On Indignation by Don Watson

Author:Don Watson [Watson, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522873788
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

William James detected ‘ferocious pleasure’ in anger, ‘stern joy in the astringency and desolation’. In like vein, indignation (along with love and other higher emotions) had the seductive power to sweep away our ‘inferior self’: our inhibitions, cowardice, shyness, conventionality. It turns us into heroes, saints—monsters.

Thus Christ, who, according to the Gospel of St John, took to the moneychangers with ‘a scourge of small cords’. As He is the Son of God, we are asked to believe that this was not indignation of the kind that grips us mortals; but rather, in the way of all divinely inspired conduct, it was somehow calculated, symbolic and the fulfilment of prophecy. It was anger without sin, righteous anger: anger of the kind that God expects of all believers when they encounter blasphemy or evil. Believe that if you like, but if Jesus had not taken out his righteous anger on the tables in the temple, and if he had not cursed the fig tree, the history of the world, including the very worst parts of the twentieth century, would have followed a different course, and one that could hardly be worse. If Jesus’ indignation was calculated, it was not the kind of calculation most of us would own up to. But Satan might.

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