We Are Our Brother’s Keeper

We are living in an age of outrage. Everyone seems to be angry at someone or something. Anger seems to be the norm. Name calling, degrading, demeaning, foul and filthy language is overwhelming and common. It’s everywhere. This indicates that society finds contempt and disrespect acceptable.

Sadly this is also true of Christians. The same Christians who talk about love lash out in anger against others, even fellow believers. They shout and throw and post derogatory insults against political, cultural, religious, even Christian figures.

They justify their anger and contempt by saying, “We need to get angry at sin in the world. Look at Jesus. He was angry at the Pharisees. See how angry God was at sin and with those who oppressed the poor.” And then the cherry on the cake, “My outrage is righteous anger.”

This is not the kingdom way. The gospel of Jesus Christ might be foolishness and offensive to the world but that does not give us license to be offensive, angry and hateful. The kingdom response is always persistent love, grace, and forgiveness, aiming at reconciliation and peacemaking.

Jesus teaches us here that human life is valuable. All people are valued in God’s eyes because they are created in God’s image. God loves all people. Anger, contempt, hatred are attacks on a fellow human’s life. They take life. It is murder. We are our brother’s keeper, called to love and to look out for, to care for the welfare and wellbeing of our neighbors, all of them, no exception.

1. Be Slow to Anger

Can we be angry? Yes and No.

We all experience anger. Anger is a spontaneous response, a natural feeling that arises in us. It has a function. Anger alerts us, warns, when our wills, plans, goals, or lives are obstructed or hindered.

It is like physical pain. Pain warns you that something is hurting you, wounding you. You need to deal with the source of that pain. If you do not, the pain will increase. And if not treated, the wound will become infected, make you sick, and eventually kill you. The same with anger.

So, anger in itself is not necessarily bad. And not all anger is evil. God gets angry at sin, injustice, and rebellion. The Bible tells us that God pours out his wrath on sinners because God is perfectly holy. If God ignored evil, sin, oppression and injustice, he would not be a holy, just and righteous God. Therefore, God’s anger is righteous.

Yes, Jesus was angry at the Pharisees, at sin and injustice, but he never became angry at personal insult or affront. When Jesus was dying, “when they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (1 Peter 2:23). (Hughes)

We should be angry over sin in ourselves and in the world. We should be angry about injustice. We should especially be angry when we fail to get angry about the things that anger God. So there is such a thing as righteous anger. But, we must remember that there is a huge difference between God and us. We are not Jesus, perfectly holy. We are broken, flawed and biased. Even when we are certain that our anger is righteous, our sinful flesh distorts our vision and blinds us to the truth (Stetzer). What started out as righteous anger very quickly turns into self-righteous anger. Because we are sinful even righteous anger cause us to commit wrong, sinful deeds, or take wrong actions.

Because here is the problem. Anger happens. But what do we do with the anger? We cannot avoid or control the first spontaneous feeling of anger happening to us. But we have a choice, and we can control what we do with the anger. Anger becomes a problem, becomes evil when we actively receive it and decide to indulge it. It becomes a problem when we turn the anger we are experiencing into an angry response toward others.

We embrace and cultivate anger because of our wounded ego’s. Our bruised vanity and pride blow the wound and hurt out of proportion. When we indulge in and cultivate anger, it means that we do not allow the feeling to pass. We do not deal with it in healthy, positive kingdom ways. We grab onto it, hold onto it, and we can do that only by justifying it through self-righteousness. “I have been hurt. I am in pain. My plans are upset.” There are no biblical reasons to hold on to the anger. The kingdom way is to respond to anger with love, grace, and forgiveness like God did through Jesus Christ. Anything else is our wounded ego talking and working, our pride and our vanity because that has been hurt.

Anger hurts. Anger causes injury to self and others. “Anger is always an attack on the brother’s life, for it refuses to let him live and aims at his destruction … anger is an offense against both God and his neighbor. Every idle word which we think so little of betrays our lack of respect for our neighbor, and shows that we place ourselves on a pinnacle above him and value our own lives higher than his. The angry word is a blow struck at our brothers, a stab at his heart: it seeks to hit, to hurt and to destroy. A deliberate insult is even worse, for we are then openly disgracing our brother in the eyes of the world, and causing others to despise him. With our hearts burning with hatred, we seek to annihilate his moral and material existence. We are passing judgment on him, and that is murder. And the murderer will himself be judged.” (Bonhoeffer, 127-128)

2. Be Slow to Speak

Therefore, we must be slow to speak. This brings us to anger’s twin brother, contempt (Willard). Anger needs to be acted on and acted out to become evil. Contempt is inherently evil and poisonous, an even greater evil than anger.

The word, Raca, expressed contempt for someone. It is to mark, single them out as contemptible. It is like spitting on them. “Your fool!” Is like calling another person a worthless non-human. It is an expression of malice as well as contempt (Willard, 153). Today’s equivalents — any name calling of another person.

Contempt always excludes someone, pushes them away, leaves them out and isolated, ignores them. It is cruel and serious. It breaks social bonds and relationships more severely than anger. When we dehumanize others in the heat of anger, or at any other time, we devalue their worth in the sight of God. We mistreat them terribly.

James 3:5-6: “Likewise, the tongue is a small part of the body, but it makes great boasts. Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark. The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole body, sets the whole course of one’s life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.”

“Filthy language and name calling are always an expression of contempt. The current swarm of filthy language floats upon the sea of contempt in which our society is now adrift … Contemptuous actions and attitudes are a knife in the heart that permanently harms and mutilates people’s souls” (Willard, 152 & 153)

Contempt is a violation of the soul so devastating that it deserves hell. Anger very quickly leads to contempt and then hatred. Anger and contempt is murder! “People with such attitudes towards others cannot live in the kingdom of God.” (Willard 154)

3. We Are Our Brothers’ Keepers

Next week we will look into detail at verses 23-26. What to do with anger? What to do when we are angry? What to do when someone is angry at us? For now I want to close with two very important principles Jesus teaches us here.

First, Jesus goes deep to the heart of the matter, that is, the heart. Outward obedience, acts of obedience are not enough. What is going on in our hearts? Where are our hearts? I may not physically murder someone, but when my heart is filled with anger and contempt toward others, I am killing them with my thoughts, attitudes, looks, words, or other unloving actions. And my righteousness is no better than those of the Pharisees. I am a hypocrite.

This is why Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with the heart habits, the heart qualities. The inner life of the soul, the heart, must be transformed by Jesus Christ, and then the right behavior, the right actions, the right life, righteousness, will flow easily and naturally by the power of the Holy Spirit.

“A heart that gives way to worldly anger is sinful and severely at odds with the Spirit of God. Such fury damages ourselves, our churches, our communities, and ultimately God’s Kingdom. Excusing it as an ‘innocent social media comment’ or simply ‘the way political rhetoric works’ sorely misses the point.” (Stetzer, 85)

Then, there is a reason Jesus begins his 6 statements on the law in chapter 5 with murder. He makes clear a very, very important principle that underlies and guides the rest of the statements, actually the whole Sermon on the Mount. Human life is valuable. ALL human beings, all persons, have value in God’s eyes because they are created in God’s image. That’s why Jesus became human to save us. He suffered and died for all. That is how much God loves the world, loves people. Therefore, we must value all human life. We must love all people.

Therefore, Jesus entrusts to our care the lives and the wellbeing of our fellow human beings. He tells us to look out for their welfare. He appoints us as our brothers’ keepers. Love is what it is all about. When at any time, anyone of us is thinking, “I cannot love love so and so,” we are on dangerous ground. We should fall on our knees, repent. Ask God to help us to love as he loves that person

“We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.” (1 Jn 4:19-21)

When you look at someone, anyone, you are looking at the image of God in all human beings, and we owe honor, respect, and love to that image and to the Creator of that image. We cannot look down on anyone. We are not better than anyone.

“Even when we recognize the sinfulness of others, our love must be motivated by the truth that all image bearers are worthy of our care. When Christians love others in an age of outrage, we also are loving the God to whom we do owe everything. This is radical in a world dominated by worldly or religious love, both of which inevitably lead to outrage.” (Stetzer, 221).

This is the radical kingdom life. We are the salt and light of the world by being the caretakers of others, by protecting the life of others, all others. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers.