I’m Still Angry About It

Jesus sends men ahead into a Samaritan village to arrange lodging, and the village turns them away.

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, which means he’s headed for the end of it, and he sends men ahead to make arrangements, and the village won’t have him. Old grievance, wrong mountain, the same argument the woman at the well was living underneath.

And James and John come back and ask him a question.

Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?

That’s not a figure of speech. They’re asking permission to burn a town off the map because it was rude to their friend.

But Jesus turned and rebuked them.

Then they all went to another village. Four verses. One rebuke. Everybody walks on down the road.

Here’s the first thing about those two, and it changes how you read that.

Jesus had already given them a nickname.

James son of Zebedee and his brother John, to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means Sons of Thunder.

He named them for it.

Before the village, before the fire, before any of it. He looked at those two men and saw exactly what they were made of and gave them a name that says so, and then kept them for three years.

He was not surprised by the fire request. He’d already labeled the barrel.

And I want you to notice he rebuked them and did not remove them. There’s no verse anywhere where he sends them home. They are still with him in the next scene. James is in the inner three. And the disciple standing at the cross when the rest of the Twelve are gone has been taken to be John for as long as anybody has been reading it, though the gospel itself never puts a name to him.

The heat did not disqualify them. It got them a nickname and a talking-to.

Now let me say something about the kind of anger this actually is, because I think you’ve been misfiling yours.

Their anger was righteous.

That’s the thing. They weren’t angry about a parking space. They were angry on behalf of somebody they loved, at people who had insulted him, in a situation where the insult was real and undeserved. Every fact in their case was correct.

That’s the most dangerous anger there is, and it’s the kind you’ve got.

You’re not angry about nothing. I’d bet what happened to you was real. Somebody did do that. The board did vote that way. He did say that to your daughter. The church did handle it exactly the way you remember it. Nobody has ever apologized and nobody is going to, and every particular of your account would hold up.

That’s precisely why it’s lasted twenty years. Ordinary anger burns off. Righteous anger doesn’t, because every time you check it, it’s still true, and being still true feels like a reason to keep holding it.

Now the other story about these two, because you need both to see the pattern.

Later, they come to him with a request. In Mark it’s the brothers themselves, in Matthew it’s their mother making the ask, which is its own kind of wonderful.

Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.

Top two seats. In writing, in advance.

And when the other ten find out, Mark says they were indignant, which I’d imagine is putting it mildly.

Jesus doesn’t scold them for wanting something. Watch how he answers.

You don’t know what you are asking. Can you drink the cup I drink?

We can, they say. Instantly. Of course they do.

And here’s the line that always stops me: You will drink the cup I drink.

He tells them yes.

Not to the seats. To the cup. He looks at two ambitious, hot-tempered men asking for a promotion and tells them they’re going to get the hard part of what they asked for, and then teaches the whole group that greatness is service.

So what happened to all that heat?

James was the first of the twelve to die for it. Herod had him killed with a sword, and Luke reports it in a single sentence in Acts. It is the only martyrdom among the Twelve that Scripture actually records. Judas is the other recorded death, and that one is a different thing entirely and we’ll get to him. Everything else you’ve heard about how they died is church tradition, some of it good and some of it thin.

The man who wanted to call down fire drank the cup he’d rashly claimed he could drink, first, out of all of them.

And John. John, who wanted to incinerate a Samaritan village.

Some time after Pentecost, when word came that Samaria had received the gospel, the apostles in Jerusalem sent two men to go and see.

Peter and John.

He walked back into Samaria on purpose, and he went there to pray for them.

Same man. Same intensity. Opposite direction.

And the tradition that hung on him for the rest of history, the one that shows up in everything attributed to him, is love. He’s the one who won’t stop writing about it.

Here’s what I take from those two, and it’s the reason this chapter exists.

Nothing was removed from either man.

Grace did not sedate them. It did not make them mild. James stayed intense enough to get himself killed early and John stayed intense enough that the intensity became the thing he’s known for two thousand years later.

The fire got re-aimed. That’s all. And it was the same fire.

I think you’ve been waiting to become a calmer person before you can come back, and I want to tell you that’s not on offer and it’s not the goal. You’re sixty-one. You’re not going to become mild. If you were going to be a gentle man you’d have gotten there by now.

Your anger is fuel with no steering. That’s a different problem than being a bad person and it has a different fix.

One more honest thing, because I said I’d be straight with you.

Some of your anger is protecting something.

Anger that lasts this long is almost never just anger. It’s usually standing in front of a room you don’t want to go into, and the room has grief in it, or shame, or the fact that you also did something in that season that you don’t talk about.

As long as you’re angry at them, you don’t have to go in there. The anger is doing real work for you. It has been for years.

I’m not going to take it from you in a chapter and I couldn’t if I wanted to. I’m just telling you it’s a door, and you know what’s behind it, and at some point you’re going to have to walk through it or spend the rest of your life guarding it.

That’s not a rebuke. I’ve stood guard at my own for a long time.

Here’s your move, and it’s two sentences.

Write down what happened. The actual event, in one sentence, with names.

Then write down what it cost you. Not what it proved about them. What it cost you, in one sentence.

That second sentence is the one you’ve never written, and it’s where the grief is, and it’s why the anger has held.

You don’t have to forgive anybody today. I’m not asking for that and I’d be suspicious of a book that did, in a chapter, in the middle of a Tuesday.

Just get it separated. What they did, and what it cost you. Two lines.

Because right now they’re fused, the same way the leaving and the wreckage were fused back in chapter one, and as long as they’re fused the only available move is to keep the case open.

John never got his village burned.

He got sent back to their country.