WHAT'S SO WRONG ABOUT RIGHTEOUS INDIGNATION? (MATTHEW 7:1-5; JAMES 1:19-20)

    “Do not judge that you may not be judged. Because you will get the measure of judgment you give to others.” (Matthew 7:1-2)

    “Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to anger since your anger does not lead to God's righteousness.” (James 1:19-20)

Of my many personal faults, perhaps the one that I have had the hardest time breaking is the tendency toward righteous indignation. I think I picture myself at times as acting in the steps of Jesus as he threw the money changers out of the temple. By the way, that is the real danger one takes in following the advice of Sheldon in his Christian classic In His Steps to its logical conclusion. The problem is that we aren't Jesus, who had both pure motives and divine knowledge, neither of which are possessed by us.

I can still vividly remember one rather minor incident in my own life years ago in which I got on my high horse feeling that someone else was definitely in the wrong. At the time I was a kid with very little spending money to my name and I went to the public pool with some friends. I paid the small entrance fee and received my change. I was convinced that the lady had shortchanged me and made a rather large stink over the situation until she relented. Then when I got home, I realized that the coin I thought I had given her was still in my pocket. I was too embarrassed to go back and admit my mistake and regret it to this day. I would like to say that I soon learned the lesson that God taught me and have never done it again, but the truth is that I have made several similar mistakes of judgment since that time based on inadequate knowledge of the situation.

There are many biblical examples illustrating some of the issues involved in judging others, but I will just cite just a few in chronological order:

    I Samuel 1-2: Eli is sitting in the temple and sees a woman, Hannah, praying silently to God and moving her lips while she asks for a child. Since the common practice at the time was to pray aloud, Eli jumps to the conclusion that she is disgracing the temple by coming there while drunk. He bawls her out in the mode of righteous indignation but is soon set straight regarding her actions. Not only was he judging her without having all the facts first, but in addition there is a good chance that his motives were not the purest either. I say this because Eli had apparently been turning a blind eye to the drunken and evil manner in which his own sons had been disgracing the temple of God. God's justice is slow to take place. But in an ironic twist, the son Hannah had been praying for was Samuel, who grew up to displace Eli's sons.

    II Samuel 12: A very well-known parable is the one Nathan tells story to King David to convict him of his behavior toward Bathsheba and her husband Uriah the Hittite. David is so enraged concerning the sin of a rich man taking away a poor man's little lamb that he condemns the man to death. Nathan points out that David has just condemned himself in that judgment. There is probably no clearer example in the whole Bible of someone trying to take a splinter out of another one's eye while having a log in their own eye.

    Luke 9:54: Jesus takes James and John on a trip with him and they pass through Samaria. When a Samaritan village refuses to accept their message, these brothers want Jesus to let them destroy the village with fire. If this were all we knew of the personalities of these two disciples, we could say this was a clear case of righteous indignation on their part. But when we factor in their desire to have favored spots in heaven and John's indignation at an “outsider's” ability to cast out demons in Jesus' name, I think we can make the reasonable assumption that all these actions are due to ego issues of which they were probably not even aware.

It is awfully hard for us to gauge our own motives when we act righteously indignant, much less the motives of others. So although I find it very hard to justify the actions of the crowd who stormed the Capitol almost exactly one year ago, today I can refrain from judging them since many of them probably felt that they were acting out of the noble motive of saving our nation from those who were trying to wrest power away from the will of the people. But I can still seriously question (1) whether their actions were solely due to such a noble motive and (2) whether they truly had an accurate understanding of all the facts before proceeding.