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Earlier this week there was a harrowing news story about a baby who died after her mother gave birth alone, in a prison cell in 2019. At the inquest, the coroner said systemic failings had contributed to the baby’s death. If I’m honest, I try to avoid news stories like this and often feel that I’d rather not know the distressing reality of other people’s troubled lives, because it upsets me, and makes me feel powerless and angry, emotions that I’d rather not feel. I’m not proud of this “looking the other way”, because I feel there’s a kind of moral requirement to be aware of what’s going on around us, and happening to other people, including the really bad stuff. But then what do you do with all the upset, the distress and yes – the anger – that awful news stories can induce? Anger in particular can feel bad in itself, and even dangerous. We often link it in our minds with aggression, and violence. We might not like ourselves when we’re angry. But for me, the gospels, do provide an answer to all of this. When Jesus walked into the temple and overturned the tables because people were being taken advantage of, he was surely right to be angry. He saw that people couldn’t pray or worship in the temple because it’d been turned into an overcrowded marketplace, filled with the loud shouts of buying and selling, and the noise and stench of livestock. Jesus raged because the “house of prayer” had become a “house of trade”… so he drove the money lenders out of the temple. There was a violence in how Jesus behaved. But sometimes Righteous Anger or indignation is the appropriate response to a distressing situation. It’s an important emotion – signalling to us that something is wrong. Like pain, it’s part of our alert system. The anger we feel at news stories of injustice, can lead us to take personal action, to campaign and press for change. Avoiding those bad or distressing stories can prevent the discomfort of feeling angry. But I know it’s also a way to avoid having to invest in the upsetting stories of others. The hard thing is that hearing these stories leaves us with a moral responsibility to do something about them. That may sometimes feel beyond us, but at the very least, we can bear witness, listen to the stories with compassion, reflect on them, and acknowledge the harsh reality of other people’s lives.