"The Difference Between Anger and Contempt"
#92-31Presented on The Lutheran Hour on March 30, 2025
By Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler, Lutheran Hour Speaker
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries
No bonus material MP3
Text: John 11:35
Do you remember how contentious the presidential election was back in 2016? A lot of people, on both sides of the political aisle, felt like there were no good candidates that year, which led to the creation of one of the better-selling bumper stickers of the season. It was typical election signage, with the name of the candidate in white lettering, the election year in the middle, and a campaign tagline at the bottom. From a distance, it looked like a bumper sticker for Bernie Sanders. It was the same color blue, the same font. But this one said, "Giant Meteor - 2016 - Just End It Already," implying that a humanity-ending catastrophe would be better than any of that year's candidates.
Arthur Brooks references this bumper sticker in his book titled Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. Brooks, a Harvard social scientist, had studied and taught about American public life for years. And he'd become convinced, and this bumper sticker was another piece of evidence, that the tone of American culture had become defined by contempt—contempt, which is different than anger.
Anger is a strong emotion that says, "I care really care about this." Or even, "I really care about you, and I'm angry because this is hurting you." More often than not, care is at the root of anger. But never with contempt. Contempt says, "You're not worth caring about," which is why Professor Brooks was so concerned about our culture.
So, why is contempt a problem? Maybe it doesn't feel like a problem, at first, because it kind of feels good. You know how you get a shot of adrenaline when you put someone in their place, when you show them that they're beneath you. But you also know how the receiving end of contempt feels—when you're talking with someone and they give you a smirk, a raised eyebrow, or an eyeroll; you can feel their contempt. Contempt kills conversion. How can you hope to be heard by someone who thinks you're worthless?
Marriage specialist John Gottman and his colleagues have studied hundreds of married couples. After spending just one hour with a couple, they could predict a divorce with 94 percent accuracy.i In their research, they discovered that mere anger is not predictive of divorce, but contempt is. Contempt deteriorates trust in all relationships, not just marriages. It causes people to withdraw from each other, to stop hearing each other. Contempt is also toxic, not only to relationships, but also to individuals. Over the long run, practicing contempt will make you unhappy, unhealthy, and unattractive, even to those who were initially on your side.ii If you're like me, and you believe there is a God who created us, maybe you wonder why wouldn't God hold us all in contempt? Why doesn't He just end it already?
Three thousand years of Judeo-Christian influence has taught us to say, "God is love." But ancient religions more often imagined the gods filled with scorn toward our race—that we were good for nothing, except maybe to be enslaved or ridiculed. And justifiably, so. We're not as tough as we think we are. We break easily, get sick, aged, and die. And along the way, we don't even get along. We complain. We're ungrateful. And we're really good at finding someone or something else to blame—to hold in contempt. We blame God, and bosses, and family members, and co-workers, and circumstances.
So, if the beautiful Mind that designed this vast, mysterious, interconnected universe does pay us any attention, how might that Being feel about us? If you or I were in the position of the Almighty, it wouldn't be hard to imagine feeling disgusted. We'd probably be up there preparing the giant meteor even now.
But here's the thing about God revealed in the Bible: He's not like us. God speaks of Himself through the prophet, Isaiah. He says, "My thoughts are not your thoughts ... your ways are not my ways" (Isaiah 55:9). God isn't like us, but He wants us to become like Him, to be imitators of Him (Ephesians 5:1), because God is love, the Bible says (1 John 4:8).
But also, God gets angry—angry like a friend watching another friend destroy himself with addiction, angry like a parent watching their child harm herself with bad choices. So also, God gets angry—angry at the mess we've made of His good creation; angry at how little we care, angry at the result of all this, which is death-physical and spiritual death, separation from God, hell. God is angry, but don't mistake anger for contempt. God, as described in the Bible, God revealed in Jesus, has no contempt toward us. Because contempt says, "You're not worth caring about." But our God is angry because He cares. Behind God's anger is love. We believe this only because of Jesus.
We trust that Jesus is the eternal Son of God become human. We trust that He's the perfect expression of God, the clear light from God, sent from His Father so that we might see God and see how God sees us, how God feels toward us. There's a chapter in the New Testament Gospel of John, one of the four biblical accounts of the life of Jesus, that shines light on how God feels toward us. Let me share this account with you. And listen, listen for the emotions. How are the people around Jesus feeling? How are they feeling toward Him? How does He feel toward them? How does He feel toward you?
The story begins with a man named Lazarus. He was from Bethany, a village near Jerusalem in Judea in southern Israel. Lazarus had two sisters, Mary and Martha. Now Lazarus was sick, and so his two sisters sent word to Jesus. They sent a message to Jesus that said, "Look, Lord, Your dear friend whom You love is sick." When Jesus got the message, hearing it, He said, "This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for the glory of God, so that God's Son may be glorified through it."
Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when He heard that Lazarus was sick, He remained where He was for two days. Then, Jesus said to His students, His disciples, "Let's go back to Judea." They said to Him, "Rabbi, just a short while ago the Jews there in Judea were trying to stone You—to kill You—and You would go back there?" Jesus answered, "Are there not 12 hours of daylight? As long as a person walks during the day, he does not stumble, because by the light of the world, he sees. It's only when he walks at night that he stumbles, because the light is not with him."
After Jesus said this, He told them, "Our dear friend Lazarus has fallen asleep. I am going there to wake him up." They said to Him, "Lord, if he sleeps, he will be restored." Jesus was speaking of Lazarus's death, but they thought He meant natural sleep. So, He told them plainly. "Lazarus is dead. And for your sake, I'm glad I was not there, so that you may trust. But let us go to him." Then Thomas, who was called Didymus, the Twin, said to the other disciples, "Let's also go, so that we may die with Him."
When Jesus arrived, He found that Lazarus had already been dead, in the tomb, for four days. Now Bethany was around two miles from Jerusalem. And many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them at the loss of their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet Him. But Mary stayed at home. Then Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give You whatever You ask." Jesus says to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha says, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." Jesus said, "I am the Resurrection and the Life. Whoever trusts in Me will live, even though he dies. And whoever lives and trusts in Me will never die. Do you believe this?" Martha says to Him, "Yes Lord, I believe, I trust that You are the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God who is to come into the world."
After Martha said this, she went back to the house and called her sister Mary aside and said to her, "The Teacher is here. He is calling for you." When Mary heard this, she got up quickly and went out to Him. Now Jesus had not yet entered the village. He was still at the place where Martha had met Him. When the Jews who were with Mary in the house, comforting her, saw how quickly she left, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to mourn there. And when Mary came and saw Jesus, she fell at His feet and said to Him, "Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died." When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her also crying, He was angered in His spirit and deeply troubled. And He said, "Where have you put him?"
"Come and see, Lord," they said to Him.
Jesus wept.
Then the Jews there started saying, "See how much he loved him." But some of them said, "Couldn't he who performed a miracle to open the eyes of a blind man, couldn't he have kept this man from dying?" Then Jesus, once more, deeply angered, came to the tomb. It was a cave with a stone rolled over the entrance. Jesus says, "Move away the stone." Martha, the sister of the dead man, says to Him, "Lord, there will be an odor, because he's been in there four days." Jesus says to her, "Didn't I tell you that if you trusted you would see the glory of God?" So they moved away the stone. And Jesus, lifting up His eyes, said: "Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I know that You always hear Me. But I say this for the benefit of those standing here, so that they might trust that You have sent Me." After He said this, He cried out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!" And the dead man came out, his hands and his feet still bound with the strips of linen, and his face wrapped with a burial cloth. And Jesus said, "Unbind him and let him go."
Many of the Jews who were there and saw what Jesus had done, they put their faith in Him. But some reported it to the religious leaders and they called the other leaders together and they held a council. They said, "What are we doing? Here this man is, doing many miraculous signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will trust in him. Then the Romans will come and take away our place and our nation. But one of them, named Caiphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, "You know nothing at all. Don't you realize that it is better for you if one man dies for the sake of the people, so that the whole nation does not perish?" He did not say this on his own. But as high priest that year, Caiphas prophesied that Jesus was about to die for the Jewish nation, and not for them alone, but for the children of God scattered abroad, to bring them together and make them one. So, from that day on, they plotted to take Jesus' life.
That's from John 11.
When I've listened to this story before, I usually focus on the action, the dead man raised to life, which is a natural way to hear it. But this time, I noticed the emotions. Both sisters feel strong emotion toward Jesus because He wasn't acting on their timeline. For Martha, there's sadness, regret, disappointment, maybe even anger, but also hope, and confidence, and trust in Jesus, even if she's only holding on by a thread. Mary's feeling similarly, but at this point, her faith in Jesus seems to be buried under grief. All she says is "Lord, if You had been here ..." God, if you had been here.
Maybe you've prayed like that. What did you feel? Regret? Anger? Disgust? Because God has let you down for the last time and you just don't care anymore? We don't know what Mary's tone was. But contempt is clearly what the religious leaders are feeling toward Jesus. Jesus is better off dead in their eyes. To them, He's become garbage, disposable, contemptible. But what is Jesus feeling? We're told that He is angry and sad at the same time.
The first time I clearly remember feeling angry and sad at the same time, I think I was around twelve. We were watching the movie Dances with Wolves with Kevin Costner. It was toward the end, the final scene with "Two Socks," the wolf. Now, the hero of the story is Lieutenant John Dunbar (played by Costner). He's a Civil War-era Union soldier who's been reassigned to the Dakotas. When he gets to his new post, he's all alone, isolated, until he's befriended by some Native Americans from the Sioux people. And he starts to adopt their culture. Along the way, he also makes friends with a skittish, but friendly wolf, whom he names Two Socks because of his white forepaws.
Dunbar eventually leaves his post to live with the Sioux. After months away, he returns to collect his personal journal. There he finds that a detachment of US Army soldiers has moved in. They capture Dunbar. They kill his horse and charge him with desertion. As they're transporting him to his court martial in a wagon, Two Socks follows from a distance. The soldiers see the wolf and make a game of trying to shoot him with their rifles. Two Socks, who was just starting to think humans could be friends, doesn't understand what's happening. He runs in circles until a bullet finally gets him, as a mournful soundtrack plays amid sounds of soldiers cackling and taking shots, a harbinger of the meteor that's about to descend on Native American culture.
It's a tearful scene, in a powerful movie. But, on its own it leads in one of two directions: either toward despair or contempt. We can see those soldiers in the movie who represent white, western, colonizing culture, and vilify them. We can blame them and believe that we are better and then savor the shot of adrenaline that comes with contempt. Or we can see ourselves in them, whoever we are. We're all the same—contemptible imitations of each other. And Two Socks and creatures are doomed if they're counting on us. The best we could hope for is a meteor.
But in Jesus, there is another way. Jesus is angry and sad at the death and destruction we've brought into His good creation. He's angry and sad because He cares. And in the face of our contempt, under the weight of our despair, He chose the way of love. God's world-ending judgment fell on Him, for you, on the cross. Jesus sacrificed His life for us who scorned Him. And He rose from the dead to make us dear friends, to call us out of the tomb, like He did for Lazarus, to lead us in faith to a new creation.
And we can see signs of that new creation in Christ, sometimes in the strangest places—even in cynical election signage. In the summer of 2016 journalist Beth Teitell of the Boston Globe told the backstory behind the "Giant Meteor" sticker, that bleak, bipartisan bumper meme. The word "meme," by the way, is derived from the Greek word for "imitation." It's the word used in the original version of the Bible in Ephesians 5:1, which calls Christians to be "memes" of God—imitators of God. And imitations are what they are; they're not the real thing—but they can remind us.
So also, with this bumper sticker. The guy selling it online is hoping to make a few extra bucks, when, overnight, the meme becomes an internet sensation. He braces himself to get rich, but it doesn't come, because other imitator sellers siphon off his business. But he's not too upset. Afterall, he admits, the meme wasn't even his idea. He saw the image on some other social media post. Eventually, the guy who originally created the image reached out. His name was Preston.
Preston explained that he'd created the meme in a few minutes by imitating a Bernie Sanders sticker on his computer. "Anyways," Preston wrote to the online seller, "I just wanted to say thank you, thank you for bringing this image into physical reality and sharing it with the world so that many more people could enjoy it."
Wait. You're telling me that in this culture of contempt, the person who created the image is glad for the guy who took it without permission? Yeah. "I didn't come up with every part of it," Preston said, explaining how a friend had come up with the words. "I just slapped it all together." Then he uttered a hopeful message, showing that contempt doesn't need to be the end of our story. He said, "I guess we're all part of one big global meme-making team."iii
In that spirit of unity, would you pray with me?
Dear God, in Your Son Jesus, You look on us with no contempt, but only love. Help us to be imitators of You and bring Your kindness into physical reality. In Jesus' Name. Amen.
i See Gottmann et al, "How a Couple Views Their Past Predicts Their Future," Journal of Family Psychology, Vol. 5, No. 3 & 4, March/June 1992. Accessed on Feb 22, 2025 at https://www.johngottman.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/How-a-couple-views-their-past-predicts-their-future-predicting-divorce-from-an-oral-history-interview.pdf.
ii See Arthur Brooks, Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. New York: Broadside Books (2019).
iii Beth Teitell, "The Story Behind the Election's Best Bumper Sticker," The Boston Globe, June 16th, 2016.
Reflections for March 30, 2025
Title: The Difference Between Anger and Contempt
No reflection segment this week.
Music Selections for this program:
"A Mighty Fortress" arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"I Trust, O Christ, in You Alone" arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
"Crucifer" by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
"Lord, Thee I Love with All My Heart" From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.
