It is the only occasion, so far as I remember, upon which that emotion
is attributed to Him. Once, and once only, the flash came out of the
clear sky of that meek and gentle heart. He was once angry; and we may
learn the lesson of the possibilities that lay slumbering in His love.
He was only once angry, and we may learn the lesson that His perfect
and divine charity 'is not easily provoked.' These very words from
Paul's wonderful picture may teach us that the perfection of divine
charity does not consist in its being incapable of becoming angry at
all, but only in its not being angry except upon grave and good
occasion.
Christ's anger was part of the perfection of His manhood. The man that
cannot be angry at evil lacks enthusiasm for good. The nature that is
incapable of being touched with generous and righteous indignation is
so, generally, either because it lacks fire and emotion altogether, or
because its vigour has been dissolved into a lazy indifference and
easy good nature which it mistakes for love. Better the heat of the
tropics, though sometimes the thunderstorms may gather, than the white
calmness of the frozen poles. Anger is not weakness, but it is
strength, if there be these three conditions, if it be evoked by a
righteous and unselfish cause, if it be kept under rigid control, and
if there be nothing in it of malice, even when it prompts to
punishment. Anger is just and right when it is not produced by the
mere friction of personal irritation (like electricity by rubbing),
but is excited by the contemplation of evil. It is part of the marks
of a good man that he kindles into wrath when he sees 'the oppressor's
wrong.' If you went out hence to-night, and saw some drunken ruffian
beating his wife or ill-using his child, would you not do well to be
angry? And when nations have risen up, as our own nation did seventy
years ago in a paroxysm of righteous indignation, and vowed that
British soil should no more bear the devilish abomination of slavery,
was there nothing good and great in that wrath? So it is one of the
strengths of man that he shall be able to glow with indignation at
evil.
Only all such emotion must be kept well in hand must never be suffered
to degenerate into passion. Passion is always weak, emotion is an
element of strength.
'The gods approve
The depth and not the tumult of the soul.'
But where a man does not let his wrath against evil go sputtering off
aimlessly, like a box of fireworks set all alight at once, then it
comes to be a strength and a help to much that is good.
The other condition that makes wrath righteous and essential to the
perfection of a man, is that there shall be in it no taint of malice.
Anger may impel to punish and not be malicious, if its reason for
punishment is the passionless impulse of justice or the reformation of
the wrong-doer. Then it is pure and true and good. Such wrath is a
part of the perfection of humanity, and such wrath was in Jesus
Christ.
But, still further, Christ's anger was part of His revelation of God.
What belongs to perfect man belongs to God in whose image man was
made. People are very often afraid of attributing to the divine nature
that emotion of wrath, very unnecessarily, I think, and to the
detriment of all their conceptions of the divine nature.
There is no reason why we should not ascribe emotion to Him. Passions
God has not; emotions the Bible represents Him as having. The god of
the philosopher has none. He is a cold, impassive Somewhat, more like
a block of ice than a god. But the God of the Bible has a heart that
can be touched, and is capable of something like what we call in
ourselves emotion. And if we rightly think of God as Love, there is no
more reason why we should not think of God as having the other emotion
of wrath; for as I have shown you, there is nothing in wrath itself
which is derogatory to the perfection of the loftiest spiritual
nature. In God's anger there is no self-regarding irritation, no
passion, no malice. It is the necessary displeasure and aversion of
infinite purity at the sight of man's impurity. God's anger is His
love thrown back upon itself from unreceptive and unloving hearts.
Just as a wave that would roll in smooth, unbroken, green beauty into
the open door of some sea-cave is dashed back in spray and foam from
some grim rock, so the love of God, meeting the unloving heart that
rejects it, and the purity of God meeting the impurity of man,
necessarily become that solemn reality, the wrath of the most high
God. 'A God all mercy were a God unjust.' The judge is condemned when
the culprit is acquitted; and he that strikes out of the divine nature
the capacity for anger against sin, little as he thinks it, is
degrading the righteousness and diminishing the love of God.
Oh, dear brethren, I beseech you do not let any easygoing gospel that
has nothing to say to you about God's necessary aversion from, and
displeasure with, and chastisement of, your sins and mine, draw you
away from the solemn and wholesome belief that there is that in God
which must hate and war against and chastise our evil, and that if
there were not, He would be neither worth loving nor worth trusting.
And His Son, in His tears and in His tenderness, which were habitual,
and also in that lightning flash which once shot across the sky of His
nature, was revealing Him to us. The Gospel is not only the revelation
of God's righteousness for faith, but is also 'the revelation of His
wrath against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.'
'It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.' The ox, with the
yoke on his neck, lashes out with his obstinate heels against the
driver's goad. He does not break the goad, but only embrues his own
limbs. Do not you do that!
II. And now, once more, let me ask you to look at the compassion which
goes with our Lord's anger here; 'being grieved at the hardness of
their hearts.'
The somewhat singular word rendered here 'grieved,' may either simply
imply that this sorrow co-existed with the anger, or it may describe
the sorrow as being sympathy or compassion. I am disposed to take it
in the latter application, and so the lesson we gather from these
words is the blessed thought that Christ's wrath was all blended with
compassion and sympathetic sorrow.
He looked upon these scribes and Pharisees sitting there with hatred
in their eyes; and two emotions, which many men suppose as discrepant
and incongruous as fire and water, rose together in His heart: wrath,
which fell on the evil; sorrow, which bedewed the doers of it. The
anger was for the hardening, the compassion was for the hardeners.
If there be this blending of wrath and sorrow, the combination takes
away from the anger all possibility of an admixture of these
questionable ingredients, which mar human wrath, and make men shrink
from attributing so turbid and impure an emotion to God. It is an
anger which lies harmoniously in the heart side by side with the
tenderest pity--the truest, deepest sorrow.
Again, if Christ's sorrow flowed out thus along with His anger when He
looked upon men's evil, then we understand in how tragic a sense He
was 'a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' The pain and the
burden and the misery of His earthly life had no selfish basis. They
were not like the pain and the burdens and the misery that so many of
us howl out so loudly about, arising from causes affecting ourselves.
But for Him--with His perfect purity, with His deep compassion, with
His heart that was the most sensitive heart that ever beat in a human
breast, because it was the only perfectly pure one that ever beat
there--for Him to go amongst men was to be wounded and bruised and
hacked by the sharp swords of their sins.
Everything that He touched burned that pure nature, which was
sensitive to evil, like an infant's hand to hot iron. His sorrow and
His anger were the two sides of the medal. His feelings in looking on
sin were like a piece of woven stuff with a pattern on either side, on
one the fiery threads--the wrath; on the other the silvery tints of
sympathetic pity. A warp of wrath, a woof of sorrow, dew and flame
married and knit together.
And may we not draw from this same combination of these two apparently
discordant emotions in our Lord, the lesson of what it is in men that
makes them the true subjects of pity? Ay, these scribes and Pharisees
had very little notion that there was anything about them to
compassionate. But the thing which in the sight of God makes the true
evil of men's condition is not their circumstances but their sins. The
one thing to weep for when we look at the world is not its
misfortunes, but its wickedness. Ah! brother, that is the misery of
miseries; that is the one thing worth crying about in our own lives,
or in anybody else's. From this combination of indignation and pity,
we may learn how we should look upon evil. Men are divided into two
classes in their way of looking at wickedness in this world. One set
are rigid and stern, and crackling into wrath; the other set placid
and good-natured, and ready to weep over it as a misfortune and a
calamity, but afraid or unwilling to say: 'These poor creatures are to
be blamed as well as pitied.' It is of prime importance that we all
should try to take both points of view, looking on sin as a thing to
be frowned at, but also looking on it as a thing to be wept over; and
to regard evil-doers as persons that deserve to be blamed and to be
chastised, and made to feel the bitterness of their evil, and not to
interfere too much with the salutary laws that bring down sorrow upon
men's heads if they have been doing wrong, but, on the other hand, to
take care that our sense of justice does not swallow up the compassion
that weeps for the criminal as an object of pity. Public opinion and
legislation swing from the one extreme to the other. We have to make
an effort to keep in the centre, and never to look round in anger,
unsoftened by pity, nor in pity, enfeebled by being separated from
righteous indignation.
III. Let me now deal briefly with the last point that is here, namely,
the occasion for both the sorrow and the anger, 'Being grieved at the
_hardening_ of the hearts.'
As I said at the beginning of these remarks, 'hardness,' the rendering
of our Authorised Version, is not quite so near the mark as that of
the Revised Version, which speaks not so much of a condition as of a
process: 'He was grieved at the hardening of their hearts,' which He
saw going on there.
And what was hardening their hearts? It was He. Why were their hearts
being hardened? Because they were looking at Him, His graciousness,
His goodness, and His power, and were steeling themselves against Him,
opposing to His grace and tenderness their own obstinate
determination. Some little gleams of light were coming in at their
windows, and they clapped the shutters up. Some tones of His voice
were coming into their ears, and they stuffed their fingers into them.
They half felt that if they let themselves be influenced by Him it was
all over, and so they set their teeth and steadied themselves in their
antagonism.
And that is what some of you are doing now. Jesus Christ is never
preached to you, even although it is as imperfectly as I do it, but
that you either gather yourselves into an attitude of resistance, or,
at least, of mere indifference till the flow of the sermon's words is
done; or else open your hearts to His mercy and His grace.
Oh, dear brethren, will you take this lesson of the last part of my
text, that nothing so tends to harden a man's heart to the gospel of
Jesus Christ as religious formalism? If Jesus Christ were to come in
here now, and stand where I am standing, and look round about upon
this congregation, I wonder how many a highly respectable and
perfectly proper man and woman, church and chapel-goer, who keeps the
Sabbath day, He would find on whom He had to look with grief not
unmingled with anger, because they were hardening their hearts against
Him now. I am sure there are some of such among my present audience. I
am sure there are some of you about whom it is true that 'the
publicans and the harlots will go into the Kingdom of God before you,'
because in their degradation they may be nearer the lowly penitence
and the consciousness of their own misery and need, which will open
their eyes to see the beauty and the preciousness of Jesus Christ.
Dear brother, let no reliance upon any external attention to religious
ordinances; no interest, born of long habit of hearing sermons; no
trust in the fact of your being communicants, blind you to this, that
all these things may come between you and your Saviour, and so may
take you away into the outermost darkness.
Dear brother or sister, you are a sinner. 'The God in whose hand thy
breath is, and whose are all thy ways, thou hast not glorified.' You
have forgotten Him; you have lived to please yourselves. I charge you
with nothing criminal, with nothing gross or sensual; I know nothing
about you in such matters; but I know this--that you have a heart like
mine, that we have all of us the one character, and that we all need
the one gospel of that Saviour 'who bare our sins in His own body on
the tree,' and died that whosoever trusts in Him may live here and
yonder. I beseech you, harden not your hearts, but to-day hear His
voice, and remember the solemn words which not I, but the Apostle of
Love, has spoken: 'He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life,
he that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God
abideth upon him.' Flee to that sorrowing and dying Saviour, and take
the cleansing which He gives, that you may be safe on the sure
foundation when God shall arise to do His strange work of judgment,
and may never know the awful meaning of that solemn word--'the wrath
of the Lamb.'