By: Pierre Whalon
When you put all four gospels together, there are not a lot of things that appear in all four. For instance, only Matthew and Luke describe the birth of Jesus. And even the Resurrection is described very differently in each gospel. But today’s lesson from John, the cleansing of the Temple, as it is known, appears in almost the exact same way in all four.
Jesus goes up to Jerusalem for the Passover festival, enters the forecourt of the Temple, and apparently loses his temper. He chases all the vendors of sacrificial animals out, with a whip he makes out of a rope. And he puts two scriptures together, “my house shall be a house of prayer for all nations” from Isaiah, and “you have made it a den of thieves” from Jeremiah. The other gospels quote these scriptures, John summarizes them.
Now one of the basic rules of interpreting the Bible is that if an event is reported in several sources, and it goes against the grain of routine Judaism, it really happened. Each evangelist gives this event a bit of a different slant; John is interested in the disciples’ reaction. They believed in Jesus.
How about us? I remember in seminary a long time ago, er, I mean, a few year ago, we were studying the Latin Fathers, those Christian authors who wrote not in Greek but in Latin. One of the earliest is a fellow named Lactantius, who wrote a little book called “On the wrath of God” — De ira Dei. I gave a report on my reading of it, and afterwards, one of my classmates lost his temper. “God does not get mad at people!” he shouted. “We have to stop being afraid of God’s wrath!”
What Lactantius had said, in a nutshell, was that since God loves us, God must also get angry at those things that hurt and destroy us, including the things we do. The analogy is like being a parent. You love your child, but when a snake threatens him, or she drinks too much, you get angry. It’s part of loving, Lactantius argued, and I agree with him.
My colleague had come to faith through the twelve-step program known as Alcoholics Anonymous, and indeed, several of my classmates had had similar experiences. (It’s good to know that St. Paul’s offers 12-step programs to help people beat addictions, by the way, one of the many things you do that make your bishop proud.) Part of the program is to admit that you are powerless before your addiction, and you turn over your life to a “Higher Power.” This euphemism for God helps people who have had bad experiences of church (or synagogue, or mosque, or atheism) in their upbringing. And much of those bad experiences have to do with believing that God is angry at you, that you deserve the bad things that happen to you, and in fact, they are the result of God “pouring out his wrath” upon you.
When you have finally come to accept the Good News that God loves you, that God shares your life now so that you can share God’s life forever, hearing again about God’s anger can reawaken bad memories of why you decided to stop believing. I think I understand my colleague’s anger.
Anger about the anger of God… But shouldn’t God get angry at some things? Have you followed the absolute horror of Syria, and the refugees we meet from that country? Do you know about the millions slaughtered in the east of the Congo recently, and the return of war to that country? How about children murdering children with military-style weapons in their schools? We are all awash in stories of the terrible terrible things we do to one another. Doesn’t God get angry at these things?
If not, what good is God’s love? Jesus saw the commerce in the Temple, the complacent profiting from the holy, which by the way continues today, as we all know. Walk down the via della Conciliazione or outside the gate of Canterbury Cathedral, for instance. And Jesus sees it and gets angry. It is a human reaction, as he is one of us. And it is a divine action, to cleanse the Temple, God’s house.
Those of us who were damaged by their religious upbringings need to know that that God loves them, that God shares their life now so that they can share God’s life forever. But I wonder whether many of us, who have heard over and over in modern sermons that God loves you, forgives you, and desires only the best of us, need also to hear that God’s love means also that God is angry at what hurts you. In other words, it is one thing to hear and believe that God loves me. But there is a second thing, which is to respond to God’s offer of love and forgiveness.
The Baptismal Covenant that we are about to repeat for our baptizand and confirmand is also for us. You and I need to persevere in resisting evil, and whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord. You and I need to learn to seek and serve Christ in all persons, and respect the dignity of every human being, no matter who they are, where they come from, what they look like. And we need to find our own anger against the terrible things being done to others, and strive for justice, here in Rome and around the world. We need to strive for peace, here and around the world.
We need to follow Jesus, including in cleansing the temples of our hearts, the church, and the world, of all that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. If it makes God angry, it should.
The Rt. Rev. Pierre W. Whalon served as Bishop in charge of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe from 2001 to 2019.
