Jesus' Anger
David C. Myers
March 15, 2009
Lent - 3
John 2:13 - 22 (within the sermon)
Text: "But He was speaking of the temple of His Body" . . . John 2:21
Did you ever wonder what it would be like if Jesus came to worship with us one Sunday? Well, here's how it went a few - well, many, many . . . a lot of years, long, long ago.
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 with 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 you will 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)
I doubt that any of you have ever seen Jesus this mad. Yet this is one the few stories that appear in all four of the Gospels - each in a slightly different manner. Matthew Mark and Luke all tell the same story, yes. But they discreetly place this cleansing of the Temple toward the end of their gospels. And there, at the end, during the last week of His life, you can understand the rage of Jesus. Jesus critics had been picking and poking fun at him for months, trying to entrap Him. By the very placement of the story in Matthew, Mark and Luke's Gospel, at the end of Jesus' earthly ministry, Jesus' rage is excusable.
But here, less than two chapters into John's Gospel, it is more difficult to explain away Jesus' rage. At this point, no one had said a word against Jesus. Everyone has been quite impressed with Jesus, marveling when He turned water into wine at the wedding reception. So you can't explain His anger by saying that they have pushed Jesus to the limit, or He is at last at His wit's end with their opposition. This outburst in the Temple, in John's Gospel, was early, at the beginning of His ministry.
It's even hard to envision Jesus standing there, white hot with fury, whip in hand, kicking over tables, squawking birds set loose, slinging their coins. "Take those things out of here," He screamed, "Stop making My Father's House a marketplace!"
It was the maddest, angriest anyone had ever seen Jesus; before or since.
Perhaps Jesus' anger, unlike many of us, is not fueled by how people react to what He does or says, but is a rather "pure" anger that it is at the very core of our religious beliefs.
You see, the problem is not only is Jesus mad, but this scene occurs at Passover, in the Temple. Passover is the great celebration of the liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery; the highest, happiest feast of Jewish faith. For Jews, Passover was the day that God remembered them and came to deliver them. And the Temple is the place where the whole Hebrew nation gathered to be close to God. The Temple is where people remember God and come to God. And during this peace there are plenty of people at the Temple - quite happy to be here at Passover time, quite happy to be in the Temple close to God, lots of people to sell their wares to.
But Jesus is at the Temple mad, He is at the Passover mad. And it's quite a contrast to see an angry Jesus, whip in hand kicking over tables.
"Get out of here!"
Elsewhere it is said, "Judgment begins with the household of God."
So . . . in John's Gospel, unlike that of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the first criticism Jesus makes is against the religious establishment. Jesus is like Hosea and Amos, a prophet telling the people their worship has grown corrupt and been diluted by the cultural norms, and not the true worship that God taught us and wants from us. So Jesus shows His anger to the religious establishment - at the Temple. Ummmmm, that's us, folks! If we are still wondering "what would Jesus do?" we really, probably, maybe, don't want to know! In the Temple that day He didn't mention adultery, stealing, lying, murder, or covetness. He attacked worship! He assaulted religion.
I would much rather hear Jesus light into the Pharisees for their legalism, the scribes for their snobbishness, the violent for their violence, the tax collectors for their cheating, or the politicians for their . . . well, their list is endless.
Jesus is not assaulting the pagans of Washington, this is an attack upon the righteousness here in this place, our church building! If Jesus is going to barge in among us, I'd rather He barge in at the Congress, or the Lobbyists. I'd rather Jesus tamper with other people's sins, not mine.
The Temple is a place where one goes to meet God. And Passover is a time to celebrate what God has done for us.
And this is our season of Lent, our "Passover", if you will. That is, we are supposed to be passing over from death to life, from the enslavement to whatever may bind and constrain you, to the worship of the true living God.
And Jesus found a Temple turned into the marketplace.
And it just made Jesus mad. Just made Him very, very mad.
I think John chose to tell this story, this confrontive, disturbing story right up front, at the first because John wanted us to know, right up front, the sort of God Who had come among us. If anybody thought our salvation was coming in the form of a nice young man from the Middle East, come to turn water into wine at the wedding feast, invite a few fisher folk to join His prayer group, say things like, "Come unto Me, all you heavy laden and I will give you rest," . . . well, the Gospel of John shows Jesus pounding at the door, brandishing a knotted whip, overturning tables, driving unleashed oxen down the carpeted aisles of our church.
That's Jesus. Our pious, polite, domestication of His Good News, our petty little "cause and effect", "if we do good then we will be rewarded" religion just makes Him mad. It is to Jesus a violation of the holiness of God.
But there is a strange twist here. Apparently when Jesus' anger subsided enough for the people at the temple to question Him what gave Him the right to vent His righteous indignation at them Jesus had a strange reply: "Destroy this temple, and in three days I'll raise it up."
Jesus told them, "Your temple is not such a big deal. Destroy this temple. In three days, I will build it back."
Get it? What - or rather Who - is the temple now?
In today's Gospel from John, Jesus becomes the righteous, indignant prophet who is consumed by the holiness of God and concern for God's temple. Walter Brueggemann writes, "The task of prophetic imagination and ministry is to bring to public expression those hopes and yearnings that have been denied so long and suppressed so deeply that we no longer know they are there . . . Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion."
Wow - imagine that our "hopes and yearnings have been denied so deeply that we no longer know they are there." I sometimes think - confessionally that we have become so accustomed to doing the work of maintaining our church that we forget what the real call of the church is.
Jesus' anger in the temple revealed that prophetic imagination. It revealed to us what we need to be reminded of - that our work of being the church needs to be constantly revisited, constantly assessed in light of what is important to God. So Jesus answers them in those cryptic words about the Temple being rebuilt in three days. And then the writer of John's Gospel adds these words, "Jesus was speaking of the temple of His body. Jesus' anger reveals to us a shift in understanding where the true "temple" of God is - from a building or an institution to the people that actually carry that work out. So God's temple has become a building and not a person.
I read an article this week from Christian Century about Rob Bell1, the pastor of the mars Hill Church in Minnesota and the founder of NOOMA ministries - which produces videos we have used in several occasions at this church. In it Bell said, "If you can't find God in the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches [you make for your kids] and the dinner with beloved friends from across the street, then I don't know if God will be found on the mountaintop."
Jesus' anger is another way of telling us that there's another way to God. God and the worship of God cannot be contained in the temple. The altar of God has come down to us. The high altar has become a dinner table. The sacred sacrificial act has become everyday bread and wine. The Word of God has become flesh and dwells among us.
When we understand that our real "temple" is Jesus Body and Blood, we will reveal it in our actions of love and justice in a world that for us has no walls, and no boundaries. We will, in the words of the Communion Prayer of Great Thanksgiving, "be for the world the Body of Christ, redeemed by His Blood." Or, as John Wesley put it, "the world is my parish."
Later, a lot later, after they had dragged Jesus from the Temple, stripped Him, beat Him, hung Him on the cross to die; three days later when He barged forth from His tomb, kicked down the doors of death and was raised, passed over to victory, we remembered what He said to us that day in the Temple. We asked Him for a sign of what real religion was all about. The only sign He gave us was that of His death and resurrection. The only temple He left us to draw near to God was that built of His own Body and Blood, a new Passover in which the God Who comes to us in the form of His own bloodied Son.
Then we remembered, and then we knew, we believed: this Jesus is about something big, very big!
So this Sunday, amid the rubble of our religion, we pray: Lord Jesus, drive out our self-contrived demons, whip us into shape, clean us up, dust us off, until we are able to worship you - in word and in deed, on Sunday and on Monday - as we ought. Amen.