The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?” Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking of the temple of his body. After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this; and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.
(John 2:13-22)
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The Jesus we met in this morning’s reading from John’s Gospel is not the Jesus that we’ve come to know and love! A Jesus who overturns tables and drives people and animals out of the temple with a whip is not a particularly comfortable image, and we have a tendency to want to focus only on those aspects of Jesus that do make us comfortable. The problem with that strategy is that it’s the uncomfortable parts of the story of Jesus that may in fact be the most important, and so we ignore them or explain them away at our own peril. The truth is that we should embrace these uncomfortable images of Jesus – or, if not embrace them, at least learn from them – because what we see in passages such as this is that Jesus came to jar us out of our comfortable assumptions and bring us face to face with the reality of the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between faith and the world around us. Sometimes we need to see this other side of Jesus to be reminded of that, and this morning we saw that other side of Jesus! The question is: now that we’ve seen this other side of Jesus, what do we do with this other side of Jesus? This is the Jesus people would rather not think about, but this Jesus may actually be a lot closer to the real Jesus than the fantasy Jesus we store in our minds who spends his time cuddling little children and carrying baby sheep around when they’re tired. The Jesus we read about this morning wasn’t that nice – and it’s this Jesus who forces us into reality and who forces us to confront what our faith is really all about: not a feel-good message, but a call to action, and sometimes even a call to anger.
That might seem to be a contradiction. Jesus didn’t believe in anger, after all. In the midst of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to the crowds “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not murder’; and ‘whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment ...” It seems that anger brings down God’s judgment upon us, but Jesus was pretty angry in John 2. You don’t throw tables around and whip people when you’re in a good mood. So, how do we make sense of this? I want to suggest to you this morning that there are two types of anger.
The first (and the most common) type of anger is the type that Jesus condemned in the Sermon on the Mount. This is an anger that comes from raw emotion – it’s an out of control anger and it’s usually a selfish anger because it erupts from within us when something is done that hurts us, and this kind of anger can easily and quickly consume us. If you ever encounter a person who’s been consumed by this kind of anger you’ll know that it can be an unpleasant experience – they’re often embittered people who seem to hate everything and everyone. That type of out of control, uncontrollable, all-consuming anger can easily take control not just of our thoughts but of our actions as well. It’s not only selfish, it’s potentially dangerous as well, and that’s why Jesus equates it with murder in the Sermon on the Mount. Murder stems from that sort of raw, uncontrollable, out of control anger.
But there is a second kind of anger, and it’s the kind that Jesus displayed in this morning’s reading. I’ll call this type of anger “righteous anger.” Righteous anger is a legitimate sense of anguish and even outrage against actions, events, behaviours and even thoughts that dishonour God, but it isn’t an out of control anger, nor is it thoughtless, and it does not take possession of us. Throwing tables around and whipping people might seem out of control, but in fact Jesus was acting very thoughtfully in this incident. In fact, v.16 tells us that Jesus was very much focused on his Father while he acted. He wasn’t thinking about himself – instead, Jesus was reacting against what he considered to be an outrage against God and against God’s people. If righteous anger had a legitimate place in the life of Jesus then it must have a legitimate place in the lives of his disciples as well. The challenge for the followers of Jesus is to figure out where that place is. To delve into that question, we need a little bit more context for the incident.
If you just take a quick glance at the passage without going deeper, you might get the impression that Jesus was upset because there was selling going on in the Temple area, but in fact that was not the problem, so don’t worry - I’m not going to demand that we cancel the Spring Fling here at PVUC, and I’m not going to come to it armed with a whip! What made Jesus angry was not that there was selling taking place – it was that there was dishonesty taking place. You can really only understand this incident if you look at all four Gospels, because this is one of the few incidents in the life of Jesus that was recorded by all four. John said that Jesus was outraged by the fact that the temple had become “a marketplace,” but Matthew, Mark and Luke say that Jesus’ outrage was directed at the fact that the temple had become a “den of thieves.” There was dishonesty going on here. There was price-gouging. This was like Loblaws selling bread at the temple! Think about the situation. This incident took place right before the Passover, and Jerusalem was full of pilgrims. When they arrived, the people had to find animals for sacrifices and they would have to exchange their money for the local currency to buy the animals. This was always happening. Animals had to be bought and sold and money had to be exchanged near the temple, because people were always coming to Jerusalem to make their sacrifices. But Passover was special – the holiest time of the Jewish year. The city was full of visitors and with so many people needing to buy animals the merchants raised their prices and the money changers raised their rate of exchange. It was like a long weekend at the gas station! People were being cheated, and because the sacrifices were required by the Law of Moses, that same Law was therefore being used as an excuse for the dishonesty, which meant that God was being implicated in the dishonesty! That’s why Jesus was outraged! That’s why Jesus was angry! It was a righteous anger focused on the fact that God was being dishonoured and that God’s people were being taken unfair advantage of. Our tendency today is to try to keep our anger under control – which is why this passage presents such an uncomfortable image of Jesus to us – but that’s not always appropriate. Righteous anger – anger that moves us to act against injustice – sometimes needs to be let loose. Jennifer Twardowski – a psychotherapist in California – wrote in the Huffington Post a couple of years ago that “It is acknowledging our anger that helps us to see what it is that our soul is calling us to do so that we can take proper action and move forward.” I would say that it’s God who works through righteous anger to call us to action rather than “our soul” - but I get Twardowski’s point, and I think she’s right. We need to act on it rather than suppressing it when righteous anger bubbles up. How do we act on it? Well, I’m going to offer five guiding principles for distinguishing between righteous anger and common anger and for guiding us in how we respond to those things that cause us to feel righteous anger:
- righteous anger is God-like anger – it’s directed not so much against those who hurt us (or even against those who hurt God) but rather it’s directed against those who do harm to others;
- righteous anger is legal anger – it’s directed against those who deliberately violate the will of God and it’s expressed in ways that are consistent with the will of God. It’s not vigilante justice; it’s legal justice;
- Righteous anger is not explosive – it’s slow to provoke because it isn’t based on out of control emotions, but rather on a thoughtful consideration of a situation;
- Righteous anger does not give us pleasure in the way that releasing common anger can make us feel better for a while. Instead, righteous anger actually makes us feel worse if only because we’re saddened by the conditions that made our display of righteous anger necessary in the first place;
- Finally, righteous anger is always under the control of the person expressing it, rather than being in control of the person expressing it. Common anger possesses us and can easily get us out of control, escalating situations to a dangerous level, and becoming excessive and even abusive, but righteous anger doesn’t. Righteous anger knows its proper limits.
My sense is that righteous anger is a thing of the past. As I suggested last week, in this era when churches worry a lot about survival (in spite of the fact that we claim to follow a Lord who did not worry about survival, but who gave himself for the world) we’re often too concerned with wanting to be liked to display any true righteous anger, and we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more important to be popular than it is to stand against those things that dishonour God. A lot of Christians today don’t want to stand out in the crowd; don’t want to call society to repentance; and don’t want to call ungodly powers to account. And that’s too bad, because Jesus did all those things when it was necessary. It seems to me that if we call ourselves disciples of Jesus, perhaps our faith demands that we stop playing it safe, and that we start to do those things as well.
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