A Holy Anger

I have a picture here that I want you to look at and tell me what you see. Tell me what you might see-hear-taste-touch-smell if you were in this scene. Tell me some characteristics of the person in the picture? Is he gentle? Is he fair? Is he just? Would you trust him with all that you had? Is he capable of being mean? Mad? Angry? Is he one to get frustrated? Is he one to get "whip cracking mad"?

But our scripture passage this week paints a different story. It paints a story of a man who was angry and impassioned about what he saw-smelled-tasted-heard-and-felt. This man was so angry that he overturned the tables of money collectors and took some rope and fashioned it into a whip and cracked that whip in such a way that he drove out the occupants of the temple.

Think about that have you ever overturned the tables in the midst of an argument?

I can vividly remember as a child my father getting very angry. My dad tended to run a little hot under the collar - but he was an Italian - it was ok, right? But to his credit he was always intentionally cool tempered with his children - almost perceiving that his temper would be poorly directed regardless. But one night I remember him getting very angry at something that my sister had said in the other room. I was watching TV, already in my pajamas. I think it was a Sunday night and I was watching the Disney Family Special that evening. We lived in Florida and Disney World must have been the closest thing in my childlike mind’s eye to paradise. But that night paradise was smashed as my father became enraged at something my sister had said in the midst of an argument. I think she was already to be grounded and she had ‘talked back; to him. My father - trying to hold his anger in turned to the wall next to him outside of my sister’s room and lashed out at it with his fist. When he pulled his hand back he found that he had crushed a hole into the wall. And when he went to move his hand – after the searing pain subsided he found that he had also crushed and cracked some of the bones in his hand. There is nothing more sobering in an argument then an unexpected injury. After a trip to the hospital and a permanent cast on his arm for 6 weeks I believe he had learned that anger must be directed in an appropriate fashion at an appropriate target. Especially when you are angry with your children.

But think how angry you would have to be to turn over the tables or to punch a hole in the wall.

Now back to our scripture - it says that the man in the story was so angry he made a whip and cracked it in such a way that he cleared the temple. Have you ever seen a whip? Have you ever heard it crack? There is something very instantaneous about the crack of a whip. By nature it is hard to stand still when some one cracks a whip near you. Right?

But this is the story of the Gospel for today - the story of the meek and mild messiah pushed to the limit by the selling of religion in the temple by his Father’s children. His response was to clear the temple and to disrupt the money-changers.

But unlike my dad’s split second rage at my sister – this burst of anger was one of righteous holy anger. Jesus was reacting to the scene that he saw. What do you think made him so angry?

Answer? Well first of all the cleansing of the temple takes place during the annual pilgrimage all devout Jews made to the temple in honor of the Passover. Jesus' outburst does not occur on some sleepy afternoon when only a handful of faithful were present. The Jewish historian Josephus used the number of lambs sacrificed to estimate that before the Jewish Wars erupted in 65, as many as 30,000 Jews gathered in Jerusalem for the Passover celebration. Jesus disrupts the temple at the very height of its yearly activities.

The animal-sellers and the money-changers present in the temple court were conducting business. But they were also offering a crucial service to the Passover pilgrims who journeyed to the temple. Since the pilgrims came from all over the known world it was necessary for them (as stipulated by temple law) for them to pay in the coin of the temple, not in their foreign currency. So before they could even purchase their sacrificial animals they had to exchange their currency. But the animals themselves were purchased in the temple because they must be certified for sacrifice. A person could not just sacrifice any animal to God in the temple. It had to be as the Bible says a lamb or dove without blemish. Hence the merchants approved by the temple were their to provide animals for the ritual.

The animals -- lambs for the wealthy and doves and pigeons for the poor -- were purchased by the temple visitors, presented to the priests, and offered up in accordance to the strict laws Yahweh had given to Moses. Animal sacrifice was a central part of Judaism during the existence of the temple. All rituals involve a kind of substitution -- where an abstract concept is concretized by a material/physical representation. The practice of such a detailed sacrificial system kept the Jewish people united and kept the Abrahamic covenant a vital and virtual reality in their midst. For pilgrims traveling to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover festival, it was a great convenience to be able to purchase the certifiably unblemished animals necessary for sacrifice at the temple itself.

The money-changers provided yet another valuable service. A temple tax of one-half shekel was required of all adult Israelite males (women, minors, Gentiles, Samaritans, and slaves did not fall into the category of taxable Israelites). This half shekel tax provided funds for the daily whole offerings (animal sacrifices) that would take place at the temple throughout the coming year. These were the sacrifices offered by the temple priests on behalf of all Israel -- the cultic cord that bound together all Jews and provided communal atonement for their sins before God. If we find Jesus' actions in the temple surprisingly violent and dramatic, the Jews who witnessed them must have been shocked -- finding his behavior incomprehensible

If we find Jesus' actions in the temple surprisingly violent and dramatic, the Jews who witnessed them must have been shocked -- finding his behavior incomprehensible. By chasing out the money changers and the animals for sacrifice, Jesus was not just cleansing the temple of shrewd merchants. He was questioning the validity of the entire sacrificial system itself -- of Israel's ability to atone for its sins, be forgiven and stand in right relationship with God. (from "John 2:13-22, March, 1994" @ Homiletics OnLine)

But Jesus saw something more shocking. He saw the selling of religion and faith. He saw the quantifying of his father’s precious love. He saw the pollution of the temple and the soiling of the covenant that existed between the whole earth and his Father in Heaven.

An Angry Jesus! How do you and I reconcile the pastoral picture of Jesus as the good Shepherd with the picture we now have of Jesus the impassioned zealot consumed with righteous anger for his Father’s house.

What implications does that have for you and me? How does that change the message our "What would Jesus do?" bracelets advise us to do?

Can the lamb that was slain for the sins of the world get angry at us? Even if it is a Holy Anger?

I say yes.

I am afraid that we are repeating the same sins of the Jewish priests of the temple here in the year 2000. Think about it. We often are if not explicitly involved then we are at least complicit in the quantifying of faith and the selling of religion.

If we are to be like Jesus – maybe we should think of how, when and where to become whip cracking mad at the world around us.

But before I go in that direction I want to caution you with some words about anger. Anger – for our own selfish uses is listed as one of the seven deadly sins. Anger for our own reasons devoid of a relationship with God is destructive to ourselves and to each other. Take here Frederick Buechner’s words:

Of the 7 deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. (from Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, p.117)

We must recognize that anger – Holy anger is not something you and I can initiate. We probably should never even get whip cracking mad. But what I do know is that we must never become complacent in our lives as disciples. Jesus is modeling for us our need to keep some things sacred. And to use action rooted in love to overturn the tables and clean the filth out of our lives, or communities and our faith.

Think about these things and see if any of them make you ‘whip cracking mad.’ They should.

40,000 people die each day from starvation. Every 3.6 seconds some one dies from hunger, of those 75% are children. Today 10% of children in developing countries die before the age of five. This is down from 28% fifty years ago.

Hunger and Malnutrition
Famine and wars cause just 10% of hunger deaths, although these tend to be the ones you hear about most often. The majority of hunger deaths are caused by chronic malnutrition. Families simply cannot get enough to eat. This in turn is caused by extreme poverty. Besides death, chronic malnutrition also causes impaired vision, listlessness, stunted growth, and greatly increased susceptibility to disease. Severely malnourished people are unable to function at even a basic level.

It is estimated that some 800 million people in the world suffer from hunger and malnutrition, about 100 times as many as those who actually die from it each year.

Often it takes just a few simple resources for impoverished people to be able to grow enough food to become self-sufficient. These resources include quality seeds, appropriate tools, and access to water. Small improvements in farming techniques and food storage methods are also helpful.

Many hunger experts believe that ultimately the best way to reduce hunger is through education. Educated people are best able to break out of the cycle of poverty that causes hunger.

UNICEF also reports that the number of people living in poverty has grown to more than 1.2 billion, half of them children. Two hundred and fifty million children are forced to go to work due primarily to the Asian economic disaster.

Ft. Benning, Georgia. Some 12,000 US citizens gathered there at the gates to protest the continuance of the School of the Americas, an infamous training ground for Latin American military officers, as many as 2,000 per year, who are given comprehensive training in the latest military tactics and techniques. For many years it has been public knowledge that the graduates of the SOA have returned to their own countries and have perpetrated grievous harm on their own citizens, including torture, massacres, abduction and disappearances, rape, and murder. Thousands in Latin America have suffered and died at the hands of their own military troops. Who were educated right here in the good old south - at Fort Benning, GA.

An estimated 120,000 children under age 18 are currently participating in armed conflict in Africa, some as young as 7 years old.

You can’t raise a family on $5.15 an hour. A single mother with two children working at the current minimum wage earns just $ 10,700 a year - $2,900 below the poverty line. To have the purchasing power it had in 1968, the minimum wage would have to be raised to $7.33 an hour.

More than three thousand people now languish on the death rows of our nation. In the first six months of 1997, forty-one people were executed in the United States, the highest rate in modern history. Get-tough politicians increasingly use support of the death penalty -- and the numbers of people they have executed -- to gain votes. Only 13 states do not have the death penalty – that leaves 37 that do. Of those 37, Texas has the most executions at 195. Right now there are 458 death row inmates in Texas - 24 of which are Juveniles. For the year 2000 Texas is the state with the highest number of executions at 12 with the second highest going to Virginia at only three executions so far this year.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children reported that each day in 1999 approximately 2,100 children went missing.

More than half of all couples that get married this year will become divorced in their lifetime.

Do you know friends that in some ways we don’t have a choice about whether these things get us "whip-cracking" mad. In some ways we don’t have an option. Being a Christian means that we care and caring means that we must act. Acting shows our love for the world. We must find time to clean house and allow God to purify our hearts, our lives, and our communities.

I think Johnny Ray Youngblood, Senior Pastor of St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York, says this very well in a commencement speech he gave at Boston University in 1993. He announced that he was assuming the role of a recruiter in his speech, a recruiter for real life because "You are in no way optional. Some of us may be obsolete, but you are not optional. Nor, graduates, do you have any options. Can you quickly see that poster that tended to drive as many of us away as it drew to it, that poster with Uncle Sam saying, 'I want you.' Well, I've got an A. P. B. for you. Uncle, Auntie and all the children need you. Yes, the world family needs you. You are not optional and you have no options.

"We don't need more people who want to manage, maintain, critique, analyze, merely live off the blood and money and sweat and tears and backs of those who came before us, especially who built imperfectly the institutions and patterns of thought and behavior that we have fallen heirs to today. We need more teachers, not educational experts. We need more beat police, not crime statisticians. We need more homebuilders, not more housing consultants. The world family needs more engineers who love the shape and feel of lumber and glass and steel. No more architectural critics. No more pastors and rabbis and priests and nuns who just take care of business as usual, but men and women who will approach even the sacred truths with new revelations .... We need men and women who want to roll up their sleeves and build or rebuild the spinal institutions of the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector." --Bostonia (Summer 1993), 42-45. (from "John 2:13-22, March, 1994" at Homiletics Online)

But wait – before you storm out that door with holy anger in your heart let me tell you two stories to guide your actions, your anger, and your passion for God and your faith.

First - how to understand anger.

There once was a little boy who had a bad temper. His Father gave him a bag of nails and told him that every time he lost his temper, he must hammer a nail into the back of the fence.

The first day the boy had driven 37 nails into the fence. Over the next few weeks, as he learned to control his anger, the number of nails hammered daily gradually dwindled down. He discovered it was easier to hold his temper than to drive those nails into the fence...

Finally the day came when the boy didn't lose his temper at all. He told his father about it and the father suggested that the boy now pull out one nail for each day that he was able to hold his temper.

The day passed and the young boy was finally able to tell his father that all the nails were gone. The father took his son by the hand and led him to the fence. He said, "You have done well, my son, but look at the holes in the fence. (found at www.sermon illustrations.com)

The fence will never be the same. When you say things in anger, they leave a scar just like this one. You can put a knife in a man and draw it out. It won't matter how many times you say I'm sorry, the wound is still there.

May our passion for the church not result in scars on anyone - on their life, their bodies, their families or their communities. Fanaticism and Facism are not far apart. We are not called to force the world into a mold. But to bandage the wounds of the world and witness to a better way. The problem though is we cannot do this without becoming concerned. In our concern we must find our love for the world. And in that love we must find a way to act for the good of God’s creation.

Second, how not to leave this place.

In the spring of 1894, the Baltimore Orioles came to Boston to play a routine baseball game. But what happened that day was anything but routine. The Orioles' John McGraw got into a fight with the Boston third baseman. Within minutes all the players from both teams had joined in the brawl. The warfare quickly spread to the grandstands. Among the fans the conflict went from bad to worse. Someone set fire to the stands and the entire ballpark burned to the ground. Not only that, but the fire spread to 107 other Boston buildings as well. (Daily Bread, August 13, 1992 found at www.sermon illustrations.com)

Christ’s anger at the temple was not an anger that spread like a wildfire destroying and burning out others. Rather his anger was impassioned love for the world - love for his father’s house and the sad shape he saw it being left in. His love was a refiner’s fire that burned controlled and hot so as to allow those around him to be changed, purified and made whole.

Being a disciple does not mean that we are armchair Christians, activists and social workers. Being a disciple means that we care deeply for the world around us. As disciples we must be led by God to bring about the kingdom of God. We must be willing to show others we love - not by violence, but by peace, and not by words but of actions. In doing this we will find a powerful place that Christ has called us to be.