Jesus Gets Angry

John 2:13-22

Lent 3

March 7, 2021

 

I think we mostly like to think of “nice” Jesus.

The Good Shepherd Jesus,

the one who welcomes children, the healer.

Cleansing of the Temple
Alexander Smirnov

But today Jesus is not that nice Jesus.

This week he’s angry Jesus.

I mean he was also angry Jesus just last week, when yelled at Peter,

“Get behind me Satan.”

but we don’t like to remember that Jesus.

And this week he’s demonstratively angry Jesus.

 

They often call this the “cleansing of the temple”

and I’ve never liked that term.

Cleansing seems more innocuous than what Jesus was doing.

And it suggests that Jesus work was completed

and everything was changed after that day which it wasn’t.

I don’t think that what he was doing there is completed today.

 

What Jesus was doing here was actually an angry protest.

He saw something that was wrong, that went against God’s plan,

and he was showing that with a demonstration.

Now Jesus crossed a line that many societies draw in the sand

when he disregarded personal property

and turned over tables and drove profitable animals out.

 

Jesus was a problem for the status quo.

They probably called him whatever the Hebrew word for “thug” even.

And sure enough, in Mark’s Gospel it says that this

was basically the thing that made the religious

authorities look for a way to arrest and crucify him.

 

Now some say that he did something like this on purpose

in order that he would be arrested and killed

and follow the destiny that was set before him.

But I say he did it for the reason that so many other

people get angry and protest and upset the apple cart:

Things are just plain wrong needed to change.

 

So what was Jesus so angry about?

Let’s start with why they were selling things

in the front of the temple in the first place.

 

The reason that they

were selling animals in the temple,

was so people could buy them to do sacrifices

which was the main element of Jewish worship at the time.

 

The original idea was that people worshipped God by giving

God back the best of what God had given them. A sacrifice.

Most people would bring their own animals,

or they would trade whatever they produced

for an animal to sacrifice.

 

But when the temple was built in Jerusalem,

people would to travel there to do their worship.

They couldn’t bring one of their own animals

or a bunch of other produce. So people started to

sell animals in front of the temple for money.

 

And because Jews couldn’t use Roman money,

there were money changers, who would exchange

Roman money for Jewish tokens for a price

so then you could use them to buy the animals.

 

It wasn’t outrageous. It all made perfect sense.

They weren’t selling terrible elicit things,

or necessarily bad things.

It was all stuff for worship.

All of these things were proscribed by religious law.

But what had developed was this:

The temple that was built for everyone to worship God

had become a marketplace.

 

The whole purpose of the temple

and the act of sacrifice, was so that people

and communities would grow closer to God.

So they could understands God’s will for humanity.

So they could live out God’s dreams, and live

in a just community, caring for the poor,

the orphan and the widow.

But they ended up just “doing temple”

they weren’t doing God’s will.

The purpose of it had become to make money.

And actually the marketplace itself was unjust,

like all marketplaces.

It gave the wealthy more share, and excluded the poor.

 

And this is why I say Jesus work in the temple is not completed

People today who follow Jesus still

find ourselves “doing church”

doing the rituals and the practices,

and not getting down to helping out God’s dreams.

 

We could be “doing church” just right.

We could say all the right words right,

sing the right songs, have the most accurate budget,

the best classes, the nicest facility,

the best most organized ministry teams,

We can check off the

“12 most important things for a successful church.”

but still forget what God wants out of this whole thing:

justice, mercy, forgiveness, loving our neighbors,

loving our enemies, self sacrifice, faithful service, and love.

And if we’re not doing it all for God’s vision for us

and for this world, what is it all for?

 

Lots of people have been “doing church”

for a long time, but many have forgotten

what we were “doing church” for.

People can go through their whole lives

doing the practice of Christianity and never

have it change them, never have it affect their lives.

 

And many Christian Churches do Church so well,

that they’ve turned the whole process into a place

where the wealthy are included and the poor are excluded.

 

All churches have to struggle against those two things.

Just going through the motions, and excluding people.

That is what made Jesus angry in the temple that day.

 

When I was in seminary, one summer

I went to Guatemala for a few weeks by myself

to learn Spanish. I still don’t know Spanish,

but that’s another story.

 

When I was Guatemala,

the church around where I was staying

was in the center of town near the town square. 

There were always vendors there. 

But on Sunday morning, the vendors were doubled

they were selling rosaries, wooden crucifixes,

all types of religious articles.

They were trying to get some money from the more well-off people

who would be going to Sunday worship.

 

And while I was in worship on Sunday every week

a boy who was paralyzed would come into church on

a homemade wooden cart and roll around

the church asking for money and especially

coming up to all the gringos in the church.

When he would come to me, I would just

shake my head at him and go back to focusing

on my worship, like every other person in that church.

 

Now lots of people like me when we’re in seminary,

we go through this phase where we think about

what the “right and pure” way to do church.

For many seminarians,

nothing in the real world is ever good enough

At the time I was there, I was in just that phase.

 

And I was put off by the whole spectacle.

The selling of religious trinkets in the front

and the boy asking for money right in the middle of worship.

It wasn’t “right”. The Church after all was a “sacred space”

Sitting there, I actually thought of this scripture,

“we shouldn’t make God’s house a marketplace.”

I felt more than a little self-righteous as only a seminarian can.

 

But what system would Jesus have wanted to change then?

Which table would Jesus have turned over?

Would Jesus have scolded the poor ladies

who were selling and just trying to make a living?

Would he have scolded that young paralyzed boy

rolling around church bugging the worshippers?

 

Honestly, I think that if Jesus was there that day

he would have left those tables alone.

I think Jesus what Jesus would have done was turn over

the table of my heart that felt entitled

to have my sacred moment and ignore someone in need.

 

He would have turned over

The table that looked down on that young boy.

And the table that had only the more well-off in worship

who didn’t engage with the rest of the community.

The tables that put a barrier between God and others.

 

He would have turned over the tables of the

system that allowed people to go to worship,

but never touched people’s hearts and lives and attitudes.

 

Jesus didn’t just talk about his anger in the temple that day.

He didn’t waste time telling a parable, or asking a clever question,

That day he flipped it all over.

He turned over a tradition that he had been a part of,

that his parents had been a part of,

in a religion that he loved and honored.

He turned it over. He disrupted everything.

Everyone was disrupted that day.

He loved God and God’s people so much that he disrupted what they were doing.

Richard Rohr a well known Catholic theologian said:

Christianity is a lifestyle - a way of being in the world

that is simple, non-violent, shared, and loving.

 

However, we made it into an established "religion"

(and all that goes with that) and avoided the lifestyle change itself.

 

One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain in most of Christian history,

and still believe that Jesus is one's "personal Lord and Savior" . . .

The world has no time for such silliness anymore.

The suffering on Earth is too great.

 

The suffering on Earth is too great.

And God is disrupting us now in so many different ways.

God isn’t being nice and gentle these days.

Things are changing quickly and the church

is struggling to keep up with the Holy Spirit.

 

God is kind of being a thug right now.

Not having any regard for our property and our possessions,

and the things that we have valued and coveted all our lives.

 

We have to do this whole church thing

completely different than we once did it.

God loves us so much that the tables are being turned over on us.

 

And that, brothers and sisters, is good news.