Lent 3B
Text: John 2:13-25
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
March 7, 2021
Turn It Over
We get the story of Jesus in the temple, brandishing a whip and overturning the tables of those who make faith a matter of transaction. Sometimes people talk to me about this story and say, “I can hardly believe that is Jesus there.” Jesus is violent, and angry. We can hardly fail to notice. What are we to make of that?
One thing we need to make of it is to stop making it out to be the one story when Jesus gets angry. This is the one people talk about, “he did get angry that one time, in the Temple,” people often say. Otherwise, the implication is, he was a pretty nice guy, right?
Not so fast; I’m not at all convinced that this story is as much an outlier as that. Seems to me Jesus gets angry a lot. He is confrontational when he faces down demons. He gets frustrated with the cluelessness of the disciples – it was just last week in our worship that Jesus was ordering Peter: “Get behind me, Satan!” And Jesus is downright nasty toward arrogant religious authorities who dump on the poor and the sinful. ““Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of rotting filth,” Jesus says of them.
Now, why is it that we ignore the confrontational, judging, and angry Jesus in favor of nice-guy images? Well, we don’t want to deal with the ways in which Jesus brings good, loving, and accurate judgment to bear. To deal with that Jesus, you’ve got to deal with some real stuff in you, and you’ve got to deal with some real stuff in this world. Some tables you’ve got to turn over if righteousness is to be established. There are things that need to be whipped out of you. So whip it good.
Jesus is not nice about everything; Jesus revolutionizes everything, and that’s different. All kinds of tables are going to be overturned. I don’t know what in your life needs to be overturned, but I know two things: First, that you probably know *exactly* what it is, when you hear me say this: what in your life needs to be moved, needs to be changed, needs to be turned over. You know exactly what I’m talking about, even if I don’t. But then also: remember that when I say there’s something in your life that needs to be turned over, I mean it in two different senses. Yeah, there’s something that needs to be turned over, in the sense that Jesus has of turning everything upside down. But also there’s something that needs to be turned over, in the sense that you can let it go, put it over into the hands of God, and not take it back again, just turn it over to God.
And as in your life, so also in the world. You think God is satisfied with the world the way it is right now? If God were satisfied, then I suppose there would be no need for Jesus. But God looks at the world as it is – in its brokenness, and its pain, and its sin, and its injustices, and a society that thinks it can just go on building one injustice after another, as if we can build a nation on the premise that the rich will just get richer and the poor will just be pushed poorer – and to a tough old world, God brings tough and even angry new language. Jesus is a revolutionary word, indeed; he brings word that God wills that it will not be business as usual. The Kingdom is near, and Jesus revolutionizes everything. The tables are turning.
So it is that, frankly, I like this gospel story; I am happy to see Jesus get good and mad, in the same way I appreciate it when so often in the Hebrew Scriptures God becomes infuriated with us. We are uncomfortable with divine anger only when we think that anger is the opposite of love. It is not. Anger is simply the feeling-signal that all is not well in the relationship. Anger is no way the opposite of love; anger is, as the theologian Beverly Harrison writes, “anger is a mode of connectedness to others, and it is always a vivid form of caring.” It is a mode of connectedness; if God is angry with us, that means that God is still in relationship with us. It is always a vivid form of caring; if God is angry with us, it is only because God loves us so deeply.
I begin to think that anger is necessary to be an effective moral agent, that it is the sign of enough passionate feeling, enough love, to begin to move things. This is not to say that every action that comes out of anger is wise or well-taken. I’m sure we’ve got to have a spirit of discernment about these matters, a carefully considered ethic to figure out what we should do in our anger, and what we should not. But understand I am saying that the rising power of anger must be present for serious moral activity, especially for action for social change. That anger is the feeling-signal that change is called for and necessary, that transformation in relation is required.
So it is that I appreciate the story of the cleansing of the Temple. Things were not right, and I am happy to see Jesus get good and angry about that. And I am hoping that we will look here, as we look to other stories from Jesus’ life, for a model of the moral life, and that when things are not right, where there is injustice, we’ll get good and mad. May the rising power of the anger move us then to act, for righteousness’ sake.