(c) There is a striking passage in Luke (H^"^-), Avhere, although anger is not mentioned, it is im- iwssible not to feel that Jesus is speaking Avith a profound and even passionate resentment. ' Great multitudes folloAved Avith him, and he turned, and said to tlicni, If any man cometh to me, and hateth not his fathii , and mother, andAA'ife, and children, and 1 not hers, ami sisters, yea, and his OAA-n lifa also, he canuiit bo my disciple.' Jesus Avas on His Avay to die ; and it moved Him as an indignity, Avhieh He Avas entitled to resent, that on the very' path to the cross He should be attended by a shalloAV throng Avho did not have it in them to do the slightest A-iolence to themselves for the sake of the kingdom of God. The Avhole passage, in Avhich the moral demands of discipleship ai-e set at the highest, vibrates Avith indignation. To folloAv Christ is a great enterprise, like building a tower, or going to Avar ; it requires the painful sacrifice of the tenderest natural afl'ections, the renunciation of the most valued possessions ; and Avhen it is affected by people Avho have no moral salt in them— Avho could not Avin it from themselves to give up anything for Gotl and His cause — the resentment of Jesus rises into scorn (v.^^'-). AVith all His loA'e for men, there Avas a kind of man Avhom He did not shrink from describing as ' good for notliing.'
{d) The last passage is that in Avhich Jesus cleanses the Temple: Mk 11'= and parallels. What stiiTed His indignation here Avas in jjart the pro- fanity to Avhich sacred places and their proper "'iations had lost all sacredness ; in part, the ' tousness Avhich on the pretext of accommotlat- tlie pilgrims had turned the house of prayer
I . ■ a den of thieves ; in part, again, the iiiliu- iiiauity Avhich, by instituting a market so noisy in tlie Court of the Gentiles, nmst have made Avorship for these less privileged seekers after God difficult, if not impossible. "The text quoted in Jn 2" (Ps 69^), as remembered by the disciples in connexion Avith this event—' the zeal of thy house shall eat me up' — sums up as Avell as anything could do the one characteristic Avhich is never Avanting in the anger of Jesus, and Avhich alone renders anger just. It is jealousy for God — the identifica- tion of oneself Avith His cause and interest on eartli, especially as it is represented in human
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beings, and resentment of everytliing which does it wrong.*
2. The occasions on which Jesus expresses His jicdfument on moral questions with a vehemence which is uncloiMcdbi inspired by indignation. — Every moral judgment, of course, contains feeling : it is not merely tlie expression of assent or dissent, but of consent or resentment. AVe are all within tlie moral world, not outside of it ; we cannot be spectators merely, but in every thought we are actors as well ; to deny this is 'to deny that there is a moral world at all. Hence all dissent is con- demnation, and all condemnation, if real, is resent- ment ; but there are circumstances in whicli the condemnation is so emphatic that the resentment becomes vivid and contagious, and it is illustra- tions of this that we wish to find in the life of Jesus.
{a) The most conspicuous is perhaps that which we find in the passage on aKavBaXa (Mt IS"'-)- Jesus has taken a little child to rebuke the am- bitious strife of the Twelve ; but ' these little ones who believe in me' are not children, but the disciples generally (cf. Mt 10^-). ' To make one of them stumble ' {o-Kai/SaXl^etv) is to perplex him, to put him out about Christ, to create misunderstand- ing and estrangement, such as we hear of for a time in the case of the Baptist (ll-''-) and the Nazarenes (13"), and so to make his discipleship void. In a more general sense it means to mislead, or to be the cause that another falls into sin which his better conscience condemns. If we are to judge from His language, nothing ever moved Jesus to such passionate indignation as this. The sin of sins was that of leading others into sin, especially 'the little ones' — the weak, the untaught, the easily perplexed and easiljr misled— whose hearts were otherwise naturally riglit with Him. Every word in Jesus' sentence is laden with indignation': ' Better for him that a great millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.' This anger of Jesus is exactly what is meant in tlie OT by ' the jealousy of God,' i.e. His love pledged to His own, and resenting with all the intensity of the Divine nature any wrong inflicted on them (cf. Zee 8='- ). Though anger is often sinful, the absence of anger may be due to the absence of love : and the man who can see the ' little ones ' being made to stumble and who takes it quite coolly is very far from the kingdom of God.
{b) It is possibly an instance of this same indig- nation that we find in Mt 16-'. Peter tempts Jesus to decline the cross — in otlier words, tries to make Him stumble at the will of the Father ; and the indignant vehemence with whicli he is repelled — 'Get tliee behind me, Satan' — shows how real the temptation was, and how a prompt and deci- sive resentment is tlie natural security in such trials. We have a right and a duty to be angry with the tempter.