“Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.” Every good superhero has at least one signature catchphrase. Batman’s “I’m Batman,” is about as simple as you can get, but it’s surprisingly effective at intimidating bad guys who are desperately hoping they have run into a copycat. Superman’s “Up, Up, and Away!” as he takes off into the sky is simultaneously bland and powerful, which is a good fit for the character.
But the Incredible Hulk has the best one. Actually, the Hulk’s 
alter ego, the mild-mannered scientific genius named Bruce Banner, gets the best one; it’s he who would say, “don’t make me angry; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” usually to someone who was annoying him or threatening him.
It’s an epic catchphrase because on the surface, it seems polite, even self-deprecating. But, of course, there is a tone of menace and even malice just below the surface, because Banner is referring to what happens to him when he does get angry: because of a mutation that he developed from experimenting on himself using gamma radiation, when Banner gets angry or agitated he transforms into The Incredible Hulk, a gigantic green monster of a person.
The Hulk is about eight feet tall, weighs half a ton of pure muscle, and becomes stronger the angrier he gets, to the point that he is shown shrugging off bullets like drops of summer rain, leaping high enough to go into low orbit of the Earth, tearing pretty much any form of metal or stone like it’s made of paper, and even withstanding nuclear explosions. Given that he is fueled by limitless rage, the Hulk is typically shown to have little capacity for speech or reason, which is why his catchphrase is simply, “Hulk smash!” because that’s basically what he always ends up doing.
Bruce Banner is very conflicted over his power to turn into the Hulk. On the one hand, he’s afraid that he might hurt innocent people in his violent anger; on the other, when people assume he is easy to intimidate or push around, he likes to say, “don’t make me angry; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry,” so that at least his opponent has gotten a fair warning that there is a lot more going on under the surface than they know or can even imagine.
The reason that The Incredible Hulk has been such a popular character for so many decades, then, is pretty obvious. Many, many of us have wished at some point in our lives that we secretly could turn into a gigantic rage monster that was both invulnerable and unstoppable when suitably provoked. I remember coming home from school more than once after being bullied at school with fantasies in my head of those bullies fleeing in terror of my wrath as I hurled (empty) school buses after them for what they had done.
Maybe you’ve felt that way with a neighbor who’s constantly provoking you with criticisms, complaints, or bad behavior for weeks and months and years. Maybe it’s with a co-worker who is cruel to everyone below her on the org chart but sycophantic with everyone above her, sometimes switching back and forth like toggling a lightswitch off and on. Maybe it’s with a spouse or partner who always says, “in a minute,” when the dishwasher needs to be loaded or the laundry needs to be folded or whatever, but a minute always turns into eternity. Just once, you think; just once, I’d like to show them just how angry this makes me…
That’s what is so seductive about anger, right? The sense of power it gives us? It’s a real, physiological reaction: our heartrate, blood pressure, and breathing all increase significantly, the way we need them to do so if we’re going to engage in a physical fight. The blood rushes out of our brains and down into our muscles to prepare and support them for exertion. Our bodies literally realign themselves for combat when they’re angry. All we need is a little gamma radiation, and they would not like us when we’re angry!
That sense of power is not a bad thing; it’s the result of thousands of years of evolution to give us a physical edge precisely when we needed one. But it can be a dangerous thing, because anger is not just empowering; it is intoxicating. Anger can impair our judgment and lower our inhibitions more than the strongest drinks, in part because we almost always assume that our anger is justified. We are angry because of something unjust that someone has done or not done, and that means we are filled with righteous anger. And the problem with righteous anger is that we tend to think it, in turn, justifies our behavior in expressing our anger.
That is what these teachings in Ephesians is worried about. There’s a lot of ambivalence about anger in this passage. First it says, “Be angry, but do not sin.” But then just a few verses later it says, “put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger,” so apparently we’re allowed to be angry as long as we put away all anger. What are we supposed to do with that?
Well, let’s unpack it a bit. “Be angry, but do not sin.” That’s important for two reasons. First, being angry is not inherently sinful; that’s a false teaching that has circulated through different parts of Christianity, but the Bible is quite clear that anger itself is not a sin. Aside from this teaching, we see a number of stories in which God gets angry, the prophets get angry, Jesus gets angry. There’s even a popular meme about this that circulates periodically. It says, “if anyone asks you ‘what would Jesus do’, remind them that flipping over tables and chasing people with a whip is within the realm of possibilities.”
And yes, when they get angry it is righteous anger, because in all those cases it is anger about exclusion and exploitation, about idolatry and faithlessness, about injustice and self-righteousness, all things that should make them and us angry. Anger can be good, sometimes very good, because it can spur us to action against those things.
But second, it reminds us that while anger is not sinful, it can sometimes lead us into sin; if it didn’t, the letter wouldn’t link the two together so closely. “Do not let the sun go down on your anger,” it continues, and then goes further: “and do not make room for the devil.” The first one of those instructions sounds like something you’d see on an Instagram post about relationships: “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” which sounds a lot like “don’t go to bed angry.” In fact, some very loose paraphrases of this passage from Ephesians even say, “don’t go to bed angry,” and this is apparently where that advice originated.
But that’s not what the actual letter says, which is good, because, just as an aside, that is not amazing relationship advice. Sometimes it’s better to go to bed angry and pick things up the next day when you’re both in a better frame of mind than to continue arguing into the wee hours of the night when your brain is less and less able to function between the physiological impact of the anger and that of exhaustion.
The actual letter says what you heard read today: “do not let the sun go down on your anger,” which has nothing really to do with going to bed. Rather, it is a metaphor for not allowing your anger to operate in the shadows of the night, the metaphorical time of the devil, the temptation in our anger to do all kinds of things that we wouldn’t do in the brightness of the day: assuming the worst and discounting the best of those with whom we disagree; engaging in disparagement, mockery, ridicule; gossip, slander, and above all, contempt.
Those are all and always sinful expressions of anger; they are inherently unrighteous because they tear down and tear apart not just the object of our anger, but the community of which we are a part. “Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is good for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear,” the letter goes on to warn, knowing that this is precisely what tends to happen when the sun goes down on our anger and we let it run loose in the shadows.
Again, it is not the anger that is the problem here, but the corruption of it to justify and fuel behaviors that divide and diminish and destroy, behaviors that make us feel powerful when we’re not feeling powerful, and end up with us like the Hulk, smashing everything around us in our rage. That is what it means to “grieve the Holy Spirit,” as the letter puts it; to cause grief to the Holy Spirit because it is the Spirit that both wields and shares the power of God to unite, to heal, to forgive, to reconcile; all the things that are good for building up the community of God’s people, all the things that anger operating in the shadows tends to tear up and tear apart.
And when we allow anger to have its proper place, neither stifled nor allowed to run free of its own will, we begin to learn some important things about it. Anger, you see, is often the surface expression for many other things. Sometimes we wear anger like armor, to protect our more vulnerable parts from being hurt by not letting anything dangerous get too close. And sometimes it is like an overcoat, an outer covering that keeps us warm and obscures the layers beneath.
C.S. Lewis, in his powerful and personal book A Grief Observed, reflects on some of the biggest questions and dynamics of human life in the aftermath of his beloved wife’s death and his own grief process, which included a lot of anger. Anger, of course, is a very common part of grief, whether you subscribe to the famous “Stages of Grief” typology or not. We get angry at the unfairness of our loss, we get angry at ourselves if we think we could have done something to prevent it, we get angry at the person who died if we think they could have done something, we get angry at God for not doing anything. Anger is not just a stage of grief; it is an expression of it, an outward face or incarnation of it. Lewis put it beautifully this way: “I sat with my anger long enough, until she told me her real name was grief.”
Anger does that a lot. It is the powerful, even dangerous superhero hiding a secret identity within. Anger is the public face, but its real name, its real identity is something else, and often the only way even we ourselves know is to sit with it long enough until it tells us. I am your anger, it finally says, but my real name is grief. I am your anger, but my real name is fear. I am your anger, but my real name is despair. I am your anger, but my real name is sadness, or loneliness, or homesickness, or unrequited longing.
My real name, my real name, is hurt; it is pain. As James Baldwin once said about hate, which is one of the children of unchecked anger: “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Anger is the same way. It gives us power to act, and in acting we do not have to sit with it and be forced to deal with the fact that its real name is pain.
Any process of change inevitably includes loss, and loss inevitably includes grief, even when the change is unquestionably for the best. And that means there will be anger. One of my friends who is a recovering alcoholic told me once, “My life is a thousand times, a million times better now that I’m sober, in every conceivable way, starting with the fact that I’m still alive, and I wouldn’t be if I wasn’t sober. But still: every nice dinner, every party, every holiday, every celebration that I go to, makes me angry on some level.
I’m angry that I can’t just have a couple of drinks like a normal person. I’m angry that alcohol even exists. I’m angry that other people get to enjoy it and I don’t. But what I’m really angry about most of all is that I remember how much I used to enjoy it, how much I still want it, and how much that means I can’t have even a drop of it now without it washing me away. I feel the loss; and it’s the loss that makes me angry.”
The temptation of talking to someone going through loss, going through grief, especially when those are accompanied by positive change, is to tell them, in not so many words, to look on the bright side; to focus on what’s being gained through that change. But when we make that mistake, we’re inevitably minimizing people’s grief or asking them to minimize it, and we do it mostly because their grief makes us uncomfortable. The truth is, you can see and appreciate the bright side and still grieve the loss that accompanies it.
Yes, I am glad that my loved one is not suffering anymore, but that doesn’t mean my grief at losing them is any less. Yes, I’m glad that I downsized from a house to this apartment because it’s safer for me and so much more easy to manage, but that doesn’t mean I don’t miss my furniture and my neighbors and all the things that surrounded me for so many years. Yes, I’m glad that we have the chance to do some extraordinary new things as a church that will help us be more faithful and effective followers of Jesus in a world that has changed so rapidly and profoundly in so many ways.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t miss the days when people would come just because we opened the doors and offered good worship and programs, and we had hundreds of children and youth running through the halls, and we always sang the songs that my parents sang with me in worship. That loss is going to make us angry sometimes, and that’s ok. “Be angry,” Ephesians allows, “but do not sin…be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.”
Those are not just platitudes; they are the ways we intentionally make room for one another and care for each other in this time of change and transition. They are the ways in which we make room for both our humanity and our identity as baptized disciples of Christ, called to a new way of life: a life that has more than enough for all of us, and all of us: room for grief, for loss, for sadness, and yes, for anger; and also for hope, for growth, for joy and yes, for love.