Be angry, and don’t sin.” Don’t let the sun go down on your wrath,
Ephesians 4:26 (WEB)
in its setting: Ephesians 4:17-32
1 Where we are
Wei Sheng is thirty-three and he trains the new hires. At twenty past seven on Tuesday, at the bus stop, a man cuts in front of the queue and shoulders past him without a word, and the heat arrives in his hands the way it always did, the way it did years ago before the years inside. He has about three seconds and there is nobody watching. He lets the bus go and takes the next one, standing at the pole feeling faintly ridiculous. Underneath it is not the man's rudeness. It is the old belief that a person who lets himself be shoved is nobody, and that respect is something you have to collect on the spot or lose.
2 What the passage is doing
Paul is writing to a young church in a crowded port city, people from very different households now sharing meals, work and money. He has spent three chapters on what God has already done for them before he asks anything at all. Then he gets specific: take off the old self, put on the new, and stop lying to each other. Right in the middle of that he quotes the Psalms — be angry, and do not sin. He does not tell them the heat is forbidden. He tells them not to give it a room to sleep in overnight.
ὀργίζεσθε
orgizesthe · be angry
Paul is quoting the Greek Psalms, and the form he uses is a command in the present tense — not "if you happen to get angry", but a plain allowance that anger will come and may even be right. English hears "be angry" and assumes a slip has already occurred. The Greek puts the fault later, in what you do with the heat once it arrives. The surge is not the sin. The feeding of it is.
3 Taking it with you
So the three seconds where you did nothing were not nothing. That was the new self, put on again that morning like a clean shirt, and it will need putting on again tomorrow, because it was never installed once and finished. Hear this first: God did not wait for you to master your temper before he counted you his. Christ was shoved, spat at, shouted down, and answered none of it — and he lost no dignity in it, because his standing came from his Father and not from the crowd. Yours comes from the same place now. You do not have to collect your respect at a bus stop at twenty past seven. It has already been given.
A prayer you can pray
Father, you know how fast the heat comes, and how old it is in me. Thank you that you called me yours before I had any of this under control. When it rises today, hold me for three seconds. Let me feel it and not feed it, and let me not carry it home tonight. I am not who I was. Keep proving that to me. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria — to God alone be the glory.
