Preached at Christ Church, Worton
James 1.17-27; Mark 7.1-8, 14, 15, 21-23
“…let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger…”
Angry people click. If there’s a catchphrase that captures the nervous mood of the 2020s, it’s that one. On the Internet, and on our TV screens, there is a brutal competition for our attention and our time. With thousands of articles and programmes available to us at the touch of a button, websites and TV channels have to find ways of getting people to read or watch their content rather than any of the myriad alternatives.
Self-Portrait (The Angry One) by Ferdinand Holder (1880-81), Hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland.
There are various high arousal emotions that, if the right words trigger them in us, make us particularly prone to clicking on a link or watching a programme. Excitement, joy, and fear are all examples. But the most powerful of all is anger—if an editor can create a headline or a twenty-word synopsis that makes us angry, we are far more likely to read or watch their stuff; and that means the advertising revenue comes in to pay their wages.
How does it feel to live in a world where people constantly need to make us feel angry, or at least in some other sort of emotionally heightened state, to pay the bills? Look around you. Switch on the news. We are left feeling, permanently, that we are on the edge of some sort of civilisational crisis.
It’s tempting to think this started as some sort of nefarious plan by the dark lords of the Internet to make the world a worse place. But that wasn’t what happened at all. Around the turn of the century, the Internet put a tool into the hands of news editors and publishers that they’d never had before – they could try out different headlines and see which one brought most visitors to their website. Headlines that made people angry were often particularly effective. Then towards the end of the 2000s, social media emerged, powered by its algorithms that just worked out what content got people to spend longer on their platform, entirely blind to what the content was let alone the emotions it aroused.
The Internet is many things, and one of those things is a big mirror reflecting our instant, often unchosen, emotional reactions back at us. What they reveal about us isn’t particularly pretty. It turns out that we human beings have plenty of dark aspects to our character, even before we reflect on the way we seem to spontaneously form tribes and mobs. You might even say it confirms the doctrine of original sin.
Anger has a power. It tends to overwhelm other emotions, and crowd out reason. Anger demands our attention. Perhaps that’s why St James warns his readers in today’s epistle to be “slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness.”
Note that James doesn’t say, “don’t ever get angry”. We might do well to remember that there are times when anger is a necessary spur to action in the face of injustice, or means of overcoming fear. I’m sure you remember every word of our Epistle reading from three weeks ago 😉, when St Paul wrote: “Be angry but do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger.” Anger, even in a good cause, can overwhelm everything; even the hunger for righteousness that made us angry in the first place.
This isn’t just a matter of the words we might use when we are angry, but angry words do matter in and of themselves, and can have awful consequences. We saw plenty of evidence of that in this country over the summer.
Words matter. Words can bless, or condemn; words can heal a broken heart, or start a war. That’s why it’s so important, as St James reminds us, that we put even more effort into listening well than we do into speaking correctly.
But words are not only important because of their consequences in the world. Words seem to be fundamental to what it is to be human. Jesus Christ is the Word made Flesh, the Word who was with God before time began. We are made in the image of that eternal Word.
Looked at purely biologically, what makes human beings distinctive is speech. We can talk to one another in a way that other animals don’t seem to be able to. Dogs and cats communicate, with us and with one another, but they don’t sit around chatting. And even when we encounter animals that we strongly suspect have complex forms of speech, like dolphins or whales, the content of that speech is impenetrable to humans. If it is possible for us to ever understand it, which I rather doubt, it lies on the other side of scientific breakthroughs we can’t so far imagine.
And it’s because words are so important to human nature that we must, as St James’ reminds us, live out our words in actions. Empty words, false words, are worse than simply ignoring a problem or passing by on the other side. When our actions fail to live up to our words, they show us to be empty.
That doesn’t mean that our words are unimportant. While our beliefs are indeed hollow unless they are put into practice, if what we believe is wrong – if the words we use to describe the world or God mislead us about their true nature – then the things we do as a result of those beliefs will also be wrong. What we believe, and what we say about what we believe, does absolutely matter in its own terms.
That’s a big part of what this morning’s Gospel is about. In it, the Pharisees come from Jerusalem all the way to Genessaret in Galilee to challenge Jesus about how unorthodox his followers are. This is around 100 miles – quite a long way to travel without motor vehicles or trains, about the same distance as Worton to Canary Wharf. It was a typically demanding effort from the Pharisees whom nobody could accuse of not making huge sacrifices for the sake of their faith. They would put themselves to considerable inconvenience to keep the Sabbath correctly; their desire to live in a way pleasing to God even governed how they went about eating and drinking.
They were full of faith. They followed the God of Abraham and Isaac, the same God that Jesus proclaimed and whom we worship today – and the best of them did so with all their hearts and minds and souls and strength. But they were wrong about what God actually wanted from them.
They neglected the really important parts of the law they had received from Moses, while obsessing about trivial points of ritual. The point being that it was easy to keep minor points of ritual to make a public show of being a follower of God. What the law taught about the human heart was harder to live out—and as it was impossible for anyone else to assess what was really going on in someone else’s heart, it was useless for making a public show, so the core of Moses’ teaching was often ignored. An uncomfortable reality is that this is as true for us and Christ’s commands as it was for the Pharisees and Moses’.
Most of all, as St James reminds us, all the good that we do, all the good things that we say, ultimately come from God. What do we wish to give back to Him in thanksgiving for all that He has done for us? I hope nothing less than the best, in our words, and in every aspect of our lives.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: A range of heightened emotional states. © Andrea Piacquadio and used under CC.0 thanks to Pexels.
