Jesus was Angry!

A Thought on Sunday
  from the desk of Fr. Ignatius Waters, CP

Sunday 8th March 2015

If we grew up with a gospel of ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ it may come as a shock to us that Jesus wasn’t always meek and mild. Of course he was loving and compassionate towards the sinner, the outcast and the poor but he was also flaming angry with those who abused the innocent, the weak or the poor, and those who exploited others – especially those who exploited others in the name of religion!

And there’s no contradiction between his love and his anger! The stronger, deeper and more passionate your love is for your people, your family, your children or grandchildren, the stronger, deeper and more passionate will be your anger if those same people are abused in any way. The anger is part of the love! Sometimes the problem is we’re not angry enough – maybe because we don’t love enough. Sometimes we have a duty to be outraged by the behaviour of others!

Now I haven’t forgotten that anger is named among the seven deadly sins or tendencies and we grew up thinking anger was always wrong and sinful. But it’s not. Of course it needs to be managed. It needs to be baptised in some way. Anger is a powerful emotion that can explode like a volcano destroying everyone around it in molten lava and doing more harm than good!

How do we manage it? How do we baptise it? How do we make it a power for good? First let me ask you the strengths, the powers for good that we grew up with – we called them virtues then. I think you will agree what was drummed into us at home, in church, in school, were the virtues of humility, patience, long suffering, obedience, and these are good virtues. They are virtues to keep the family and the community together. But there are other virtues that we never heard much about like truthfulness in naming a problem when there is a problem, like challenging an unjust situation in the family, in the parish or in the work place, taking a stand and taking the consequences – as Jesus does in the gospel today. That takes courage and planning. It’s easy enough to march and protest about water charges or any other popular cause! But scattering the cattle mart in the temple courts was far from popular with the farmers or the money changers or the temple authorities who of course benefited from the traffic and the trade! What enraged Jesus was that pilgrims from afar with different currencies were being fleeced at an exorbitant rate by the money changers. And the poor and humble pilgrims were practically blackmailed into buying animals for sacrifice inside the temple. Their own sheep were often vetted and rejected as not good enough. And all in the name of religion! But can you imagine the commotion as the cattle and sheep are driven out of the temple – the roaring and the cursing of the sellers and the buyers, people scrambling to get out of the way, the pigeons scattered, the money tables overturned. It was mayhem! And it couldn’t have happened on the spur of the moment. No, it had to be planned. We read in Mark’s gospel that Jesus arrived in Jerusalem the night before, went into the temple and looked around but it was late. No sense in having a protest with so few around! So he went out to Bethany with the twelve. No doubt they then planned their protest for the next day and it would have needed Jesus and the twelve and any more they could recruit to cause such an uproar. It was the beginning of people power. This whole episode is often called the ‘Cleansing of the Temple’.

You can imagine the cleansing needed after cattle and sheep but more needed was the power hosing of corruption and injustice suffered by the poor in a place of prayer.