3rd Sunday of Lent

March 7, 2021

I don’t think anyone of us could say that we haven’t gotten angry at least once in our lives, after all, we are human. In our Gospel today, we get another glimpse of the humanity of Christ. Some of us may have difficulty with reconciling the Jesus who said, love your enemies, turn the other cheek and who emphasized love so many times with the Jesus we see in todays’ Gospel text. We see where he made a whip out of chords, turned over the tables, and seemed to kick things around all over the place. He must have been really ticked off. Did he use the whip? The Gospel does not mention that. What the Gospel does indicate very strongly is that it is possible to be thoroughly angry and thoroughly Christian at the same time. However, holding onto anger and grudges is not good for our physical and mental wellbeing. Even though we know that God forgives us, nevertheless it is difficult to experience his forgiveness as long as we latch onto these things. We need to ask for God’s grace to get rid of this baggage.

The reason that Jesus got so angry was that he saw other people being mistreated. What he was reacting to here was a religious rip-off. There were merchants in the temple selling sacrificial birds and animals and they had to be purchased with temple money. That was the business of the money changers and the rate of exchange was always very, very much in their favor. People were coming to the temple with oftentimes broken hearts and lives. They came seeking understanding, forgiveness, kindness, mercy and at times like this people can be very vulnerable. The temple merchants knew this, and they took advantage of the situation to make unfair profits for themselves. When Jesus saw this, his face blazed with anger and so he made a whip.

There can be such a thing as a healthy use of anger and it most obviously applies to peoples’ abuse of people. Just a few examples, it could be a bully in the schoolyard or someone who mistreats a member of your family. It could be a con artist who cheats your retired parents out of their life savings or a drug pusher who gets your son or daughter hooked on drugs. It could be a child molester and the list goes on. How would you react in these situations? I think I know, and I think I know why. Your anger would know no bounds and it would be because of your love for the people who had been hurt.

This is what Jesus experienced. He loved these people who were being ripped off in the name of religion and he simply could not stand by and watch it happen.

A great spiritual once wrote that you can measure a person by the size of the things that make him or her angry. I hope that in your life and mine that they are big things, unselfish things. Let us hope and pray that we are all learning to make a healthy use of our capacity for anger.