On a recent episode of The Russell Moore Show, pastor and author Rich Villodas discussed anger, forgiveness, and faithful family members who make it possible to rise to the challenge of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Russell Moore: Can you tell us about the influence your grandfather had on your life?
Rich Villodas: I became a follower of Jesus at 19. At that time, about 15 family members came to faith in Christ in one night in a small church in Brooklyn. After that remarkable encounter, I had lots of questions.
Thankfully, my grandparents were down the block from where I lived. My grandfather Marcus, at that time in 1999, was quite ill.
I walked down the street and said, “Grandpa, I have lots of questions about what happened on that Sunday.” He said, “Why don’t you sit next to me?” I sat next to him on his bed, shoulder to shoulder, and three hours later, we had had our first conversation about the Bible and Jesus and prayer.
And then he said, “Why don’t you come back tomorrow? Let’s do it again.” So I came back the next day, and we did it again. And that was my rhythm for eight months—four to five days a week, two to three hours each time. I sat shoulder to shoulder with my grandfather as he taught me about the Scriptures, theology, prayer, humility.
He gave me two assignments throughout those eight months. One was to memorize entire psalms, and the other was to live the words of Jesus, specifically the Sermon on the Mount. That was how I started following Jesus.
I wish everyone had what I received in those eight months with my grandfather, patient and unhurried. After those eight months with him, he passed away. But what a deposit in my life.
RM: I’m assuming that as you were writing your book [The Narrow Path: How the Subversive Way of Jesus Satisfies Our Souls], you were teaching through the Sermon on the Mount at your church.
It seems to me that when it comes to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, you have to either make strange the familiar or familiarize the strange.
Would most people in your congregation be those for whom this was new, where you had to make it familiar? Or do you think most people were overly familiar—that they were used to the words and you had to get around that familiarity and numbness to show them the strangeness?
RV: The challenge with a question like that, at least in my context in Queens, is that our church is so diverse. There are 80 nations represented in the neighborhood and 123 languages spoken. Our church is generationally diverse, theologically diverse, and politically diverse, which makes this congregation one of the most dangerous and stressful places on the planet to preach.
But I think more people would be unfamiliar with the Sermon on the Mount. And many who are familiar with it are used to hearing it in a particular light. For example, those who are familiar with it often hear, “This sermon is not meant for me to live but to show how inadequate I am to live it and then to lead me to throw myself at the grace of God.”
That’s opposed to a different mindset: “Let me throw myself at the grace of God first and ask God to help me to live it.” The emphasis Jesus puts on the Sermon on the Mount is on living it.
I find myself having to toggle back and forth. Some folks need to be made familiar with the language, and others need to see it from a different vantage point.
RM: There are people who look at the Sermon on the Mount and say, “This is really hard, and it seems impossible to do. And that means I’m inadequate and not the kind of person that Jesus is calling.”
And then there are people who say, “Well, this is obviously impossible to do. Jesus just wants us to reflect on God.” Both of those views can lead a person away from what Jesus is doing.
RV: To look at Jesus’ words directly, toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, he says things like “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice” is like a person who builds their life on the sand (Matt. 7:26). As Jesus comes to the culmination of this amazing sermon, the greatest sermon ever taught, his emphasis is on practicing it.
This emphasis is true even in Matthew 7—one of the most terrifying passages in the Bible, where Jesus basically says, “You’ve prophesied in my name, you’ve cast out demons in my name, and on that day, I’ll say, ‘I never knew you’ ” (vv. 22–23).
I used to think that Jesus was exclusively talking about someone’s personal relationship to him. They were doing the right stuff but had never really made a commitment to receiving Christ as Savior.
That might be part of it, but I think when Jesus said, “I never knew you,” he was also talking about the path we’ve chosen to take.
It’s more like he’s saying, “You’ve never submitted yourself to my teachings. You’ve never submitted yourself to my way of life.” It’s not about a personal faith thing; it’s about your outward life.
I think we let ourselves off the hook very easily by saying that Jesus doesn’t expect us to submit to a certain way of life—that all he wants is a relationship with us, and how we live and follow him is secondary. We say, “If we can get there, great. But if we can’t, don’t worry—we have the grace of God.”
We do need to be reminded of the scandalous grace of God that forgives and pours out love and mercy. And that same God is also calling us into a relationship, to follow Jesus in a particular way right here, right now. We need to not just have faith but live faithfully in the way of Jesus.
RM: Let’s talk about some of these specific issues people are struggling with. One of those issues is anger. A lot of people, when they hear what Jesus says about anger, think immediately of people who are quarrelsome, who have screaming fits.
How do you help people see where they fit into these warnings about anger when it can look so different for different people?
RV: Some people grew up in households where they didn’t have permission to be angry. That was an emotion that, as a Christian or maybe as part of a particular culture, was frowned upon.
Frederick Dale Bruner, the New Testament scholar, really helped me to understand anger. The word that Jesus uses there is not about momentary anger when something happens. Jesus is talking about an anger that is subterranean. Bruner says it’s a kind of anger that gets expressed through resentments, and it ultimately results in contempt.
Jesus says, in short, “You’ve heard it said, don’t murder, but I tell you, if you’re angry at your brother or sister, you’ve already committed murder in your heart” (Matt. 5:21–22).
And then he talks about this word raca in that same context. Raca is basically a word to describe cultural harshness with a level of contempt in our souls. When you look at our world right now, the world is raca everywhere. We have allowed this low-grade sense of resentment to stockpile in our hearts to such a degree that it’s weighing us down.
When we think about anger, we think about the Inside Out film, where Anger is this red, fiery guy who’s explosive. That’s the only kind of image we have of anger. But anger is also something that seethes down low. It’s resentment. It’s a way of diminishing others that we’re carrying deep in our souls, which leads to contempt.
This is why I think that lying happens more inside the church than outside the church. We know as good cultural Christians how to hide our anger through being nice and warm and hospitable.
Jesus is talking about this subterranean resentment that ultimately leads to contempt.
There’s lots of anger in the church—in the evangelical church, in the Pentecostal church, culturally, politically. So much of that has been bubbling up over the years. And now we’re at a place of significant anger, contempt, that raca that Jesus talks about.
RM: What about somebody who says, “I think I’m resentful about some things that have happened to me”—perhaps a broken marriage or relationship—and has a lot of anger. What can they do with that?
RV: I think about it in two ways: interpersonally and individually. Interpersonally, having spaces where we can wrestle faithfully with what’s happening in our interior lives helps us to move beyond that moment.
My wife, Rosie, and I have been married 19 years. In the first few years, I found myself having a hard time when she was sad or angry. I did not know what to do. I would personalize it. I would minimize it. I’d say, “You know what, I’m going to go grocery shopping. I’ll be back in two hours.”
We found ourselves stuck when it came to this part of our marriage. I remember going to a therapist and saying, “When my wife gets angry, I just don’t know what to do. I make matters worse.” And he said, “Rich, the next time she’s angry, I want you to do one thing: I want you be angry along with her.”
There was something incarnational about that. When someone is angry, sometimes we need to step into that space with them.
If we have spaces—friendships and communities—where people can be angry along with us, we can create a space where there is enough patience and exploration to then ask ourselves, “Is there something beneath the surface that this anger is pointing to?”
Individually, I think the language of lament is important in naming our anger, because what lament does is open us up to lifting our minds and hearts to God. We allow God to have access to a significant part of our tender hearts in that moment, to give us a different social imagination about what’s going on.
Lament—naming what’s beneath the anger and lifting that to God—can be a significant pathway to getting to the core of what our anger is revealing. Anger is usually secondary and symptomatic of something deeper. And God can handle it.
When we find ourselves stuck in those moments, the best thing to do is to behold Jesus. This is why I believe the Sermon on the Mount is the most important set of teachings in the entire Bible. If you want to know exactly what path to take, the words of Jesus are where to go.
RM: In abusive families, churches, and systems, I’ve noticed that people will often use the language Jesus gives about forgiveness and nonretaliation to tell people, “Don’t seek accountability. If you’re seeking justice in this case, that means that you’re not Christlike, because Jesus would tell you to let this go.”
How do you help somebody in that situation who thinks, I’m not forgiving in this radical way that Jesus has instructed? Especially when there are people in this person’s life saying, “If you keep bringing this up, you’re disobeying Jesus.”
RV: To read Scripture is to look at the ultimate goal, the telos, the hope of what Jesus is teaching us. But we often don’t see the time it takes or the pathway to get there. Jesus says to forgive someone “seventy times seven” times.
I wonder what it would look like for us to forgive in a way that is transformative and not performative. Sometimes I’m trying to strictly obey the Bible, but there’s nothing happening on the inside. In those spaces, there must be room for discernment and nuance.
One of my favorite books about forgiveness is called Don’t Forgive Too Soon. A lot of Christians will hear that and go, “Whoa, we’re being really unbiblical.” But it’s easy to forgive someone in word while our hearts are not there.
Does Jesus want us to say, “I forgive you,” when our hearts are far from him? We’re talking about a God who wants to transform us from the inside out. He wants not just external obedience but internal obedience and alignment to his ways.
Rich Villodas is an author and the lead pastor of New Life Fellowship in Queens, New York.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
This article appeared in the March/April 2025 issue of Christianity Today as "Guest Appearances".
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