"Where Did That Come From?"

We’re now three Sundays into the season of Lent, the most passionate time of the Christian liturgical year.  The root meaning of passion, as Ginnie explained last week, is to suffer, and com-passion literally means to suffer-together.  God so loved the world that Jesus was born into the world to suffer together with us under the limitations of the human condition, even to the point of dying on a cross.  Jesus is the ultimate expression of God’s compassionate love for us.  And Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.”  That’s the background of this morning’s scripture, which, if it were judged in a modern court of law, would be deemed a crime of passion.

It catches us by surprise.  Or, at least it would, if we weren’t so used to it, and hadn’t used it so often to justify our own errant behavior.  Up to this point we’ve been familiar with the Galilean Jesus, the wonder-working healer who attracts crowds with entertaining stories of what God has done for us, who gave a great children’s sermon and appealed to men, women and children alike.  He says things like, “love your enemies, turn the other cheek,” and “go the extra mile.”  But then a not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Jerusalem, right about the time, in a liturgical sense, that we entered the season of Lent.  When the light-filled Galilean Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem, the storm clouds begin to gather and his sermons take a decidedly darker tone.  “Take up your cross and follow me,” “those who lose their life shall save it” and vice versa.  He’s not the fun guy he used to be.  Now, instead of talking about what God has done for you, he’s asking what you’re willing to do for God. 

And then comes this morning’s scripture, when “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” has a full blown hissy fit, turning tables, cracking whips and acting like a candidate for a few good sessions in anger management.  Where did that come from?  And, truth be known, a part of us loves it.  He’s human, after all.  See, Jesus gets angry too.  He seems to have opened a loophole in the law of love that you could drive a Mac truck through, and many have done just that, even to the extent of declaring war in the name of Jesus.  I think that’s bogus.  We’re kidding ourselves when we justify our own anger by pointing to the anger of Jesus.  It’s apples and oranges!

The season of Lent is about going deeper, and this story invites us to do just that.  It’s not what it appears to be on the surface. You have to dig down to the roots. The disciples were as surprised as anyone when their gracious and loving Jesus seemed to go ballistic.  Where did that come from?  Who would have thought?  But, after the dust settles, they get it and, in the tradition of Jewish biblical “prooftexting,” they cite Psalm 69:9 as a messianic text and apply it to Jesus: “Zeal for my father’s house will consume me.”  Do you know what zeal is?  Check Webster.  It will refer you to its synonym: see passion!  The so-called anger of Jesus was rooted in love.  It came from God’s compassionate identification with suffering humanity.  Jesus wasn’t so much mad as he was sad.  When he saw the cows and the sheep and the doves and the tables of the moneychangers there in the courtyard of the temple, it just broke his heart, and his passionate response was, in one sudden and symbolic, unpremeditated moment (that’s the definition of a crime of passion – it’s not premeditated!), to turn the tables on the establishment and drive out the demons.  Yes, I said demons.  The Greek word that is translated as “drive” is actually the same word used in exorcisms, when Jesus is described as “driving” demons out of the possessed!  It was an act of compassion and liberation.

So, who was suffering?  Everybody!  During Passover tens of thousands of oppressed Jews flocked into Jerusalem.  All males were mandated by law to offer up sacrifices at the temple, and you couldn’t just bring an offering.  It had to be a live offering of a perfect, unblemished animal of one kind or another.  Guess who determined whether it was pure and unblemished?  The priests, who just happened to have holding pens full of “pure and unblemished” sacrificial animals you could purchase, for an inflated price, of course!  The holding pens for those animals used to be outside the city walls, in the Kidron Valley, but the high priest, Caiaphas, in an attempt to curry favor with his political cronies in the Sanhedrin, moved the animals into the temple complex, into the so-called “court of the Gentiles.”  Sacred space, set apart by God as a “house of worship” had come to be filled with thousands of animals both large and small, lots of noise and tons of excrement, presided over by a bunch of rip off artists seeking to feather their own nests at the expense of the poor.  The whole thing smelled to high heaven, and it was not pleasing to the Lord.  It stank, and every major prophet down through Jewish history had denounced the temple racket of animal sacrifice as a corrupt system that exploited the people and displeased the Lord. They had protested, but the powerfully entrenched hierarchy of the priesthood, with its vested interest in the status quo, didn’t seem to notice.  It was going to take something dramatic to get their attention.  Turning the tables and cracking the whip was just what it took. 

But where, where does it ever describe Jesus as mad?  He turned the tables, scattered the money and drove the animals off, that’s all.  Oh yeah, the whip, a detail that only John, by the way, happens to include. The three other gospels say nothing of a whip, but in popular paintings down through history we always see an angry Jesus, and always with a whip, and always, by the way, depicted as wearing a red robe for the occasion.  All the other paintings you see of Jesus have him in white.  Do you think he had a special red robe just for his “mad days?”  Or do you think that just maybe there’s a little projection, and perhaps some symbolic, revisionist painting going on?  All cracking a whip means is that you know how to move a bunch of dumb, thick-skinned cattle and wooly sheep.  Don’t use this story to justify good old-fashioned ego-anger, because that’s not what it’s about.  It’s about God’s compassionate identification with suffering humanity.  It’s about mercy for the poor, and about allowing sacred space to be sacred space.  It’s about Jesus, in the great tradition of the Jewish prophets, being a channel to express God’s righteous indignation through symbolic action.  There was no ego and no anger in it.  It was pure compassion.

And, finally, a long while later, after Jesus had suffered, died and rose again, finally the disciples began to get it.  In the final analysis, it wasn’t about the temple at all.  The temple was just a pile of rocks.  The real temple is the holy of holies that lies deep within the human heart, where we worship God in spirit and in truth.  As Christians we have come to know that Jesus Christ is the foundation stone of a new temple, not made with human hands.  We’re still in the process of learning that each and every one of us is called to become the “living stones,” in a new temple called the Body of Christ, the Spirit-led community of faith that knows no walls, whose very reason for existence is to express, in the flesh, just as Jesus did, the love and the compassion of God.  That’s who you are, folks.  That’s who we’re called to be.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.