September 13, 2024
As I’ve simultaneously embarked on my sabbatical, which ought to make me rested, and my training to be a spiritual director, which ought to make me good, I’ve stumbled into an uncomfortable reality: I am often cranky.
Angry, even.
Without dwelling too long upon the actual anger and what to make of it, the subject of a longer essay I’m working on, suffice to say I don’t feel great about it. As I seek to grow into a spiritually mature person, even training to help others grow, I can imagine the calm, patient, gentle guru I should be. And I try, I really do, to hold it in, to take deep breaths, to not let things get to me.
But after every accidental explosion, like when my four year old, against all parental admonitions, wiggles her way into knocking over my just-purchased cup of iced coffee on a hot, tired day, prompting a stranger to tell me how I should instead be parenting—which you know I received with grace and honest self-reflection—I ask myself, ashamed at my lack of control and inability to play nice: What kind of guru is seething?
Well, Jesus was.
At least, when the situation called for it. The story you usually hear is righteous anger Jesus, turning over tables in the temple, fighting injustice: God’s house, which should have been a haven for all to know God, perverted into a place of exploitation of the vulnerable. Even a normally calm guru should get mad about that.
But Jesus, embodied God, was also fully human. And this couldn’t have been the only time the very human and familiar emotion of anger arose in his holy heart.
I notice one day, as I’m reading a blessing poem from a beautiful book by K.J. Ramsey, gifted me for my sabbatical, a reference to Jesus raising the dead “with anger on your lips.” It quotes John 11:38, just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, describing “the anger welling up within him.”
What?
When was Jesus angry in this story? He was sad, right? Isn’t this the site of the famous shortest verse “Jesus wept,” his emotional humanity on full display?
Well, sure. But emotion is almost never one dimensional, and it wouldn’t be that strange to imagine Jesus feeling more than pure grief. What was strange, though, was that while this translation, the Message, described “anger welling up within” Jesus, when I flipped open my own Bible to the story, my trusty old NIV, preferred translation for millions, reported the tamer “more deeply moved.”
Maybe the Message was taking poetic license? It’s a paraphrase, after all, not direct translation. But it was created by a serious and revered Biblical scholar. The whole point is using modern English to convey the heart of what was intended, so Western readers can better understand. And “anger welling up” sure conveys something different from “deeply moved.”
I looked up a series of English translations to cross check. A few translations, ones I’m not as familiar with (CSB, NLT) mention anger. But most repeat the NIV’s “deeply moved” (ESV, NAS, CJB, DBY), or greatly/deeply “disturbed” (NRS, CEB, CEBA)), or even the more melodramatic “groaning in himself” (KJV, NKJV, ASV). To the mind of this emo enneagram 4, there’s a world of difference between groaning in myself in sorrow and anger welling up. Groaning in sorrow is a nun ministering to famine victims. Anger welling up is me with iced latte dripping over my pants. Which is it?
I’m no Greek scholar, but I can wield Google. I pull up an outline of the original Greek words these translations are based on, which reports John’s actual word is “embrimaomai.” Means nothing to me, of course, but a quick flip over to Strong’s concordance spells out a meaning that goes beyond even the poetic “anger welling up within:” “to be moved with anger, to admonish sternly.” And the usage, get this: to snort, with the notion of coercion springing out of displeasure, anger, indignation, antagonism. Express indignant displeasure with someone. From em/en – engaged in and “brimaomai” to snort.
That is, to snort like an angry horse.
Perhaps what John is really saying is that our Lord was snorting like an angry horse. And not only that, snorting at someone. It wasn’t just the situation, heavy as Lazarus’s death was. It was annoying people.
Jesus – he gets us!
Sorrow, grief—these are acceptable deep emotions. No wonder the translators often steer us away from what may have been John’s actual intent. To imagine Jesus snorting like an angry horse at someone being a pain in the neck, well, that’s a little dangerous. If Jesus can snort at a jerk, what does that mean for me?
So conditioned to be pleasant, perhaps we miss that love can be strong as well as gentle. The anger here seems aimed at bystanders more intent on proving their rightness and making a point than tending to the genuine pain of Martha and Mary. Love didn’t mean nodding politely, letting the haters hate at the expense of the grieving. Love compelled Jesus feel both sorrow for his friends and indignant displeasure at people who just didn’t get it. So Jesus was annoyed.
We’ll say, rightly annoyed, because he was perfect, right? My annoyance may not be so right. But at least the next time I feel like snorting like a horse in my own indignation and displeasures, I can trust Jesus has been there. And I can let him be with me even in these less-societally unacceptable feelings, seeking to cultivate in their dark soil the strength, in the words of the poem that sent me down this trail, “to demand death’s violence be removed like a stone from the tomb of our world.”*
*He Leads Me, from The Book of Common Courage, by K.J. Ramsey, pg. 58.
