When We're AngrySýnishorn

Step One: God meets us where we are.

Growing up in a family where power and position trumped familial love and loyalty, Herodias experienced loads of trauma in her childhood. When she was eight, Herod the Great murdered her father. Soon after, she was married off to her uncle Philip Antipas. Herodias grew up with little control over her life, family, or circumstances. Given her history, perhaps by the time we meet her in Mark 6, she felt like she deserved a chance for happiness when she divorced her uncle and married his brother with whom she’d fallen in love.

Into this tangle of trauma, sin, anger, and passion, God shows up. God sends a prophet to show Herod and Herodias a different way, telling Herod that his marriage to Herodias is unlawful.

Even though John the Baptist has spent years inviting people to repent and be forgiven, Herodias doesn’t hear John’s critique that way. She hears it as a threat and nurses a grudge, a grudge that perpetuates her family’s cycle of exploitation and murder.

Perhaps John’s message provokes Herodias’s anger because it threatens all three of her basic needs: love, security, and agency. (By agency, we mean the ability to act in ways that will lead to meaningful change, a sense that we are not completely controlled by our circumstances.) Maybe her marriage gives her what she always longed for but never had: a true love, security in a world where fathers murder sons, and agency in a life controlled by powerful men. If so, then no wonder she feels murderous rage. How dare John threaten her newfound happiness and rile up the people about her relationship? Whatever good plans God might have for her future can’t be trusted compared to what she has now.

When our needs are not met and anger rises within us, we can use our feelings as a cue from God, a gift God gives us to pay attention to something serious in our lives, a place God longs to meet us. If we receive our anger as God’s invitation to walk together through whatever is making us so mad, we can listen to our anger with appreciation and curiosity. It may be the stirring of the Holy Spirit, meeting us where we are.

Prayer:

God, I want to walk with you through all that is making me angry. Help me pay attention to and get curious about my anger so that you can use it for my good and your glory. Amen.