on. That's who we really are.

Sirius is entirely right of course, it is how we respond to the world, which part within us we give power to that determines who we are.

We live in a stressful time, it has brought many of us to the very edge of what we are equipped to tolerate and so when something goes wrong it can be like a spark in a balloon filled with petrol.

It can be especially hard to deal with when we think of Jesus teaching on anger when he says “You’ve heard it said, ‘Don’t murder’ well, I tell you do not even get angry!” It can make us feel guilty about feeling anger, especially when the anger happens without us being able to control it as happened with Harry. What Jesus was speaking about though was our inability to keep God’s law on our own and that we need help. I’m sure some of you have seen the slogan that you can get on t-shirts and mugs which reads “Some people are only alive right now because it is illegal for me to shoot them in the head!” This is kind of the reason why Jesus was saying that getting angry was wrong, because if you let the anger rule you and your decisions it can lead you down a bad path.

Jesus knew that there were two different kinds of anger and the response we have to feeling them should be different. They could be termed Righteous anger and ungodly anger, and in the church we might use the language of “sin” to help us understand it.

What it really comes down to is one is the anger which we feel which comes from the darkness we see outside ourselves, when we see laws broken, lives taken, abuse and wrongdoing and this sparks anger within us. This is righteous anger, it is the anger Jesus felt when he saw God’s house used as a marketplace to cheat people out of their money in the name of religion, it was the anger he felt when the priests used a poor man’s disability of a withered hand to test to see if Jesus would break the holy day of the sabbath by healing the man. Jesus healed the man saying that it is more lawful to do good than evil.

The other kind of anger is the one which comes from the darkness within us, it comes from our injured pride, our inflated sense of self worth, from jealousy or lust or greed. It is this anger we need to deal with and rid ourselves of. It is this anger which hurts others. The way to deal with it is to look at what the root is within us, what dark place is feeding it.

Anger in an of itself is not wrong, it can motivate people to acts of greatness in the service of others who are being wronged but we need to give the anger to God. Let God guide our actions and watch that the anger we feel does not take root in us, anchoring itself on our own sense of injury.

Therefore, if you are seeing something in the news which sparks anger within you, give it to God and ask “God take this anger which I feel, direct me in how I should respond. Do I forgive and move on or is it time to speak out and make sure that this does not happen to others again?”