The content of the Sermon on the Mount could be easy for someone making assumptions to misunderstand in drastic fashion. Making no assumptions, grasping what does and does not logically follow, and sometimes reading other parts of the Bible clarifies that many popular teachings about this sermon are not accurate. Among many other things, anger is not condemned as an intrinsic sin by Jesus. Logically and Biblically (not that the real nature of any philosophy is dictated by something other than logical necessity), this is total bullshit. Ahead of providing miscellaneous affirmations of God's own anger, I will show the words of Jesus in Matthew 5:22 and address a handful of points pertaining more to the one verse. Some manuscripts clarify that anyone who is angry at another person "without cause" is in the wrong, but the rest of the verse is unaffected by the absence of this phrase:
Matthew 5:22--"'But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, "Raca," is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, "You fool!" will be in danger of the fire of hell.'"
It is vital that when speaking about anger, Jesus does not always use negative language. As associated with the concepts of wrongdoing and punishment as the word judgment is, it is neutral on its own. Judgment is evaluative, but this does not mean that the person being judged is always or inherently morally deficient. Being subject to judgment only means that harboring anger will bring a person under God's evaluation. Their beliefs and actions, entirely within their control, determine if this judgment for anger has a negative outcome. If an individual's anger is nonsinful, then he or she would have nothing to worry about. Aside from the warning about mishandling something otherwise neutral or even good, over and over, the Bible says that God does experience anger, though his anger is not unjust and will never be used to spur on true injustices like the atrocities of eternal torture ascribed to him by many illogical and Biblically disoriented people (Deuteronomy 25:1-3, Matthew 10:28, Luke 12:47:48, 13:1-3, John 3:16, 36, and so on). Here are some examples of divine anger in the Bible:
Exodus 22:22-24--"'Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword . . .'"
Leviticus 26:27-28--"'If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me, then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over.'"
Judges 2:20-21--"Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and said, 'Because this nation has violated the covenant I ordained for their ancestors and has not listened to me, I will no longer drive out before them any of the nations Joshua left when he died.'"
Jeremiah 7:20--"'"Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: My anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place--on man and beast, on the trees of the field and on the crops of your land--and it will burn and not be quenched."'"
Not that there is any inherent disconnect between God's character in the Old and New Testaments--and if there was, the New Testament would be philosophically erroneous rather than the Old, since it contradicts its own prerequisite ideas--but divine anger is clearly acknowledged in the New Testament as well. People who fallaciously retreat away from the Old Testament, as asinine as that is according to the New Testament doctrine itself (Matthew 5:17-19, Romans 15:4, 2 Timothy 3:16-17, and so on), still are "left" with a deity of anger.
Romans 2:6-8--"God 'will repay each person according to what they have done.' To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor, and immortality, he will give eternal life. But for those who are self-seeking and reject the truth and follow evil, there will be wrath and anger."
Revelation 16:1--"Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels, 'Go, pour out the seven bowls of God's wrath on the earth.'"
Jesus would be a hypocritical heretic if he truly contradicted the Torah, Psalms, and other writings in the Old Testament on anger (or divorce, oaths, and so on) while believing himself on Yahweh's side. Going back to Matthew 5, in saying that anyone who says "You fool" [1] to another person is in danger of hellfire, Jesus could mean his words entirely literally and still not mean that anger is evil: the angry person in question needs to handle themself carefully lest they cross the moral line and only then be deserving of death in hell (Matthew 10:28). Even in its exact wording, Mathew 5 does not outright say that anyone who is angry sins and will be sentenced to hell, using none of the apparent hyperbole in verses like Matthew 5:31-32 or 19:1-9 [2]. Being in danger of consuming hellfire is applicable even if someone has not yet expressed anger in, for instance, an illicitly violent manner, but is carelessly going right up to the boundary. As long as a person does not actually cross the line from permissibility or justice into mental or physical sin, it does not matter how close to the line they are--but emotionalism, apathy, and malice already lapse someone into sin and in turn jeopardize the person's willingness to handle anger properly.
Matthew 5:22 is not one of the verses where Jesus is truly exaggerating, since the literal statement is entirely compatible at face value, especially with the "without cause" phrase, with everything the Old Testament teaches about human and divine anger. God is angry towards sin and sometimes acts on that ire in dramatic but just ways. People, too, can be angry about true injustice. This is never once condemned in Yahweh's laws, unlike actual mental sins like coveting (Exodus 20:17, Deuteronomy 5:21), scheming to murder (Exodus 21:13-14, Deuteronomy 19:11-13), unwillingness to help the poor (Deuteronomy 15:7-10), and reluctance to let male and female servants automatically go free in the seventh year (Deuteronomy 15:18). It is untrue that the Torah does not very directly address the logical necessity of certain thoughts being evil if certain deeds really are evil. Anger simply is not automatically wrong.
Involuntary emotions cannot possibly be sinful anyway because a person cannot avoid them, and thus he or she cannot be legitimately punished for them. Anger can certainly be involuntary in some cases. It is what someone believes (and why, though why they believe anything is itself part of what they believe) and how someone behaviorally handles their anger alone that could be morally erroneous. It is very stupid but entertaining how some professing Christians will either consider all anger immoral or might trivialize Christ's teachings on the cruciality of rightly managing anger, and yet pretend like he speaks of divorce elsewhere in Matthew 5 in a purely literal way--one that supercedes any directly or indirectly relevant moral law from the Torah (Exodus 21:10-11, 26-27, Deuteronomy 21:10-14, 23:15-16, and 24:1-4) he would thus be heretically contradicting (as he insists he is not in Matthew 5:17-19), in addition to Paul's plain and less direct allowances for divorce one way or another outside of those mentioned by Jesus (1 Corinthians 5:9-14, 7:15, 2 Corinthians 6:14-17, Ephesians 5:3-7).
Jesus is distinctively not God according to the Bible (Matthew 19:16-17, 24:36, 26:39, Mark 10:17-18, John 14:9-13, 28, Acts 2:22-24, 1 Corinthians 8:4-6, 1 Timothy 2:3-6, and more). Still, he expresses anger or very much appears to (Matthew 23, John 2); anyone who heretically thinks he is the same as Yahweh according to the Bible would be hypocritical for believing he was angry and also that anger is always sinful. God is certainly presented as being angry at people for very particular, legitimate reasons, and it seems Jesus is too. A person can only assume that the Bible opposes all human anger. It does not and on the contrary would explicitly endorse any anger that aligns with God's.
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