The Christian emotional life is a complicated thing. There's a time to get angry, Paul affirms, but the time to stay angry is short (vv. 25-27):You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness (Ephesians 4.22-24).
So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another. Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and do not make room for the devil.Or, more specific for what I'm thinking today: There are good grounds for anger, but there are no good grounds for grudges.
(1) There are good grounds for anger.
Biblically, good anger is characterized by two things: (a) it's based on God, and (b) it's mingled with grief. I constantly tell folks that sadness -- grief -- is an emotion that's deeper, more spiritual, than simple anger. After all, "Jesus looked around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart" (Mark 3.5). It's one thing to be indignant, but it's another for the anger to result in a grief, a sadness, that longs for reconciliation. Absence of the latter is a disobedience. From Ephesians 4, again:
Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.It's not that easy not to hold a grudge. But this is why the emotional life, for Christians, is a discipline. It requires training.
(2) There are no good grounds for grudges.
That training, that discipline, is at the heart of the Christian life:
If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink; for you will heap coals of fire on their heads, and the Lord will reward you (Proverbs 25.21-22).Or, as Jesus put it elsewhere (Matthew 5.44-45):
But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.The discipline of kindness is the Christian response. Holding a grudge isn't.
"But you don't understand; you don't know what they did to me." You're right, I don't. But I know that carrying the bitterness that leads to carrying a grudge is not the discipline of being Christian.
Nor, for that matter, is the gloating that goes into karma:
Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble ... (Proverbs 24.17).We all battle hurt feelings. What matters is what we do with those hurt feelings. Allowing anger to rule our life is like inviting wild horses to control the cart. Instead of holding grudges, and allowing those grudges to drive us away from others, it's the time to draw nearest to them in kindness -- to be Jesus -- to them.