The Displeasure of Jesus

The passage: When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her weeping too, he groaned in his spirit and was troubled. (John xi. 33.)

Grimm’s lexicon gives the pagan senses of the Greek [Greek: embrimaomai] as “I am moved with anger,” “I roar or growl,” “I snort at,” “I am vehemently angry or indignant with someone,” but says that in Mark i. 43 and Matthew ix. 30 it means “I command with severe admonishment.” I doubt he has any authority for that; I think it a blunder. The Translators and Revisers still render it that way there, and in our passage, where a true version matters more, they write “groaned.” The Revisers’ margin gives what I believe is its true meaning: “was moved with indignation.”

Let’s look at every place the word is used of the Lord and learn what we can. The only gospel passage where it is used of anyone else is Mark xiv. 5, where both versions say the disciples “murmured at” the waste of ointment by one of the women who anointed him. That can hardly be strong enough, since “they had indignation among themselves.”

A word carries different moral weight in different mouths: a good man’s anger is not a bad man’s, nor the displeasure of Jesus a tyrant’s. But both are anger, both displeasure. We have no right to change a root meaning, saying a word means “he was indignant” in one place, “he strictly charged” in another and “he groaned” in a third. If a word seems unworthy of the Lord, let us refuse it, saying “I don’t believe that,” or “There must be something here I can’t see into, and I must wait; it can’t be what it looks like and be true of the Lord.” To accept the word as used of the Lord yet say it means something quite different from what the same writer means by it of anyone else seems to me untruthful.

Take Mark i. 43 first, which the authorized version renders “And he straitly charged him” and the revised “strictly charged him,” with “sternly” in the margin. Literally, I think, it reads: “And being angry”—or “displeased,” or “vexed”—“with him, he immediately dismissed him.” “Dismissed” also seems to carry dissatisfaction; it is the word of John ix. 34, “they cast him out,” only slightly stronger.

This adds to the story and raises the question why Jesus was angry. If we find no reason, we must leave it obscure, since I know no other meaning for the word short of an interpreter’s despair.

Jesus cured the leper not by word alone, which would have sufficed for the cure but not for his heart, but with his touch (the Sinaitic version says “hands”). In Jewish thinking that touch defiled Jesus, but how cleansing it felt to the leper, who seems not to have deserved such delicate tenderness! The Lord, reading his heart, saw no true response and no faith awakened; he had not drawn the man’s soul to his own. The leper was jubilant to be free of pain, uncleanness, isolation and scorn, and probably proud that a miracle had been done for him; he was so full of himself that he gave his deliverer no true thought.

The Lord saw this, or something like it, and was dissatisfied. He had wanted to give the man something far better than clean skin, and had only roused an unseemly delight in being clean, unseemly because it led the man to ignore the Lord and at once disobey a plain order. That attitude angered him: he saw rampant self-will and impertinent self-assurance. Filled not with gratitude or childlike joy but with gratification, all the keener for having been so long loathed, and with arrogance at the great prophet’s favour to him of all people, he left the healer to thwart his will. Told to tell no one, he began at once, the frothy, talkative soul, to spread the story everywhere, until Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed out in lonely places.

Next, the two blind men in the ninth chapter of Matthew. Both versions translate the word as in the leper’s story: “straitly,” “strictly,” “sternly charged them.” I read: “And Jesus was displeased”—or perhaps “much displeased”—“with them, saying, See that no man know it.”

“But they went forth, and spread abroad his fame in all that land.” Surely this shows why he was displeased: like the leper, they were bent on their own way and didn’t care for his. No doubt they partly wanted to spread his fame as the best thanks they could give. They never suspected that a great man might want to avoid fame, knowing it a foolish thing, or that someone out to help others might shun a crowd as an obstacle. “What is a prophet without honour?” they virtually ask, not understanding the answer: one the more likely to be a prophet. He objected out of modesty, but they would see he got his reward, and the praise of men! “Not tell?” they cry. “Of course we’ll tell!” Too grateful not to talk of him, not grateful enough to obey.

No wonder they were so self-sufficient. How many people seem ready to do anything for the church or Christianity except the one thing their Lord cares about: what he tells them! He would free them from themselves into the liberty of God’s children, make them his brothers and share his bliss with them, but they worship from a distance and boast of their church. His commands aren’t burdensome, yet they invent commands for him and load them on their brothers. I think what angered the Lord wasn’t the obstruction to his work or any inconvenience, but that they wouldn’t be his friends, do what he said, be his father’s children and help him save their brothers. When Peter later opposed the Father’s will in much the same way, saying “Far be it from you, Lord!”, Jesus called him Satan and ordered him behind him.

If anyone thinks less of the Master for ever being angry, I ask whether he knows only one kind of anger. There is good anger and bad: a wrath of God, and a wrath of man that doesn’t work God’s righteousness. Anger is as varied as the rainbow. God’s anger can only be Godlike, divinely beautiful, one with his love, helping, healing and restoring, yet truly anger. The anger of one who loves differs from that of one who hates, yet anger is anger: human anger can be degraded, or grand and eternal. Ours is usually degrading because usually impure.

I find it an especially glad thought that the Lord came near enough to be angry with us. The more I think of it, the more I feel we must press closer to him, within the circle of his wrath, out of the sin that angers him and near him where sin cannot come. His anger doesn’t quench his love; it is his recognition that we are to blame. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be his kind and he could never be angry with us. To say we are to blame is to say we ought to be better and can do right if we choose, can turn from darkness to light. The Lord will see to our growth.

It is a serious thought that the disobedience of men he had freed from blindness and leprosy could hinder his work for his father. His closest friends did the same: horrified at his crucifixion, they would have made him a king and ruined his father’s work. He preferred his enemies’ cruelty to his friends’ kindness, since the first, with evil intent, did his father’s will and the second, with good intent, would have thwarted it. His disciples troubled him with their unbelieving objections. The poverty of our idea of Jesus, and much more our disobedience, delays his victory and the kingdom of heaven. Many a man valiant for Christ without understanding him, who loads himself and others with burdens against nature, is practising self-willed worship and self-appointed service for which Christ will give little thanks, and which may be moving his holy anger even now. Be angry with us, holy brother, where we do wrong we could have avoided; don’t treat us as not worth being displeased with. Where we don’t understand, be patient, open our eyes and give us strength to obey until we are children of the Father as you are. You are lord, master and saviour of those who are growing, but perfect lord only of the true, the safe and the free, who live in your light and are divinely glad; we hold back your perfect lordship. Make us able to be angry without sinning, without the least revenge, and full of forgiveness. We won’t be content until even our anger is love.

The Lord neither summoned the leprosy back to seize the disobedient man, though he may have deserved it, nor wrapped the formerly blind men in darkness again for wrapping themselves in disobedience. He let them go. They lost their well-being by it, of course; to say a man can disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no can be yes, light darkness, and God’s will not man’s bliss. But he didn’t punish them directly, any more than he does tens of thousands of wrongs in the world. Many wrongs punish themselves against armed law, and many wrongdoers slash themselves with the knives of their own injustice, as the priests of Baal did; he means it so. Whether he punishes directly or indirectly, he is always working to rescue. I think his anger is sometimes followed, even accompanied, by an astounding gift from his heart of grace. He knows what to do, being love: love when he gives and when he withholds, when he heals and when he kills. Lord, if this is how you look on people in your anger, what must your full gaze of love be!

Now the last case of this word [Greek: embrimaomai] in our Lord’s story, in the form we have it down here (surely they have a fuller gospel in the Father’s house, without a spot of error). Let us use what we have so well that we may at last look inside the leaves of that other!

John xi. 33 in the authorized version says Jesus “groaned in the spirit, and was troubled” when he saw her weeping and the Jews weeping with her. The revised margin has “he was moved with indignation in the spirit, and troubled himself.” And in verse 38 it has “Jesus therefore again being moved with indignation in himself cometh to the tomb.”

Indignation, at the very tomb, among hearts torn by the loss of a brother four days dead, whom he loved too! It was eternally right for Jesus’s heart to be stirred with such anger at such a time and place. I can hardly doubt he is stirred the same way now by the deathbeds and graves of many who are no enemies of his, yet seem no better than pagans in death’s presence. What have they gained by being the Christians they claim to be? They stare at a grisly phantom called Death and never look up at the radiant Christ standing by the bed or grave. For them Christ has not conquered Death:

Thou art our king, O Death! to thee we groan!

They would shudder to say so aloud, but they say it in their bitter tears, despairing eyes, black clothes and quick retreat from daylight to burrow in darkness. “What, would you have us not weep?” Weep freely, friends, but let your tears be those of expectant Christians, not hopeless pagans. Now to the story.

All this time the Lord had been teaching his friends about his father, how blessed and perfect he was, who sent him so that people could see his likeness and know him greater than any likeness; yet when death touched them, none of it consoled them. He told Martha and Mary hundreds of things not in our few earthly pages, but that God loves them and has Lazarus meant nothing because they didn’t have Lazarus; even his bodily presence couldn’t make up for their brother’s bodily absence. I don’t mean that God would have even his closest presence make us forget our friend or stop wanting him. God forbid! His love perfects every love; he is the God of eternal remembrance, with whom there is no past and no shadow of turning. Far from the jealousy people attribute to him, he is determined that his sons and daughters love each other perfectly. He gave us to each other for ever, and doesn’t give in order to take away. But if my son or daughter has gone from me for a while, shouldn’t their mother’s coming comfort me? Is it nothing that he who is life is here, assuring me that the vanished life is well, and the love that misses it too? Why did the Lord come at all, if his friends could take no more good from him than this? All they could say was, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died!” You may say they didn’t yet know Christ well enough. True, but he expected more of them and was disappointed. You may ask how, when he knew what was in man; but I doubt you realize how much he gave up in coming to us, how much the Son could let the Father take from him without touching his sonship, except to deepen it. That he didn’t know everything here is plain from his own words, and I would scorn to think that harms his Godhead; to me it raises my idea of it. I can’t help thinking he was disappointed with Martha and Mary: was this how his best friends treated a father doing everything a father can for his children? He cared so much for their hearts that he couldn’t bear to see them weep in a way that shut his father out. His love was vexed that they sat in ashes when they should have been out in his father’s sun and wind, and all for a lie, since their weeping came from a false idea of loss, not from love. To believe in death and the grave, and not in him, the Life! Why should death trouble them, or why begrudge the friendly elements a body Lazarus, gone home to God, no longer needed? I suspect he saw them, in their hearts, feeling and acting as if Lazarus had ceased to exist.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

“Your brother will rise again.”

“I know he will rise again at the resurrection on the last day.”

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”

I won’t try now to plumb this saying. It is enough for my purpose that the sisters must surely have known he had raised Jairus’s daughter and the widow of Nain’s son. Even if “Your brother will rise again” seemed too good to mean he’d raise him now, the sisters, believing he could, might at least have known that if he didn’t, his reasons would be as lovely as any he might have had for doing it. If he could and didn’t, must that not be as good as, even better than, if he had?

Martha had gone, a little comforted for the moment. Now came Mary, who knew the Lord better, with alas the same bitter tears and hopeless, almost reproachful words. Seeing her and the Jews with her weeping, the Lord’s spirit was stirred to indignation. They wept as people who believe in death, not life; Mary wept as if she had never seen or touched the Word of life. He was troubled by their unbelief and by their trouble. What was he to do with these brothers and sisters who would be miserable and wouldn’t believe in his father? What a world, that wouldn’t free itself from death’s grip even now that death was dead, but would weep for thousands of years more, clasped to the breast of dead Death! Was existence, his father’s glorious gift, to be the worst of miseries because some must go home before others? All this because they wouldn’t know his father! Then his indignation gave way, and his labouring heart found relief in tears.

The Lord stood on the watershed of life. On one side lay what Martha and Mary called the world of life, on the other what he, his father and Lazarus called more abundant life. He saw both: the sisters weeping on one side, Lazarus waiting in peace on the other. He would do his best for the sisters, not for Lazarus. It was hard on Lazarus to be called back into the winding-sheet of the body, a sacrifice to their faithlessness, but it would be done: through him they would be forced to believe in the Father and escape death’s dominion.

He was vexed with them, as I said, for not believing in God, their father and his, and troubled at the same time by their trouble. His loving anger and disappointed sympathy broke in tears, which eased his heart of its divine grief. He turned not to punish their unbelief or scold their sorrow, but to his father, to thank him.

He thanks his father for hearing a prayer; whether he made it a moment before or earlier, before he left the far side of the Jordan, I can’t tell. What was it? Surely he had spoken of bringing Lazarus back, and his father had shown he agreed. “I knew that you always hear me, but I said it for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe you sent me.” Said what? Something for the crowd’s sake: the thanks he had just spoken. He didn’t usually thank his father in so many words, since he was always speaking to him and being heard; he did it this time to be heard doing it, and for holy honesty’s sake he tells us so, speaking so the people could hear, with nothing hidden or double: “I thank you, father, for hearing me. I say it not because I doubted you hear me, but so these people may understand that I’m not doing this on my own but as your messenger. It’s you, father, who are going to do it; I am doing it as your right hand. Lazarus, come out.”

The Lord’s trouble, as I said, was that his friends wouldn’t trust his father. He wanted no welcome for himself that wasn’t a welcome for his father, who did the works, not he. From that disappointment came, I think, his sorrowful sigh: “When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”

Here the Lord is thinking not of his own vindication but of his father’s reception by his children. When he asks to be received as a true man, it is so that those who receive him receive the one who sent him. What he was about to do would have proved his own claim, but he needed them to see that the Father was one with him in it: they acted together, by the Father’s will, because the Father had sent him.

Lazarus must come and help with these sisters he couldn’t get to believe! He had tasted death and must testify. “They’ve lost sight of you, Lazarus, and imagine you gone to the nowhere of their unbelief. Come out of the unseen; we’ll set them at rest.” It was hard on Lazarus, better off where he was, but he would keep the Lord company a little longer, then be left with his sisters, that they and millions like them might know God is the God of the living, not of the dead.

The Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But can any Christian believe Jesus wept from love for Lazarus? It was love for God, and for Martha and Mary. He hadn’t lost Lazarus; they had strayed from their father in heaven. “Come, my brother; be my witness!” he cried, and Lazarus came out, bound hand and foot. “Unbind him and let him go,” he said: a living truth walking about the world, never dead yet come forth, never lost yet restored. He came through a strange door, known to only one, but there he was! Surely the Lord was repaid for his trouble by seeing their joy.

Lazarus had to die again, and we may be sure he thanked God for it. Suppose his sisters, left behind a second time, fell into the same passion of grief, wailing and refusing to be comforted: what would you say of them? Something like this, I imagine: “How unworthy, to be no better for such a favour, behaving like the naughtiest, most faithless children! Didn’t they know he wasn’t lost? He was with the Master, who himself had seemed lost for a few days but came back. Couldn’t they trust that the one who brought him back once would make sure they had him for ever in the end?” Wouldn’t you speak that way, remembering that the shepherd will see that sheep who love each other get their own again, in whatever pastures they graze for a time? You would hardly believe they ever acted so; they must have felt he had only “gone for a minute … from this room into the next,” and that however much they missed him, it would be shameful not to be patient when there was nothing to fear.

“Yes,” I imagine you saying, “that’s exactly how they would have felt.”

“Then why are you so miserable?” I ask. “Or is it only the cold frost of habit and forgetting that makes you less miserable than a year ago?”

“Ah,” you answer, “but no such miracle was done for me! If there were, you would see then!”

“You mean that if your husband, son, father, brother or lover had been taken from you once and given back, you wouldn’t, when he had to go again, dream of calling him back from the good heaven? You couldn’t be so cruel, or wail and sadden the Lord’s heart with hopeless tears. Don’t you see that, in truth and reason, you’re exactly where those sisters were after Lazarus was taken from them again? You know everything they knew then; his recall gave them no more revelation than it gives you. You say you believe the story, though your neglect of its very soul makes that doubtful. As far as you’re concerned, Lazarus might as well not have risen. Your friend has gone as Lazarus went twice, and you act as if you knew nothing of Lazarus, making a pitiful fuss and vexing Jesus because you won’t be reasonable and trust his father. When Martha and Mary acted as you do, Lazarus hadn’t been raised; for you he has been, and you carry on as they did.

“You give every reason to think that if it were done for you, you’d call it a cataleptic fit and say he was never raised. Or do you think God isn’t unchangeable, but acts one way one day and another the next, on a whim, so that he might give a brother back to favourite sisters but such a gift can’t be counted on? Then why do you worship such a God?”

“But you know he doesn’t do it! That was a mere exception.”

“If it was, it’s as worthless as your behaviour makes it. You’re as dull of heart as Martha and Mary. Can’t you see that he restores as constantly as he takes away, that every bereavement is a restoration, that while you weep with empty arms, others who love as much as you are holding theirs in joyful reunion?”

“Alas, we know nothing of that!”

“If that’s all you’ve learned, I must leave you; my words have no soil to fall on. You deceived me by calling yourself a Christian. If you had been doing the Father’s will, you wouldn’t be like this.”

“Ah, you little know my loss!”

“It is great indeed; it seems to include God! If you knew what he knows about death, you’d clap your idle hands. But why try in vain to comfort you? You must be made miserable so you’ll wake from your sleep and see you need God. Without finding him, endless life with the living ones you mourn would be unbearable. Your own heart will teach you this, through the knowledge now coming to you by way of suffering. Then you’ll feel that existence itself is the worst of evils without the righteousness which is of God by faith.”