Anger, God, and The Cross
“And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold pigeons...he...said to them, ‘Is it not written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations”? But you have made it into a den of robbers.’”
March 27, 1983
Today, I want to tell you about the time Jesus blew his stack, really blew his cool, got angry. It happened of all places in the temple, what some of us might call a church. Kind of shocking, isn't it? Jesus, the last person we can imagine getting mad, makes a scene in church, the last place we can imagine letting our temper show. As Mark tells it, the incident occurred on Monday or so of the last week of Jesus' life. Just a day before, Jesus entered Jerusalem like a king. People were waving palm branches, cheering "Hosanna," "You're the tops!" and the like. But just one day later, a lot of people, especially the leaders of the city, were saying, "He's gone too far. We have to put a stop to this."
You see, in Jesus' day the city leaders and the temple leaders were more or less the same. They had entered into a sort of sweetheart deal with the Romans who occupied the land. Romans permitted the city/temple leaders to stay in charge as long as the elders saw to it that the people stayed in line and paid their taxes. At the temple, people were sold the particular sacrificial animals appropriate for their life occurrences. You sacrificed so-and-such pigeons for a marriage, for the birth of a child, even more for a male child, and the like. Not only did the temple furnish you the animals at a price and profit, it required that you turn in your Roman money and change it for temple currency which finally purchased the bird.
Jesus messed up all of that. He got the people to thinking that maybe their relationship to God was not dependent upon pigeons sacrificed. He planted the notion that the people on bottom were just as good and acceptable to God as those on top. There is no evidence that he advised defiance of Caesar and the government. But he did affirm that some human duties, namely those to God, went beyond Caesar. Jesus kicked over the moneychangers table, chased the bird sellers out of the temple. And that upset the temple/city leaders and the Romans.
When religion begins to question the profit system, along with the political and military arrangements of the day, it gets ticklish. American presidents, you see, are not the first to attempt to pressure religious leaders to push their economic and military policies.
Jesus got angry. It happened during the last week of his life. That week we call Holy Week begins with Palm and Passion Sunday and continues to Easter Sunday. We are entering that week now. For Christians, holy week is a sort of biopsy of life. It is a sort of cross section that reveals what humans are capable of at their best and their worst. Holy Week is a sampler of how close God can be experienced to us in life, of how far, far away God can seem on occasion. It is about people hanging in there with one another, about people letting each other down. About good and evil. About the issue of whether there is God or nothing for us in the end. It was during that first holy week when so many not so holy events occurred that Jesus got angry. And today, we put anger under our life microscopes.
Anger is a Mask
First of all, we need to make clear that Jesus' anger, your anger, my anger, just anger is always a mask, always a front for something else.
One day months ago, our four year old just disappeared. Only Dianne and I were at home with him. Thinking he was playing in his room or watching TV, we did not miss him for a while. Then it dawned on us that he was gone. First reaction, he's hiding. Under the beds, in the closets, the shower stalls, no Andrew. After about 20 minutes panic was rising. It was cold outside, but we called and looked around the neighborhood. Either I said to Dianne or she said to me, "When we find him, I don't know what I'm going to do: hug him or spank him." He did show up and we were relieved that he had gone next door to visit. But it was an occasion that proved that the degree to which you care about someone, to that degree they can make you mad. We were angry at our child because we were scared that we had lost him who we love so much.
Think about it, no one can get your goat faster than someone you love. Other people's kids, other persons’ spouses, other persons' mothers, never get me as riled as my kids, my spouse, my mother. Even when some anonymous person has the nerve to pull out in front of me in traffic and I get fist waving mad, the anger is an expression of my love for me that almost got hurt or my unpaid for car that almost got crunched.
Out anger is always a front for frustration about something we care about. Someone we care about has taken us for granted, used us, ignored us, let us down, and we are hurt and that usually comes out in anger. There are times when things just don't work out and we are frustrated about our lives and we have anger we do not know what to do with. That's when we kick the dog or turn the anger on ourselves and get depressed or grow an ulcer.
When working with a couple preparing for marriage, I make the point that they will not have the choice to have a relationship without anger and conflict. The choice is whether they learn to use the anger and conflict which will surely arise to solve problems or let the anger make things worse. The issue is not whether you have anger or not but how you express it. If you slug it out: that's bad. If you can talk, maybe even a little selective yelling it out: that's usually good. The problem is not anger but how it is expressed.
The point again is that anger is a front or mask for something else: usually our frustration and hurt about someone - ourselves or someone else we love.
Jesus loved God, he loved the temple where people could draw close to God, and he loved God's people so much that he became angry when God's temple and his people were being misused. Thank God, people still love him enough, love his beautiful green/blue earth enough, and all his exasperating humans enough to get mad when there are those who threaten to hurt them and/or destroy them in all the neat ways we humans cook up both individually and nationally to do each other in.
What? Could even anger be an expression of love?
Anger at God is a Faith-Full Response
Andrew Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest who writes some pretty spicy novels. He argues that life is pretty spicy and that is where God is to be found if we find him at all. In his recent THY BROTHER'S WIFE, a main character is a priest by the name of Sean Cronin. Sean is troubled through much of his priesthood about his doubts regarding God. Deprived of his mother because of her mental illness and a tragic car accident when he was an infant, it remained a faith issue for most of his life. Sean shares this with a priest friend Jimmy:
"I've never told anyone this Jim, but I'm plagued by doubts all the time. Hardly a day goes by that I don't need a sign that he's (God) is out there and that he cares about me.... How can I go through life as a priest...? Jimmy responds: "If you mean how can you go through life as a priest plagued by doubts, the answer is, Why should you be different from anyone else? I'll tell you what your problem is, Cronin: you're mad at God because he took your mother away from you. Mr, I wish I had a strong enough sense of God to be mad at him."
What? “...a strong enough sense of God to be mad at him!” Hmmm. A few moments ago, I mentioned the times in life when things just get messed up and there is really no one to blame. Who can you blame when a person in the prime of life has a tragic accident? Who can you blame when you do the best you can with your life and things just never really come together? Who can you blame when a storm wreaks havoc on human life and property?
Few believe in a God who wills that this particular child develop leukemia, or that particular woman be struck by a car, or that this group of people be slaughtered or just mistreated because they are of the wrong race, religion, or background. Yet we live in God's world and there are points in life when we cry out to him Why? Why?
Job did it. Jeremiah did it. The Psalmists did it. Remember the piercing cry of Psalm 22: "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" That's what Jesus said at one point from the cross during that first Holy-not-so-holy-week. Jerry Sisson spoke of Jesus' struggle in the garden last week. "O God, isn't there another way besides my having to suffer and die to break the hearts of this world and turn it around?" Dare we use the word anger at God with Jesus? I'm honestly not sure. Can we imagine him bristling out of the temple that day saying, "God, why do you let these folks get by with such?" Anger...protest... frustration...hurt...if not them exactly, something like them even Jesus experienced.
Yet, even in his feelings of despair or protest or whatever it was, Jesus cried out not "O Nothingness" but "O God..." You have heard me speak and write about this before, but I am convinced by the great persons of faith depicted in the Bible that sometimes anger is a faith-full response to God. It may not be the place we want to end up with our faith, but it is certainly an honorable station along the way. Maybe, like Sean's friend Jimmy, some of us whose lives have not been as hurtful as those of others might wish for "a strong enough sense of God to be mad at him."
The Cross is God's Response to our Anger
I had the privilege of hearing Elie Wiesel speak in January. Wiesel, now in his early fifties, is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. His mother, father, and sister were not so fortunate. In him book Night, Wiesel tells about his experience in the camps, as a young boy. Once, two men and a thirteen-year-old boy were hung in the prison courtyard as the other prisoners were forced to watch so that they would learn the lesson of not obeying.
Each of the three were stood on chairs and had nooses placed around their necks. The chairs were kicked out from under them The men died quickly. But the boy was so light that his neck did not instantly snap. In fact, he dangled midair, betwixt and between life and death, for almost a half an hour before he died. As Wiesel and the other prisoner's watched, someone quietly asked, "Where is God? Where is He?... Where is God now?"
Wiesel says that he heard a voice deep within himself answer: "Where is He? Here He is - He is hanging here on this gallows...."
As we look at that tissue section of life and death which comes to us from Holy week, we remember another one who hung on a cross, died, and did not deserve it. For all of us who have felt angry, hurt, and cheated because of the unfairness of it all, there is one more innocent than we will ever be who has been where all the innocent sufferers of earth have been: hanging alone. Never again, can one of us say, "No one understands how hurt, frustrated, and angry I feel." Jesus the Christ has been there and is there with us.
And now I try to speak of that which human words and logic cannot quite make sense. How very little of that which really matters in living and dying, relationships with each other and with God, fits the cubby holes of our craniums? Yet for Christians, there is a conviction we cannot quite shake that somehow, someway, God showed his face in this one named Jesus. Somehow, someway, this Jesus said if you know me, you know the mystery called God. And as we come to the tingling realization that Jesus is with us, that he has been in all of the terror and horror places we humans have been, that God, too, is with us. Even as we protest God's seeming absence, his absence is a kind of presence.
The cross is God's response to human anger and anguish. God does not rescue us from all our tragedies. But he is with us through them. Even in the final, ultimate tragedy of death, we have a glimmer of hope, he is with us. But that has to do with the mystery of another day of Holy Week, Easter, a word about which we anxiously await. Amen.