Mad As Hell

“But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” (Matthew 5:22). The Savior outlines the destructive path that anger unchecked can wreak in our own lives and the lives of others. Anger is a resource-intensive emotion. Anger triggers our natural fight response and shuts down all unnecessary bodily processes to save up energy for the big fight. When we are angry, we don’t have any room in our brains for complex thoughts, and we don’t have any room in our hearts for distracting feelings of empathy. We shrink our whole existence down to just our fists, or to whatever weapons we can put into them. The parts of our brain that would be able to give the benefit of the doubt, to come up with rational arguments for why the person who wronged us may have done what they did, the higher orders of conscious thought have all been shut down. And since we are not thinking, the person who offended us must not have been thinking either. Scratch that, they didn’t just suffer a momentary lapse in judgment. No. They are incapable of thinking at all. The word Raca means empty-headed. In order for us to maintain our anger, we must jettison the idea that the person who hurt us is a thinking, feeling being, an agent who can act for themselves, a person worthy of our respect and understanding and empathy. They are not thinking things, they are objects that have gotten in our way and they deserve to be pounded into oblivion. We are lashing out against something that can’t feel pain so we don’t need to worry about pesky emotions like guilt or remorse gumming up the works of our runaway freight train of anger. But we can only pummel a dumb, unthinking punching bag for so long before we start to get worn out. If empathy and guilt and remorse can’t pump the brakes on our anger, then exhaustion and fatigue surely will. Unless. Unless we can metamorphosize and metastasize our anger into hatred. You can hold onto hatred even after the frantic cloud of hot-blooded anger has dissipated. But we can’t hate dumb, unthinking objects. We need a much more sinister focal point than that. It turns out, our brother or sister who hurt us wasn’t unthinking - they were evil. Malicious. Insidious. Wicked. They don’t deserve our empathy. They deserve to be destroyed! Nobody can go no-holds-barred, scorched-earth, defying-the-Geneva-conventions total annihilation like the righteously indignant. When we are convinced that others are evil, we can cheerfully justify the most horrendous and vile acts against them because as bad as we treat them, they deserve so much worse. When we go past trying to convince ourselves that our brothers and sisters are unthinking to full-blown evil, then we are mad as Hell. Literally. Jean-Paul Sartre said that “hell is other people” and when we start making a list of truly irredeemable people, it is only a matter of time before we start adding more and more people to the list and filling up our home and our neighborhood and the world around us with “other people” - people who are not just stupid but truly evil. That is when we are in danger of hell fire - not in some distant afterlife but right now. We’ve turned our brothers and sisters first into unthinking objects and then into incarnations of pure evil. Completely surrounded by those we consider to be pure evil, where else could we be but in Hell? Anger leads to hate, and hate makes it easier to get angry, which gives us more things to hate, which makes us even angrier. We get trapped in a perpetually burning lake of seething, burning, vicious, unquenchable anger and hell fire. But we don’t have to get stuck in that awful feedback loop. There is no inferno hot enough that can’t be extinguished by the Living Waters of our Savior Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ can replace our hatred and our contempt and our anger with love and compassion and empathy. He can help us to see our brothers and sisters as He sees them - as beloved Sons and Daughters of God - not evil and not unthinking but deserving of our respect and our understanding and our love. It will be hard at first to love our enemies but bit by bit through our consistent efforts to love them and through the power of Christ’s Atonement, we will transform “other people” in our minds and in our hearts back into our beloved brothers and sisters and love our neighbors as ourselves until we have loved the hell right out of our hearts and right out of our families and neighborhoods.