Since the middle of December, I’ve been helping with the 12-14s Children’s Church group at St. Aldate’s and last Sunday was my turn to lead. This term we’re looking at the Sermon on the Mount (protip: if you want a challenge in your youth group session preparations, go through the Sermon on the Mount), and my session was looking at Matthew 5:21-26 where Jesus talks about Anger.
With my kids’ group leader’s hat on, the passage is a bit dry – there’s no nice story to act out, it’s all talk using language and situations that won’t exactly be familiar to the 12-14 year olds we have. I doubt that many of our group have been to court. Instead of focussing on this passage I decided to add in a few extra passages to give a more holistic overview as to what the Bible said about anger.
To begin with we looked at the stories of Cain & Abel and Jesus in the Temple. The guys acted out the story of Cain & Abel (with a fantastic street twist to the dialogue) and the girls acted out the story of Jesus in the Temple. In the first story, Cain & Abel provide an offering to God – Cain gives grain, while his brother Abel gives some lambs. God looks favourably on Abel’s sacrifice which makes Cain angry. So angry that he kills Abel. After the murder God sends Cain out to wonder the land, but also places a mark on him to stop him from meeting the same fate as his brother.
The first point about this story are that Cain got angry after not giving God his best. It’s clear from the sacrifices God asks for in the Old Testament that he prefers blood sacrifices so for Cain to bring along some grain he’d manage to cobble together was a bit shoddy. The second point about this story is that God shows Cain mercy by despite his murder. Even though Cain had murdered out of nothing better than anger and jealousy, God still placed a mark upon Cain to stop him from being murdered.
The story of Jesus in the Temple is well known – Jesus enters the Temple in Jerusalem and finds it full of stalls selling tat. Getting angry he over turns the stalls and turfs the traders out. It’s interesting to see Jesus getting angry here – from the story of Cain & Abel it’s easy to conclude that we shouldn’t get angry, but if Jesus gets angry it can’t be all bad. The difference is in how Jesus and Cain dealt with their anger – Jesus’s anger was more of a ‘righteous’ anger aimed at at a true injustice and used far more constructively and effectively than Cain’s.
After acting out and talking about the two passages we looked at what Jesus said in his Sermon on the Mount. The passage is split into three pieces. The first couple of verses expand upon the spirit of the commandment to not murder. This stems from the essence of righteousness; it’s not some checklist of things you must or must not do, but instead it’s a rightness of spirit or relationships. Clearly a person cannot be righteous if they go around hating everyone even if they haven’t murdered them. God intends for us to get along the best we can with everyone we meet and not hold grudges or anything like that.
Jesus expands upon how this “real righteousness” works in practice in the next few verses. First he says that if you’re on your way to worship (such as on a Sunday morning) and you remember that you’ve done something to make someone else angry with you, go and sort it out first. Secondly he says that if someone’s trying to sue you, there’s no point being indignant and dragging the process out through lengthy trials because that’s not going to sort out the underlying issues in your relationship with that person.
Both these parts are classic Jesus – looking at something from completely the other side of the coin to most people’s initial thoughts. It switches the onus from the person who’s angry to the person who caused it in the first place to start sorting the issues out. They should be best placed to do so because the angry person is, like Cain, going to be tainted by that anger.
When I ran the session, I pretty much finished it there. In hindsight I should probably have made a conclusion and reminded everyone of what we’d looked at today, particularly as there was a few minutes of free-time left at the end, but I guess that’s something I’ll have to remember for next time.
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