Kingdom Ethics: Anger, Sunday March 1, 2026

All right, well good morning everyone. Welcome to our 9.30 AM service here at Citizens. My name is Jason. As always, I have the privilege of bringing us God's Word this morning. If you have a Bible, if you want to turn with me to Matthew chapter 5, we're going to look at verses 21 to 26. Matthew chapter 5, verses 21 to 26. This is the reading of God's Word. You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, you shall not murder. And anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, Raka, is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, you fool, will be in danger of the fire of hell. Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them. Then come and offer your gift. Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way. Or your adversary may hand you over to the judge. And the judge may hand you over to the officer. And you may be thrown into prison. Truly, I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny. Amen. Jesus is coming for us this morning. If you want to join me in a word of prayer. Spirit may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be pleasing to you, our rock, and our edema. I know that many of us come into this space this morning with fearful and anxious hearts. And we want to lift up the escalating conflict in the Middle East. Lord, we pray for leaders and diplomats on all sides. Would you grant them wisdom in the days ahead? The wisdom to act in ways that preserve peace and protect the innocent. God, we know that it grieves you deeply to see this world you love ripped apart by violence. So give us discernment in these confusing times about how we as the church can bear witness, pray, and act in ways that honor your call to be peacemakers. Lord, in the midst of all the chaos in the world and the chaos of our lives, we thank you that we have this space to sit before your holy word. We ask that you would open our eyes, our ears, and our hearts to receive what you would have for us today. We entrust this time and our lives into your loving hands in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Well, we are continuing our series today through the sermon on the Mount. Jesus' most famous teaching. And we're now getting into what I would call the most meaty part of this sermon, where Jesus is going to get very practical and start addressing some uncomfortable topics. Things a lot of us would probably rather keep tucked away. Things like anger, lust, divorce, loving our enemies. Basically, all the topics you hope the pastor isn't going to talk about the Sunday you decide to come to church. But for the next six weeks, this is where we're going to be. Now, if you hear with us last week, Esther preached a beautiful sermon from Matthew 5, 1721, where Jesus says, "I did not come to abolish the law and the prophets. I came to fulfill them." And this is big because you have to understand what's happening here. Jesus is this new Jewish rabbi. He's teaching Jewish people in a Jewish context, these people whose entire understanding of God, life and faith has been shaped by the law and the prophets. Well, what you and I now know as the Old Testament. So everyone's trying to figure out what is this Jesus guy about? And they're all asking the same questions. Is this new teacher undoing everything we believe about God? Is he rejecting the scriptures we grew up with? Is he replacing our faith with something new trying to do his own thing? And right off the bat, Jesus is saying, "Look, I'm not here to get rid of the law. I'm not throwing out the scriptures. I'm bringing the scriptures to their true fulfillment." And he's saying, "The issue has never been the law." And as you're talked about this last week, the law is good. The law is an expression of God's love. The issue is always about how the law has been understood and lived out. So Jesus is saying, "I'm not here to contradict God's law. I'm trying to clarify the meaning and depth of God's law because that's what's been lost and distorted over time." And when he ends that section saying, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." I think a lot of times we think Jesus is saying, "You have to do more than the Pharisees if you want to inherit the kingdom of heaven." But see, that would be impossible. Like that wouldn't have made sense to anyone listening to this because there was no way the average person in that time, there's no way any one of us in this room could possibly outdo the Pharisees. These were people who made it their life's mission to live by the book. These were people who tied their spices. Nobody knew the Bible better than them. Nobody lived their life with more zeal. Nobody followed the rules better than they did. So Jesus is saying, "You need to do more than them." He's saying, "You have to go deeper than they do because you can follow all the rules to the tea and still miss the whole point of the law, which is to free you to live life as it was meant to be lived." Let me give you an illustration. Let's say my wife Carol comes up to me one day and says to me, "Jason, I feel like we haven't really connected in a while. I really feel like we're missing some us time. This is a hypothetical example, not real life, by the way." Let's say she's like, "I know you're really busy with church and stuff, but can you please make it a priority to schedule a date night for us at least once a month?" Let's say I hear that and I go, "You know what? You're right. Let's look at the calendar. We'll do it. Date night. Once a month. The first Thursday of the month that looks free will do every first Thursday of the month, seven to nine p.m. I'll block off those two hours for you." Let's say that for an entire year, I never miss a date. But every time we're out, I'm still checking my phone. I'm still like half-present responding to work emails. Then at exactly nine p.m. on the dot every time, I'm like, "Ooh, all right. That was great. Should we head out? I feel good. Nine p.m. And then on the weeks when I do actually have margin when I'm not that busy, I don't plan anything spontaneous because again, I know that we have first Thursday of the month date nights. Now, technically, I'm doing exactly what I was asked to do. And if anyone questions my commitment to my wife, I'm going to tell them, "Do you know what I did for the last year?" For an entire year, I never missed a date night. I blocked off first Thursday of every month those two hours. I gave them to my wife. But is that what Carol meant? Is that what she really wanted? Is that the kind of connection she was longing for? Is that actually going to produce the mayors that we want, of course not? Because my wife wasn't asking for a calendar appointment. She was asking for my presence, my attention, my heart. I was so focused on the letter of the law that I completely ignored the spirit of the law. And this is exactly what Jesus is calling out in the Pharisees. He's saying, "Yet, technically, they're doing everything the law says. They're doing everything right. But they're missing the whole point of the law, which is why he says, "Unless you go deeper than them, you could check off all the boxes and still not experience the life I want for you." And to illustrate this point, Jesus is going to give six examples, six case studies, one after the other. And what Jesus is doing here is he's laying out a set of kingdom ethics, a way of living that is so counter-cultural, so distinctly different from the way the world operates that when people see it, they can't help but take notice. When he starts each of these six case studies and you'll notice this in the weeks to come with the same exact pattern, he says, "You've heard it said, but I say to you." So he's going to provide a familiar command from the Torah, you've heard it said, "He's going to affirm the command because he's not here to abolish the law. He's going to affirm the command." And then he's going to show his followers the deeper intention underneath the command. But I tell you, but I say to you. Because again, Jesus is not as interested in the letter of the law as he is in the spirit of the law. And the first command he's going to tackle here is one that none of his listeners think they have a problem with. He says, "You've heard it said, you shall not murder." Okay, now that's the six commandment. Everyone knows that one. You've got to imagine people listening are probably nodding along, be like, "Okay, we're good with that. You can move on." I imagine this would also be the one commandment those of us in this room would also feel most confident that we've kept. Like if we were to do a sermon series through the ten commandments, and if I were to go through each of the commandments one at a time, you shall have no other gods before me. Some of you would be like, "Yeah, I haven't done that well. I've definitely worshipped other gods." If I went to commandment, too, you shall not make for yourself any idols. Some of you would probably say, "Yeah, no, I do have many idols in my life. You shall not use the name, the Lord's name in vain." I violated that on the way to church. You shall honor your father and mother having called my parents in a couple of months. You shall keep the Sabbath. I mean, work has been crazy. Haven't done that for a while. You shall not lie, steal, covet, cheat. I think all of these commandments, we would at some point admit we've probably violated. But if there's one commandment that all of us would probably hang our hats on, okay, at least the vast majority of us, if not, I don't know. But at least the vast majority of us would hang our hats on, right, to say like, "I'm okay. It's you shall not murder." It's the commandment we used to tell ourselves, "Yeah, we're not perfect, but we're not the worst." There's still people in the world far worse than we are, right? Those evil wicked people, the murderers. And this is why Jesus is so genius. He takes the command that nobody thinks they have a problem with. And he equates it with something everyone knows they have a problem with, anger. And he says in God's eyes, "Anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is subject to the same judgment as the one who is committed murder." Now I don't know about you, but every time I hear this, it feels a little bit like Jesus is using hyperbole here. I would say most of us in this room probably don't believe this is true. Like it doesn't matter how many times we've heard this in church, I don't think we actually believe that being angry with someone is really the same thing as killing them. Right, one is a feeling, the other is a felony. We're like, the two are not the same. And Jesus knows this. He knows that he's just said something that sounds completely absurd, which is why he doesn't just drop this as a punchline and then walk away. He actually slows down and presses in deeper. He says, "No, no, I want to say more about this." He makes you linger in it with him. And if you read verses 21 and 22 as one section, you'll see that Jesus gives three levels. Level one, he gives them murder. He says, "Anyone who murders is subject to judgment, which in this context means a local court or a civil tribunal." So you murder someone, you're going to have to answer to your local authorities. Level two, he says, "Anyone who calls their brother or sister, "Rockah." And "Rockah" was an aero-make word, doesn't really have a modern day equivalent, which is why in the NIV, they just translate it straight as "Rockah." Right? But think of basically like the worst racial or ethnic slur. Think of something that's really dehumanizing. And then add another layer of disgust and contempt to it, that's "Rockah." And he says, "Anyone who calls their brother or sister, "Rockah" is answerable to the court. And here the word "court" is specifically the Sanhedrin, which in that time was the highest court. So think the supreme court. Okay? Well then he gets the level three. Someone who calls another person, you fool. And the Greek word there for you fool is moross. It's where we get the word moron. And it's basically calling someone stupid or an idiot. And for that person he says, "They will be in danger of the fire of hell." Now I don't know if you saw this or I don't know if you can see what's happening here. But it seems like the actions are getting smaller, but the consequences are getting larger. Murder you get the local court. Calling someone the N word, you get the supreme court. And then calling someone an idiot, you get the fires of hell. That doesn't add up. The punishments don't fit the crime. But see Jesus is so intentional about everything he says and does. He wants you to feel that dissonance. He wants you to ask the question, "What is he tracking that I'm not tracking?" And see it's not that Jesus is saying, "One is worse than the other." He's intentionally scrambling all of our moral intuitions. He knows that human beings instinctively grade sins by their external severity. How much damage did it cause? Who was watching? Did anyone actually get hurt? This is why we asked the question, "There was a lot of yelling. Did it ever get violent?" Because even in our minds we have levels to this. But here Jesus is saying, "I don't grade on that scale. I don't see things the way that you see them. I'm looking at them completely different. I'm not as concerned as you are about the external action. I'm looking at the thing that's driving the action." And here's what all three of these levels have in common. Murder, Raka, and you fool. Underneath all three of these actions is the same root. You looked at another person made in the image of God and you decided in your heart that they don't matter. Somewhere along the line you stopped seeing that person as a full human being and either out loud or subconsciously you rendered a verdict over that person's life. You relevant. Trash. Nothing. Not worth my time or energy. And Jesus is saying, "In my kingdom, that verdict, that's the crime." The act of violence is just what it looks like when that verdict goes unchecked long enough. Now, I'm going to be honest with you. I've been genuinely rebuked by Jesus' words this week. On some level, every week you get up here to preach the Word of God. There is some level of inadequacy you always feel. But especially there are definitely those weeks when you feel more unfit to preach a text than others. Jesus was one of those weeks because it literally felt like Jesus was speaking directly to me. Now most people who know me, I don't think at least would consider me like a rage-filled angry person. I generally pride myself in being pretty even keeled. I don't pick fights. I hate confrontation. My wife will be the first to tell you she could probably count on one hand the number of times I've really yelled in my home. But the standard Jesus is laying out here has nothing to do with whether or not you raise your voice. It has to do with what happens in your heart when a certain name comes up in conversation. What happens in your mind when you think about a certain person? What happens to you? What do you feel when you see a certain face? And by that standard, I break this commandment every day. There are people in my life who right now you could utter their name and it would do something to me. Like my body would react in a very specific way. I can't tell you how many people I've quietly written off in my mind, how many times I've declared verdicts over people's lives and felt completely justified doing so. Then you add to the fact that I'm a pastor, which makes it very difficult for me to talk about my anger with other people. So it's all just sitting in there, festering, growing, eating me alive. And I don't think I'm the only one who struggles with this. You and I carry so much anger. Anger at strangers we've never met. People on the internet whose entire existence irritates us. People on the other side of the political aisle who we wouldn't mind if they just disappeared. By Jesus' standards, every comment section these days on social media is full of people violating the Six Commandment. People yelling, "Rockah, you fool, people dehumanizing each other." We live in a world fueled by anger and outrage, a world where we subconsciously declare verdicts over entire swaths of the population. Let's be honest, sometimes when we say for God so love the world, a lot of times we mean only the part of the world that looks like us, thinks like us, and acts like us. And see, it's not even just the anger out there, it's anger in here. Anger at a parent who wasn't there for you. Anger at a friend who stabbed you in the back. Anger at a partner who lets you down. Anger at yourself for choices you can undo. Anger at God for a life that's unfolded in a way that you hadn't hoped. And especially if you grew up in a home where anger was the primary language, where tension was always simmering there just beneath the surface, that anger didn't just stay in that house. You now carry it with you. You carry it with you everywhere you go. You bring it into your relationships, your workplace, your marriage, your parenting. You ever have one of those moments when someone cuts you off in traffic and your response is way bigger than the situation warrants? All of a sudden, as someone who often causes road rage in a lot of people, sometimes I forgot to signal, I do this. They're speeding up and I'm trying to make eye contact with me because they come to the side of the car and I'm acting like I'm fiddling with my radio and they're screaming through the window. I've had the car been spit at someone through a water bottle at my car once and sometimes I just want to be like, you need to unpack that or something, right? Because at the end of the day, someone just forgot to signal and made a lane change. But something gets activated in us and we don't know why. For all parents know this one, your three year old spills a cup of water and somehow you respond with the force of Hades, right? And now your three year old just absorbed the full weight of your family trauma. And five seconds later, you're like, what am I doing? Like, there are three. I'm 40. What's going on? And somewhere in that moment you realize that reaction didn't start there. It was already there. This was just the moment it finally came out and that's what Jesus is after. Not just the explosion, he's after the reservoir underneath the explosion. Because he's not interested in managing our behavior at the surface level, he's after something deeper. He wants to get to the anger underneath the anger, the old wounds, the unprocessed grief, the slow accumulation of disappointment and betrayal and unmet expectation that we carry around and just forget it's there. And he knows that until that anger gets addressed, we're all just one bad lane change away from making a really bad decision. Now click disclaimer. I think sometimes you read a passage like this and think Jesus saying, you're not allowed to feel anger. And I know a lot of us grew up in religious contexts where we were handed this message that good Christians aren't supposed to get angry. And what this teaching produced in a lot of us was an actual piece. It was repression. I know this from personal experience. And so the moment we felt angry, we either either immediately disassociated or we just got really good at hiding it. But we all know that hidden anger doesn't disappear. It just comes out sideways. When you have that really big sandwich, you push it down and the man is comes out sideways. That's what happens to our anger. You just push it down. It comes out some way shape or form. Passive aggressiveness. Emotional withdrawal. The slightest sharpness in your voice when someone says, are you okay and you're like, I'm fine. It's like, I don't know if you're fine. But see Jesus here isn't saying anger itself is bad. And we know this because Ephesians 426, Paul says, in your anger, do not sin. So there is a way to be angry and not sin in your anger. In fact, there are times we should get angry. We should get angry about some of the things happening in our world right now. We should get angry about children being trafficked. We should get angry about injustice and oppression. Jesus got angry a lot. There's the same Jesus who flipped tables in the temple. The same Jesus who in Mark 3 looked at the Pharisees with anger because they tried to keep him from healing a man who had a withered hand. This is the same Jesus who in Mark 10 was indignant with his disciples when they tried to keep children away from him. So clearly Jesus isn't condemning all anger, which is why he uses a very specific word in Matthew 5 when he talks about being angry with a brother or sister. The Greek word there is "orgasomenos." And it denotes a very particular kind of anger, not righteous indignation, not even a momentary flare up. "orgasomenos" is the kind of anger you nurse. It's the kind of anger you feed. That you replace so many times in your mind that basically it's become a part of your personality. It's the anger you hold on to, not because it's helping you heal, but because letting go of it feels like losing. To release that anger would mean that you're admitting you don't get to control how this story ends. And so what do you do? You hold it. You water it. You keep it alive. Every new person you meet, you tell them about it, make sure they're angry too. And little by little that anger turns into contempt, and the person at the center of it stops being just someone who hurts you in the past and starts becoming someone who has no value. Someone who as far as you're concerned is dead. And that, according to Jesus, it is what puts you on the road to hell. And the word there translated hell is "gahana." I don't have time to unpack that word fully, but basically, Jesus is not just talking about a bad place you go after you die. He's talking about the fire you carry around inside of you that's slowly consuming you and destroying you. So that's the diagnosis. It's a pretty heavy diagnosis. Thankfully Jesus' goal is never to make us feel bad about ourselves. His goal is to transform us, which is why in the following section, he's now going to take everything he's just said about anger and make it very practical. In verses 23 to 26, he gives two real world scenarios that show us what it actually looks like to live differently. In the first scene, he takes us to a worship service. He says, "Okay, imagine you're at the altar, you're mid offering, and imagine while you're mid offering, you remember something. You remember that someone in your life has something against you." And Jesus says, "In that moment, stop everything you're doing, leave the gift, go find them, make it right, and then come back." Now keep in mind what Jesus is saying here is so ridiculous. It's wild. Because in that time, getting to the temple wasn't like driving the church on Sunday morning. If you think the parking situation is hard at our church, okay? If you were living in the first century and you needed to get to worship, first of all, it took days to get there, okay? The travel alone took days. Then when you got there, you had to wait in this long line to purchase an animal. Then you had to go through all these different cleansing rituals. Then you had to wait in line again to talk to the priest and what Jesus is saying is, "After you've done all this, even if you're the next person in line, if you remember, someone is angry with you, leave the gift and go make it right with that person." And he's making a big theological point here. He's saying, "You cannot outworship a broken relationship." You can't do it. See we all want a version of Christianity that's just me and God. My relationship with that other person, that's a separate matter. I'll handle my vertical relationship. I'll go to church. I'll serve Alida Community Group. And then I'll handle my relationship with my parents the way I handle it. But according to Jesus here, that version of Christianity doesn't exist. He's saying, "I don't care if you know all the lyrics to every song we sing in praise. I don't care if you close your eyes and raise your hands. If you have this unresolved conflict with your brother or sister, we're not good." I think a lot of times we think revival is something that happens in rooms like this. I think God would say revival is what happens if every person after this sermon took the first step toward repairing a broken relationship. Whether that's praying for someone, texting someone, an email, a conversation, wherever you are in that process. And notice who Jesus puts the responsibility on. He doesn't say if you have something against someone, go deal with it. He says, "If they have something against you, the one who caused the wound is the one Jesus sends." However small you think your part is, even if you feel justified in what you did or said, God holds you responsible to go make it right. Now let's be clear. Jesus here isn't saying you have to be endlessly available to every person who you've had conflict with. Sometimes in the church we can play two things that need to stay separate, right? Riding someone off as worthless and recognizing that every relationship needs limits and boundaries in order to be healthy or even possible. The two are not the same thing. You can believe someone is made in the image of God that they have full dignity and worth as a human being and still recognize that unfettered access to your life is not something that relationship can have right now. So you can pray for someone. You can grieve what the relationship was. You can genuinely want the other person to flourish and still need distance from them to stay safe and whole. That's not contempt, that's wisdom. So what this is not commanding is to just go back into toxicity or go back into abuse. But see the problem occurs when we use the language of boundaries as an excuse to justify our contempt or even our apathy toward a person. All right, let's be honest. Sometimes I need space. Pathy is just, I don't want to deal with you. Sometimes I'm just going to protect my peace. Really is just, I hope you disappear. See I think many of us grew up in homes where conflict wasn't repaired, it was managed. You brush things under the rug, you didn't talk about it, you just assume that some point things would get better or maybe the people would just forget and move on. And a lot of us have been carrying these patterns of avoidance for so long that we've started to mistake them for maturity. But Jesus here is saying, I know the difference because I look at the heart. And so if there's something in you that stopped trying, not because it's unsafe or unwise, but simply because it's hard or you're tired or you've convinced yourself that person doesn't matter anymore. Jesus is looking right at that place and he's saying, leave your gift and go. So then he moves on to a second example. He says, okay now imagine you're on your way to court with someone you're in a dispute with, you're literally walking together toward the judge. Jesus says, settle it now on the road before you get there. Because he says, if the judge gets involved, then the officer's going to get involved, then the prison cell's going to get involved, you're not going to get out until the very last penny is paid. Now, some people read that section literally, like they see it as practical wisdom to deal with legal disputes, others read it more figuratively, more as a warning to resolve conflicts before you meet God in final judgment. But really the heart of what Jesus is trying to say is the same thing. Unresolved conflict is an urgent matter. It's not something you just blow over. It's not something you get to eventually, eventually one day when the timing feels more right or when you have more bandwidth. No, he says, this is an emergency. Because unaddressed conflict never stays the same size. He says, if you wait too long, you're going to get to the judge and then you're going to get to the officer and then you're going to get put in prison and then all your money's going to be taken away. See, unresolved conflict always grows. It hardens. It calcifies. What starts as an argument, we know this. What starts as an argument becomes a wound. What starts as a wound becomes a wall. And what starts as a wall eventually becomes a wall so thick that you can't even remember what you were fighting about. You just know that something's been permanently broken and you're not sure if it can be fixed anymore. And Jesus is pleading, don't let it get there. Settle it now while you're still walking together. Settle it now while you still have a chance. And here's what I want you to notice about both of these scenarios. In both of them, Jesus is asking you to go first. Before it's resolved. Before you know how it'll be received before the other person has done their part, he's saying, "You go. You initiate. You leave the altar. You settle on the road." As far as it depends on you, you take the first step toward repair even when every instinct in you is saying, "Wait for them to come to me." And I know that for many of us, that literally feels impossible because you're like, "You don't know my family. You don't know the complexity of my situation. You don't know the layers of pain I've endured." And look, I will never presume to know what you have been through. But I also want you to know this is why the gospel is good news because the gospel says, the very thing you think is literally impossible to comprehend with your human mind. The very thing you think is too dead to be brought back to life, that is the thing that can actually be resurrected. See there was a person in history who truly had the right to harbor orgyzominos. Maybe the only person in history who truly had the right to harbor orgyzominos. The only person who was perfectly righteous and yet was falsely accused, rejected, scorned, taxed that by his closest friends, abandoned and humiliated. If anyone had the right to nurse anger, it was Jesus. And yet hanging on the cross, absorbing the full weight of human violence and hatred and contempt into his own body, the words that came out of him were not "Raka." They were Father, forgive them, but they don't know what they're doing. The one with every right to condemn chose mercy. He looked at us in our worst moments, the moments when we couldn't control our rage, when we dehumanized his beloved children, when we made the people in our lives feel like nothing. And he said, "You know what? I'm seeing that and I'll go first." And so the invitation today, as you think about your own orgyzominos, is not for you to just suck it up and try harder and be the bigger person. No, the invitation for you is to receive the grace of God again. Our God who is slow to anger and a bounding instead fast love. There is no way around the fact that what Jesus calls us to is hard work. This is why He says, "Take up your cross and follow me. It's excruciating work." But we believe that because of Jesus' live death and resurrection, because of the power of the Holy Spirit now living and working in us, we have the capacity to release whatever we've been carrying. Not because it doesn't hurt, not because it doesn't matter, but because Jesus meets us in our hurt every time and refuses to let bitterness and resentment have the final word over our lives. Let us pray. Jesus, we humbly come to you and we want to, even in this moment, be honest about and offer you the anger we've been nursing. The verdicts we've rendered, the people we've quietly written out of the story, and we know that you see all of it and yet you come toward us anyway. So we receive your mercy again right now. For those of us in this room who are carrying something heavy today, a relationship that's broken and anger that's been sitting there for years, a wound that hasn't healed, would you meet them right there? Not with a guilt trip, not with shame, but with love and tenderness. Lord, would you give us the courage to go first and the grace to release what we've been holding? We love you, we need you, we thank you for loving us in Jesus' name. Amen.