Musings

Mar

04

Angry Jesus

A sermon preached at Christ Church/San Marcos, Tarrytown, NY on Sunday, March 4h, 2018 (The Third Sunday in Lent) 

Readings: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

Anger is a complicated business. It is a universal human emotion and yet it’s a taboo subject. We don’t like to talk about anger. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we fear it. Even the way we speak of anger colloquially reveals some of our underlying fears: we speak about “losing our cool” or “losing our temper.” That language of loss implies that anger takes something away from us, takes us out of our right minds, makes us less human. Certainly, unchecked anger can have disastrous consequences, as we know too well from personal experience. Anger, when unaddressed, can lead to violence and hate. But does it have to? Is anger bad? Or is it more complicated than that?

The Bible, as with so many things, does not speak with one voice on the subject of anger. This is important to realize because, over time, certain Biblical voices have been given preference to others and have dominated the conversation. Often, we remember that anger (or wrath) is one of the 7 deadly sins and we stop there. Anger = sin = bad. But the truth is, the Bible has so much more to say about anger, and we hear some of those alternative perspectives in today’s readings. In today’s Gospel, we are confronted with a very angry Jesus. There is no avoiding it, or glossing over it. Jesus is mad and he acts on his rage, storming into the temple with a whip, chasing sacrificial animals, and knocking over furniture.

It is a scene that provokes deep discomfort. How would we feel if someone barged into this sanctuary with a whip and started overturning the furniture? At best, this is Jesus having a very bad day and, at worst, it’s Jesus engaging in criminal destruction of property. There is no shortage of ways to explain why Jesus might have been angry about the practices he saw in the temple, and many of those reasons are both plausible and valid. But I’m not interested in explaining away Jesus’ anger today. We do enough explaining away of emotions in our own lives; we don’t need any more practice. What I’m interested in is: what do we do with this uncomfortably angry Jesus? How do we make sense of him? And what does he have to offer us?

As Christians, we believe that God chose to become incarnate in the person of Jesus to share our humanity, to bridge the gap between us and God. The Incarnation is the ultimate act of love – God chooses to have a human body, with all its limitations and complications, to better understand what it’s like for us. Jesus, we believe, was like us in every way except for one thing – he never sinned. Well. That has some interesting implications for the way we read today’s Gospel, doesn’t it? It becomes a kind of logic puzzle: If anger is a sin, and Jesus got angry, but Jesus never sinned…something doesn’t fit here! But which part is it?

It all comes back to Jesus’ humanity. In the Church, we talk a good game about Jesus’ human nature, but we so often try to soften the sharp edges, make the idea of a human God more palatable. And it’s really important for us to pay attention to the parts of Jesus’ humanity that make us squirm because, chances are, those are the same parts of our own humanity that make us uncomfortable. Bodies are a chief culprit: we’re good with the idea of an Incarnate God in the abstract, but when we really start thinking about all the imperfect and troublesome things that bodies need and do…well, we tend to change the subject rather quickly. So let me say it: Jesus got hungry! And tired, and sick, and hot. Those things are not sins, so Jesus is not immune from them.

And Jesus, human being that he was, also had feelings. Just like we do. Strong, complicated, deeply uncomfortable feelings. And I dare to say that is extremely good news for us. Because it means that our most vulnerable, most human moments of anger, or grief, or anxiety, or sadness are not beyond God’s ability to comprehend. Jesus has been there, done that. And by entering with us into our deepest, darkest emotions, God has pronounced them holy.

How might that change how we experience an emotion like anger? Often, the anger itself pales in comparison to the stories and value judgements we attach to it: we feel the prickling of rage and quickly go to a place of, “Oh no! This is bad! I can’t get angry! What will people think? What’s wrong with me for feeling this way?” Today, Jesus offers us a simple and stunning answer: there’s nothing wrong with us. Strong feelings are part and parcel of what it means to be human – Jesus gets that from personal experience.

This story of Jesus cleansing the temple (a rare story that appears in all 4 Gospels and is therefore especially worth our attention) is here to remind us that feelings are not sins. What we do with them might be. But the feelings themselves are not only normal, but holy. They are opportunities for us to encounter God. Anger, for example, tends to crop up when something isn’t right, when some boundary has been crossed or some expectation has been violated. It can be as mundane as being grumpy about some unexpected traffic or as potent as civil disobedience in the face of societal injustice. Anger can break us down, or it can be a catalyst for action. We’re seeing it with thrilling clarity in the witness of the teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting, who are demanding a better future. Anger exists to alert us to the fact that something isn’t the way it should be and something needs to be done. Anger is an invitation to action.

That’s perfect, because Lent is also an invitation to action: an invitation to explore the wilderness places in our own hearts, the parts we’re ashamed of, the parts we try to forget about. If you’re anything like me, there might be some anger in the wilderness of your own soul that’s crying out for recognition and healing. What anger might you be ready to let go of? What anger is calling out for action? If it’s not anger that’s asking for our attention, it might be grief, or sadness, or anxiety. Whatever it is that awaits you in your wilderness: be not afraid. There’s nothing out there or in here that is unfamiliar territory for Jesus. And that is extraordinarily good news. Amen.