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The Third Sunday In Lent
Almighty God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: Keep us both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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The Third Sunday In Lent
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A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
✛
The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride and Anger
When I learned that it fell to me in this Lenten series on the deadly sins to preach on pride and anger, my initial reaction was to say that these are the two that aren’t really sins. “Pride,” in our culture as for the ancients, is a positive word: we are admonished from our earliest years to take pride in who we are and what we do. Similarly, although in this we differ from the ancients, at every turn we are told not to keep our anger pent up inside ourselves; that it is good to express anger, as indeed it is good to express all our feelings, so that they don’t bubble and fester within us and ultimately cause an emotional explosion. “Be yourself, express yourself” we are told, and thus anger, like pride, is a good thing.
It would be tempting at this point to launch a high-pitched rhetorical riff of excoriation of our culture’s abandonment of Christian virtue; to denounce our culture’s exoneration of pride and anger as emblematic of a wholesale inversion of Christian values; and at the end to feel pretty good about ourselves because we, at least, still realize that pride, anger, and the lot really are sins. At least we have got it right! At least we still know that there are sins indeed, deadly sins! What good people we are, standing in spite of all odds against the forces of the age! . . . But such would be, precisely, a temptation, for to feel good about being counter-cultural is to exhibit the sin of pride.
And there is a problem here that we should not turn our eyes away from. It is not just that for Aristotle, as for our contemporaries, the proud man is the human ideal; it is not just that in our world passions like anger are there to be expressed not suppressed. The problem is that in our very faith itself there is ambivalence about pride and anger.
Let me start with the elephant in the middle of the room: the scriptures tell us that the Lord God exhibits anger. There is so much divine anger in the Scriptures, we could take an hour and still not touch the half of it. For now, a single instance. Consider Psalm 139. The first three-quarters of Psalm 139 are beautiful and quite possibly, for a number of you, familiar. It is a psalm about God’s intimate knowledge of the psalmist, in which God is described as the one who “knit me together in my mother’s womb” and from whom there is no escape, not even if I go down to hell and make the grave my bed, for thou art there also. But in the final six verses, which are not often read, the psalmist identifies himself with the Lord so completely that he makes God’s anger his own, as he makes God’s enemies his own: Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? I hate them with a perfect hatred.
So God angers; and the servant whom God intimately knows takes on the Lord’s anger and makes his enemies his own. Turn from that to the voice of the Nazarene: You have heard that it was said to the men of old, “You shall not kill; and whoever kills shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment . . . to the hell of fire. Here, as an element of the strategy of God to implant his law in the human heart, we are told that even to be angry breaks a fundamental commandment, that against murder. The New Law takes the old and stretches it expansively, so that it no longer pertains solely to exceptional actions (such as murder, something most of us don’t do most of the time) but also to feelings and the everyday actions we take up as a result of them. Every one who is angry with his brother shall be liable to judgment.
So which is it: anger is good, because it identifies us with God who is angry with his enemies, who are those who act against righteousness and justice? Or anger is bad, because the follower of Jesus must get rid of the stubborn and unredeemed heart? Saint Paul, ever the pragmatist, seems to split the difference in his epistle to the Christians in Ephesus, when he writes: Be angry but do not sin. This concise saying suggests that there exists a form of anger that is not a sin—which we, I think reasonably, could identify with God’s anger at injustice, cruelty, unrighteousness, and the lot. But how can a human be so pure as to identify her anger with the Lord’s? Paul goes on to suggest that there will always be, in our anger, an admixture of both divine wrath and human murderous zeal, for he concludes the same verse with this admonition: do not let the sun go down on your anger. How do we not sin when we are angry? It may be impossible, but at least do not go to bed with your anger!
We have then the beginnings of a mature understanding: anger is a divine characteristic in the presence of evil, but it is also, in us, very close to the passions that cause us to harm one another. So we could say that anger, much of the time, is not justified, and even when it is, it is dangerous. Do not let the sun set on your anger—good advice from Saint Paul, echoing the voice that spoke just outside the primeval garden: Why are you angry?, telling Cain, sin is couching at the door. Couch down with your anger, lie with her, and the conceptions of the night will destroy your brother. Cain, alas, heeded not.
In our effort to understand anger we have been brought to the edge of the primeval garden. We were there, on the edge outside rather than living within, because of pride. Dante made pride the first circle of purgatory; it is the root of all the other sins, and to get a handle on them, Dante suggests, we must first face up to our pride. In the garden, faced with the human gift and burden of choice, the choice, to be precise, of whether to be with God or over against God, the choice exemplified by the presence of the fruit God told them not to eat: it occurred to our ancestors that if they chose to disobey God then they would be like God: they would be saying for themselves what was good to eat and what wasn’t, rather than letting God or any other being tell them what was good. If we eat this, we will be like God. That choice is the proud calamity of the human race, the race that has been perversely twisted for millennia, exhibiting a strange godlikeness of false independence, and no longer able to conceive, except perhaps in an occasional glimpse, how it would be possible and infinitely desirable to be at once free and with God, rather than falsely like God.
Pride is the root of all sins, in that it is the placing of the self against the self’s maker. This is equivalent to saying that all sins amount to the choice of isolation over communion. Thus: I would prefer to kill you rather than live in a world where both of us exist. Or: if you won’t play the game my way, I’ll take my marbles and go home. All sin means isolation. C. S. Lewis depicted hell as an infinitely expanding Grey Town, in which people keep getting further and further away from each other, because they cannot stand any reality outside themselves. So proud—so alone—so pitiful. The dignity with which our maker endowed us, by contrast, is the dignity of free beings capable of living together. Aristotle saw this too: a man alone, he said, is not human; he is either an animal or a god. But Aristotle did not see that God himself is a being of true communications. The truly proud Christian—and there is such a person, one whose pride is appropriate to her being—she is the aria soloist who stands up in the midst of the choral assembly to sing the praise of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
