You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder,’ and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire. So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison. Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny. (Mt 5:21–26)
Eighty-seven percent. That’s the proportion of our mental life that writer Tim Kreider wages we spend winning imaginary arguments. He estimates that eighty-seven percent of our internal bandwidth is devoted to rehearsing accusations and defenses, playing out mini-courtroom dramas with ourselves usually cast as the innocent victim.
I think it’s more like ninety-five percent. I say this in part because we live in a society so besieged by rage and resentment that it’s very difficult to imagine what life would be like without it. Part of this undoubtedly has to do with the internet, which launders our outrage and returns it to us as validation. But even without going online, there is a lot to be upset about. You don’t have to go to Capitol Hill to find something to get your hackles up; you can just walk down Main Street. Most of us can walk into our own homes and find plenty of material. Nothing transforms a home into a mere house faster than a grudge taking up residence.
Anger is everywhere these days. You sometimes hear talk about learning “healthy anger” as a way to mitigate anger’s power. You hear about how to channel indignation in a productive way, how to embrace rather than judge it, etc. Tempting as those roads may be, they are not the same ones that Jesus travels.
In this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, the Son of God equates anger with murder. Jesus says, in no uncertain terms, that being angry with someone is akin to killing them. He goes on to elevate interpersonal reconciliation above worship. Meaning, if someone out there has something against you, you need to deal with that before you come to church. (So if you’re looking for a biblical excuse to sleep in on Sunday morning, you just found one. Whoops!)
I kid, but Jesus does not. The urgency of his words makes no room for spiritual complacency. If someone out there has a gripe against you, the time to make amends is now — not later, when circumstances align. If you don’t get the problem worked out today and you happen to die, then it’ll be too late. Jesus is exhorting his hearers to apologize as soon and as often as they possibly can. That is how you initiate reconciliation, after all.
Most of us would agree that apologies are a good and healing thing. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a sincere apology knows that they help and don’t hurt. A world filled with apologies would be a softer, easier world. It would be a better and more humane place to live. A therapist once told me that she would be out of business if parents learned to say just two words to their children: “I’m sorry.”
Why then don’t we apologize more often? And when we do, why are good apologies so rare?
A few reasons. First, we don’t apologize because we like feeling angry. The great Presbyterian author Frederick Buechner said that of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun.
To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are giving and the pain you are giving back — in many ways it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.
Anger, in other words, is more insidious than other avenues of pleasure because we don’t consciously acknowledge it as such. Maybe we gesture in that direction when we talk about characters we love to hate on reality TV. Certainly the phenomenon known these days as hate-reading or hate-listening nods at this. Perhaps you know someone who has two channels they watch for news, one where they go for “the honest truth” and another that makes their blood boil. They must, on some level, enjoy getting incensed over the other side’s perspective. If not, they’d stop tuning in, right?
Whether we care to admit it or not, certain kinds of anger feel good. There’s something enlivening about the quickened pulse we get when doing the backstroke in a sea of self-righteousness. Yet Buechner suggests that there’s a cost to this sort of recreational resentment. It is like a weapon that we point at another person but always ricochets back at us.
Secondly, we don’t apologize, because apologies are threatening. They diminish us. An apology involves giving up power and adopting a supplicating position toward another person. It requires us to surrender our right to comeuppance. And if our culture tells us anything, it’s that we should never, ever, surrender our rights.
The psychologist Harriet Lerner wrote a wonderful little book called Why Won’t You Apologize?, which sheds quite a bit of light on this subject. In an interview, she described the threat we often sense when it comes to apologies: “Non-apologizers tend to walk on a tightrope of defensiveness above a huge canyon of low self-esteem — they just can’t listen to anything that’s going to set them off balance.”
Again, there’s a cost associated with giving an apology. It may be an emotional cost, or it may be an actual financial cost. There maybe some actual restitution involved. It could be that someone wants you to apologize not for something you’ve done, but for who you are. You suspect there’s nothing for which you could apologize short of, well, existing that would move the needle in the relationship — and possibly not even that. This feels futile and sad, so we don’t do it.
Thirdly, we don’t apologize because we are waiting for the other person to apologize to us first. We are caught in a standoff, clinging to what is often an overly cut-and-dry perception of blame. “I was wrong, but she contributed,” we might say.
Maybe we insist, consciously or un-, on a High Noon-style mutual apology showdown. “I’ll say I’m sorry the moment you’re ready to do the same. One, two, three, go!” In this way, we make apologies transactional. We build in a condition: “I’ll only apologize if you apologize (and for the right thing).” This sort of approach — in which we listen very carefully for sufficient remorse before offering our own — tends to short-circuit the humility required for our amends to stand a chance of being heard.
An effective apology requires that we listen to our neighbor differently. It involves straining our ears for what we can agree with in their grievance and apologizing for that first. Even when the other party is largely at fault, we’re listening for our own part, however small it may be, and starting there. Alas, we tend to avoid such a method since doing so cuts through the myth of our own blamelessness. And so we opt not to apologize.
Lastly, we don’t apologize because we are afraid that the other person won’t accept our apology. This is especially true when it comes to the big hurts of life, things like marital infidelity, financial fraud, and professional betrayal. The fear is legitimate, as people often don’t accept apologies for the deeper woundings.
Jesus is notably unconcerned with the reception our apology may garner. He doesn’t have a command for the other person in the equation — at least not here. He has a command for you and me. If someone has a grievance against you, you need to say you’re sorry, and you need to do it pronto. Like most of the commands Jesus gives in the Sermon on the Mount, his moral ideal is nothing if not daunting.
Say we take our Lord at his word and decide to give this a shot — experts like Lerner have a few pointers we might follow when it comes to apologies: The best apologies are short and don’t include explanations that undo them. If you want to apologize for something, don’t add on a “but” or an “if.” “I’m sorry I forgot your birthday, but I was stressed out with work.” “I’m sorry if that joke I made offended you.” The extra clause turns a sorry into a not sorry. An effective apology lacks defensiveness. If you must add something to the “I’m sorry,” make it a “for”.
Apologies should also not be linked to a request for forgiveness, e.g., “I am so sorry — will you please forgive me?” Don’t pressure the other party to respond. When you do, you run the risk of compounding the bad feeling. “You didn’t forgive me. You now need to apologize for that.” Instead, just let the sorry hang out there.
I could keep going. I could tell you, for example, that if you’re known as a non-apologizer — if people have commonly said that about you — you likely have a spiritual problem. A serious one. I could tell you that a Christian is someone who looks for things to apologize for, rather than for what other people need to apologize to them for.
But I’m not sure how helpful any of these pointers are. They might even backfire. Because the truth is, no one says sorry when they are told to. At least, they don’t do so and mean it. Just think back to when you were a child and your parent commanded you to apologize to a sibling. We all remember how empty those gestures were.
Fortunately, if the law tells us to reconcile before it’s too late, the gospel tells us that God has reconciled himself to us already. God’s forgiveness is not contingent on our feeble efforts to make amends. He extends love and grace and restored relationship to those who are terrible at saying sorry, non-apologizers and defensive so-and-sos like you and me.
A beautiful picture of this gospel inversion appeared on the radio show This American Life. In the episode “Know When to Fold ‘Em,” memoirist David Dickerson tells of his return to the religious home that he had shunned for six years during early adulthood. At the outset Dickerson fesses up to the serious bitterness he harbored about his conservative upbringing. When he finally goes back, he does so ready to exact revenge on the faith that he grew up in, particularly on the father whose faith he felt had failed him. “Dad,” he says on the eve of the trip, “when I get home, I’d like to take you out to breakfast.”
And so the two men go and have breakfast. As soon as they sit down, David unloads an avalanche of historical criticism, Richard Dawkins quotations, and positivistic arguments against faith. There is a fierceness to his protestations. He calls his father “arrogant” and says his interpretation of faith was “weird” and “horrible.” “I was also assaulting his dream,” David later reflects. “You know, saying everything he was excited about, that he was sharing with me, was misbegotten, was a bad idea, was morally corrupt.”
It’s a surprise attack, but one that has been building for six years. His father sits there and listens. He does not interrupt or pull out his own weapons. The man has arguments, too, no doubt. He could take the opportunity to set his wayward son straight — to air his own grievances about the school that he, for some reason, had paid for. Instead, Dickerson tells us that “he just kind of quietly lets me do my thing.”
David’s father does not retaliate, but nor does he retreat. He lets his son exhaust all of his aggression. He absorbs the malicious tirade in toto, allowing himself to be utterly defeated.
Yet that’s not all. “When I’d finally settled down and, you know, gotten my piece out, my father looked me in the eye and said, ‘David, I want you to know that I’m really proud of everything you’ve done.’”
What?! His compassionate words were clearly not premeditated. David’s father responded to his son’s pointed (and probably embarrassing) public outburst by speaking a word of affirmation to him.
This is what we call grace, and it cannot be coerced. We know it when we see it; we know it when we experience it. His father’s grace had an effect on David, where he realized in that moment that he is being a “complete and utter jackwagon.”
David then did something else. He said to his dad, “I’m sorry.”
It turns out that David’s father had internalized a bit more of his faith than David had given him credit for. Or maybe this was just a Holy Spirit fluke in a diner. Whatever the mechanics might be, David’s father allowed himself to be buried by his aggressor so that his aggressor might be lifted up. He not only relinquished any backbiting reaction he might have had, he affirmed the child who was pointing a metaphorical gun at his head. The man provided a crash course in atoning love; the sort of love that sacrifices itself for its beloved, the kind of love that is willing to die.
David sums it up best:
I had sort of expected to argue or at least come to some kind of armistice where we’re like, well, we’ll agree to disagree, but I see your point. I hadn’t expected to lose completely, because you can’t argue with decency, you can’t argue with goodness.
It wasn’t an armistice the two men reached. It was, as David himself says, “a communion.” This gracious father looked at his son and said, My son is home and I love him, without qualification or cause. I love him with the gun in my face. I want him at my table.
You may not have the wherewithal to do anything close to what David’s father did when it comes to your own accusers. I doubt I could summon that sort of grace either. The story David tells is one-in-a-million. But what do we then do with our own anger and accusation? I’ll tell you one thing we did with it. We turned it on Jesus Christ himself. We let that rage follow him all the way to the grave. We watched as this God surrendered his prerogatives and made restitution on behalf of those who didn’t deserve a second chance. We watched as Jesus loved his enemies completely, both the bad apologizers and the non-apologizers. Jesus took — and takes still — the first step and the second step, the third step and the last.
It is on his account that I can proclaim with confidence that no matter what you’ve done, no matter what grievances you harbor or others harbor against you, God is not angry with you. He says to you the same thing that David’s father said: “Son, I forgive you. In fact, I’m proud of you.” Welcome home.
Amen.
Human nature is to seek out conflict. We express anger to get an angry response. A gracious answer is the knockout blow.
Excellent. It brings to mind the wise words: “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and thinking the other person will die.”
Thanks for unwinding my anger for me this morning. It happens often when I read these emails from you all that I encounter real grace through brutal honesty and vulnerability…