Righteous anger?

Jesus said, “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell?” Matthew 23:33

When Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned. Galatians 2:11

To my last two posts I gave the title “Christian, disagree agreeably”, based mainly on Romans 14, where Paul urges his readers not to fall out over “disputable matters” (NIV) or “personal opinions” (GNB). As long as the basic Gospel of Christ crucified and risen again is held in common, don’t let lesser things - “grey areas” - cause friction or division among you.

Good advice, surely – and desperately needed by the church in every generation, not least our own, with its massive multiplication of cults, sects, denominations, movements. Never forget Jesus’ long prayer in John 17!

Fine. But the more I wrote, the more I realised that questions arise if we are to get a fuller picture, and that therefore a further post might be helpful in trying to answer them.

For one thing, isn’t there quite a bit of “disagreeableness” in the Bible? We can’t avoid the fact that Jesus himself was sometimes quite ferociously critical of those he saw as his enemies; for example, he called the Jewish scribes and Pharisees “snakes… brood of vipers”; no mincing of words there! That’s Matthew 23:33, but most of the chapter is something of a tirade against these people: “you hypocrites… blind guides… blind fools… blind men…”

Of course, if anyone was entitled to use such language, it was the sinless Son of God, and we would be arrogant in the extreme if we assumed any right to copy him. But if nothing else it demonstrates that Jesus was not just the “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” of Charles Wesley’s children’s hymn. And it reminds us that, sadly, there are times when a clear confrontation with basic error is called for – a confrontation that may even result in a parting of the ways.

The key to Jesus’ anger is, of course, simple: he, the human embodiment of “the way, the truth, and the life”, is addressing leaders, men given the task of teaching the truth of God. Because of their hypocrisy and blindness they were in fact misleading the people, and this Jesus could not tolerate; such was his love for ordinary people. Remember how he wept over Jerusalem shortly before he died there (Luke 19:41-44): anger for the false teachers, certainly – but nothing but deep compassion for the people as a whole.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of serious and deep division in the New Testament church is described in Galatians 2:11-21. Please picture the scene…

We are in Antioch, a multi-cultural city about 350 miles north of Jerusalem. Something very remarkable has happened here. Up to this point pretty well all the first “Christians” (though that word hadn’t been invented yet) were Jews, like Jesus, who saw their new-found faith as the fulfilment of Jewish Old Testament prophecies - the promised “Messiah” (that is, the “anointed one”) had come, and his name was Jesus of Nazareth!

Wonderful news. But it was, as they saw it, news for the Jewish people only: a Jewish message about the Jewish Messiah, and therefore to be proclaimed to Jews. People who weren’t Jews – otherwise known as Gentiles or Greeks – didn’t really figure at all.

But something happened that changed the course of history… some Jesus-followers, “men from Cyprus and Cyrene, went to Antioch and began to speak to Greeks also, telling them the good news about the Lord Jesus” and – guess what? – “a great number of people believed and turned to the Lord” (Acts 11:19-21).

Who these people from Cyprus and Cyrene were we don’t know. How and why they came to do what they did we don’t know. All we do know is that the basically Jewish church in Antioch received a large influx of non-Jews - people who spoke different languages, who dressed in different ways, who had totally different customs from the Jewish Jesus-followers.

Many years ago, early in my ministry, our church in Scunthorpe received an influx of - would you believe it – “Hell’s Angels”, complete with their motor-bike leathers, boots, chains, the lot. Putting it mildly, ahem, they rather stood out in our small evening congregation. They were perfectly polite and well-behaved, and we became quite fond of them, but we really weren’t very well-equipped to integrate them. (I suspect they turned up largely out of a slightly mischievous curiosity.) After a few weeks they stopped coming, and that was that - though hopefully one or two seeds were sown.

Well, the church in Antioch faced a similar situation with this out-of-the-blue Gentile infiltration, and they seemed to have handled it far better: so much so that the very label we bear today was coined in Antioch: “The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch” (Acts 11:26).

But, as often happens in churches when God is powerfully at work, the devil also got to work, and something seriously bad happened, so bad that Paul can write in Galatians 2:11: “When Cephas (that is Simon Peter) came to Antich, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned”. What a remarkable confrontation; can you picture these two giants of the early church standing eyeball to eyeball?

Next time we’ll take a look at what led to this history-changing event; please join me then…

Father, please help me always to seek to “maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace”. If ever I feel I must confront and disagree with a fellow-Christian help me to do so with humility and love in my heart. Amen.