Open and Unafraid: A 5-day Journey Through the PsalmsSample

Aristotle once said, “Anyone can become angry—that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—this is not easy.”* This is another way of saying, perhaps, what Saint Paul said in an echo of Psalm 4:4 a few centuries later: “Be angry but do not sin” (Eph. 4:26). . . .

An honest heart is honest to God about one’s feelings. A hardened heart wants only to exact an eye for an eye. An honest heart entrusts one’s enemies to God. A hardened heart demonizes one’s enemies. An honest heart is angry before the face of God and in the presence of the community. A hardened heart hides from God and perpetually finds the community wanting. What the psalms invite us to choose is an honest heart.

This is, of course, easier said than done, especially for someone like myself who still struggles with anger. I struggle against the temptation to curse reckless drivers. I indulge imagined situations where I put a colleague “in his place” who has hurt me. I fight to resist giving in to outbursts of unholy anger at home. This is why I’m so grateful for the psalms of anger. For myself, they help me to speak before God and the people of God the angers of my heart—and to trust that in this act of faithful and forceful speech God will also heal my heart.

To pray for them, in the end, is to trust that Jesus prays these same prayers in us and for us, and by His Spirit does something much better than “managing” our anger: He sets our hearts free to love our enemy in a way that we never imagined possible. In praying these prayers with Jesus, we likewise acquire the heart of Jesus and so discover the seemingly impossible: how to be faithfully angry.**

* Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36.

** Lytta Basset offers this observation: “Holy anger engages with injustice and motivates us to right what is wrong in the world (without losing our dependence upon God).” Cited in Daniel Michael Nehrbass, Praying Curses: The Therapeutic and Preaching Value of the Imprecatory Psalms (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2013), 155.