First, an apology for the delay since my last post. We've been a little busy—we got a new puppy! Her name is Blossom; she's a Bernese Mountain Dog mix. We saw her picture on a Facebook rescue group and fell in love. Here's the face that derailed my writing schedule:

Jesus flipped tables exactly once.[1]

In three years of public ministry—healing, teaching, confronting, forgiving—he stopped the temple from functioning one time, at the end, as a deliberate prophetic act that he seemed quite aware would get him killed. He did not make table-flipping a lifestyle. He did not build a brand around it. He did not say "I'm just telling it like it is" every time he was rude to someone at dinner.

And yet the table-flipping has become the patron saint/event of every Christian who mistakes venom for virtue. If your entire personality is "righteous anger," you're likely not channeling Jesus in the temple. You're just an asshole and you’ve found a Bible story to hide behind.

When I posted this online, I was accused of making a conservative dog whistle argument with this—that saying "calm down about anger" is really just another way of saying "don't do anything." I take that seriously, because "don't be angry" has absolutely been used as a way to keep oppressed people silent. White moderates have a long, ugly history of telling Black Americans and other marginalized communities to be patient, wait for a more convenient season. Dr. King wrote a whole letter about it from a Birmingham jail.

So I want to thread this carefully. Because I think the anger matters. And I also think it can eat you alive if you let it.

I’m writing this on Good Friday. That matters for what I'm about to say. The temple action wasn't an outburst. In Mark's telling, Jesus enters the temple, looks around at everything, leaves, and comes back the next day. He slept on it. This was not a man losing his temper in a flash of passion—this was a man who saw corruption, went home, lay awake thinking about it, and returned the next morning with a whip he'd braided himself.

That plan cost him his life. The tables he flipped on Monday led directly to the cross he carried on Friday. Today. In all four Gospels, the temple incident is the hinge—the moment the authorities decide he has to die.

Which is what makes it such a terrible proof text for an angry theobro persona.

I didn't grow up knowing what to do with anger. Anger was the monster under the bed—something to suppress, never express, certainly never raise your voice about. I had nearly no models of what healthy conflict looked like. Anger was the thing that happened right before everything fell apart.

So I did what a lot of people do: I shoved it down. Buried it under compliance and performance and a relentless need to keep the peace. And for a long time, I thought that meant I wasn't an angry person.

I was wrong. The anger was always there. It just wore disguises. Having children and having a sibling die and years of ministry has a way of revealing the anger I’d been carrying around.

Repressed anger is a shape-shifter. It shows up as the volcanic eruption over something trivial—a broken dish, a misread email—where the intensity has nothing to do with the moment and everything to do with the last ten years. It shows up as passive-aggression, the slow drip of resentment that poisons relationships while maintaining plausible deniability. It shows up as perfectionism—if I just perform well enough, I'll never have to feel the thing underneath. It shows up as self-hatred, turning the blade inward because outward was never allowed. It shows up as numbing—scrolling, drinking, shopping, checking out—because if you can't feel the anger, maybe you won't feel anything at all.

Much of my therapy work has been about reclaiming my anger. Learning that it's not a sin or a character flaw but a signal—something in the world is wrong and I'm registering it. Feelings are data, not directives. The anger doesn't tell me what to do. But it tells me something needs doing.

So no, I'm not arguing against anger. The Hebrew prophets were furious people. Amos didn't mince words. Micah was brutal. Jesus called the Pharisees whitewashed tombs full of dead bones to their faces. The biblical tradition doesn't whisper politely about injustice. It screams.

The marginalized need their anger. It is the fuel that topples systems. And allies need their anger too—not to shield their own comfort, but to join the work of dismantling what should never have been built.

What I'm arguing against is something else entirely. Anger as prophetic act and anger as personality are not the same species. They share a fuel the way a controlled burn shares a fuel with arson.

Prophetic anger is specific; it names the injustice. It costs the prophet something. When Jesus overturned the money changers' tables, he was dismantling an economic system that exploited the poor in God's name—inflated prices for sacrificial animals, a currency exchange that skimmed off the desperate. His anger had a zip code.

On the other hand, anger-as-a-personality is ambient, indiscriminate, always on. The guy who is perpetually outraged, combative, and "speaking truth to power" in ways that conveniently never cost him a single dinner invitation. A brand built on being the one who "tells it like it is," which almost always translates to "is cruel and has convinced himself that cruelty is courage."

I'm talking about a specific kind of person—often a white man with institutional power—who wears "righteous anger" like a costume for dominance. The pastor who screams at his staff and calls it "zeal." The culture warrior who dehumanizes trans kids and calls it "standing for truth." The Christian influencer who posts rage bait five times a day and calls it "prophetic." That's not flipping tables but merely building a brand on other people's pain.

The real test of righteous anger isn't whether it feels justified. It always feels justified. The real test is whether it costs you something.

Jesus's anger cost him his life. The prophets' anger cost them their safety, their reputations, their freedom. When anger is genuinely prophetic, the prophet doesn't come out on top. They come out bloodied.

If your anger only ever targets people with less power than you, it's not righteous. It's just aggression with a theology degree.

If your anger never costs you a friend, a platform, a position—if it only ever gains you followers—something has gone wrong.

Last week we remembered a man who walked into a temple with a whip he'd braided himself, scattered the coins of the powerful, and then walked straight into the week that killed him. Not because anger is bad. But because real prophetic anger is not a lifestyle brand you can sell from a safe distance. It is the controlled burn that clears the ground for something new to grow—and the one who lights it doesn't always walk out of the fire.

He only did it once. And once was enough.

What I’m Watching and Reading

The Pitt. I admire Noah Wyle for how he took a super loveable character from season 1 and made him into a super unlikable asshole (that you still feel bad for) in this season. Yes, the medical stuff is nailbiting—but the work on the effects of grief and trauma is really what the show is about and what makes it so good.

Shrinking (season 3). Also catching up on this. If you’re going to enjoy the show, you just have to pretend that there is no such thing as enforceable ethics for therapists. Putting that aside, it’s perhaps the most emotionally intelligent show, like, ever?

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. Emily and I got about 60% through and then our digital library loan ran out of time. So now we’re back on the hold list: number 2,763. It’ll be a while before we get it back. Argh.

The Resurrection of Jesus by Dale C. Allison Jr. Still working through this one. It does a great job of explaining both the historical arguments for and against a physical resurrection.

[1] As far as we know. John puts the table-flipping at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, while the synoptic gospels put it at the end. Some folks try to argue that it was two distinct events, but scholarship says that’s highly unlikely. There’s no way he would have been allowed to do it more than once; once was enough to get executed.