Sunday 3 Lent (B-2006): Whipped into Love

John 2:13-25

(Msgr. Magee did not preach today, but instead offers the following reflections)

We don’t usually associate Jesus with chaos.

But chaos is precisely what we would see if we had filmed the Gospel scene from St. John we have just heard.

I have never seen a painting, an icon or any other representation of Jesus wielding a whip, with a frightening expression of anger and outrage on his face and in his body language.

Yet, a still photograph of him taken from this same scene would reveal just that.

Our sometimes sanitized and “safe” perceptions of Jesus would make this violent picture of him not just uncomfortable, but offensive.

While we profess our faith in his true humanity, at gut level we are inclined to cut away those challenging aspects of it, perhaps because we either deny them with disgust in ourselves or because we simply baulk at the idea of Jesus truly being one of us. Is our faith in the incarnation real?

Normally, people will respond to this uncharacteristic “fit” of Jesus by saying, “His anger was justified, because as God he could do no wrong and could judge the truth of things without error.”

That is true. But, even so, we could hardly describe his behavior as socially apt. Anyone else would rightly have been arrested for disturbing the peace. In fact, the Jewish leaders showed great restraint by simply asking him to show by what authority he did what he did.

His response about destroying the temple and raising it again would have gotten him charged with contempt of court, if not with madness.

So, to refer to the justified anger of Jesus is right; what is not right is thus to brush aside the uncomfortableness of the way he manifested that anger.

We should not tame this “wild” side of Jesus, nor, at all costs, try to overcome the puzzlement in which it leaves us. This scene of the cleansing of the Temple must jump out of the Gospel pages at us and shake us, challenge us and, yes, even frighten us.

The fact is that the God-Man, the true God and true Man, truly gets angry and violent. In its starkness, that can disturb us, especially if we apply it, as we must, to ourselves as individuals, matrimonies, families, parish and Church. We are perhaps too quick to consider as obsolete, as “bad theology”, the notion of an angry God.

However, the perception of Jesus as meek and humble of heart, ever-ready to forgive and forbear, is not in contradiction with the angry and violent Jesus. It is the same Lord, and we must accept him as he is, and not as our selective reading of him wants him to be.

We need to learn to live with the tension of who and how Jesus is.

We must let him be real in the full panoply of his “theandric”, that is, his human and divine, mystery. Lent is a time to discover ever more fully and deeply that reality, that mystery.

And the Gospel of today makes us face it with unnerving realism.

So what has triggered this irate outburst in Jesus of Nazareth? What does he so desperately want us to face that he resorts to such behavior?

Jesus himself puts it in these terms, “stop turning my Father’s house into a marketplace!” What does he mean by that?

If he just meant that you should not sell things in or near the Temple, then all of our Catholic parishes, to some degree or another, are patently disobeying the Lord. By extension, we should have no collections either.

Yet, Jesus had to know that money is in some ways inevitable around any activity which involves human beings. It would therefore be difficult to argue that he was suggesting that the practical organization of religion could or should be money-free. So what is he saying?

In all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), this same scene has Jesus quote the words of the Prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations. But you have made it a den of robbers.”

This takes us closer to the source of Jesus’ anger. The Temple has become a den of robbers. Who are these robbers?

Not necessarily the animal vendors. Probably many of those working at the Temple were earning an honest wage, though some might have been cheating their customers.

In other parts of the Gospel, Jesus shows great understanding for such people – he even calls Matthew, the tax-collector, to be one of his own. And then there was Judas.

So who were these robbers against whom Jesus was enraged?

If you look at the whole Gospel, there is only one class of people against whom Jesus was consistently angry: the religious leaders of the Jews, described as Chief Priests, Scribes, Pharisees, etc.. The cleansing of the Temple was also, then, directed primarily at them. Why?

Already Jeremiah had breathed threats against the religious establishment of his time, saying that the Temple would be destroyed because that establishment plundered the people like bandits and then sought refuge in the Temple.

They effectively turned it into a bandits’ stronghold or “robbers’ den.” They did evil to the people and then came calling on Yahweh in the Temple, as if Yahweh did not see their evil deeds. They presumed that Yahweh was with them because the Temple was with them.

And Jeremiah blasted them for this hypocrisy and prophesied that the Temple would be destroyed because of their infidelity. It was indeed destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.

So Jesus is effectively attributing to himself the prophecies of Jeremiah. By cleansing the Temple and then saying what he said, Jesus is interpreting his action as God’s condemnation of the Temple.

But he goes further.

Not only will the Temple at the time of Jesus later be destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans, but Jesus points to his own body as the Temple. And he does it in a double sense.

First, in his mortal body, the old cult, the old covenant, the old priesthood, the old sacrifices, the old Law, the old Temple will be destroyed by “robber humanity” and its sin.

Second, in his risen and immortal body, the new and everlasting covenant, the new priesthood, the new sacrifice (the Mass), the new Law (the Spirit), the new Temple (the Church) will be established by the Father.

From this we can understand the violent anger of Jesus: it is directed towards the destruction of the sin which had so sorely and so deeply wounded his beloved human family and thus his own sacred and tender Heart.

In the end, the whip will be used, not on us, but on himself. As Pope Benedict puts it in his recent Encyclical: God’s love makes God turn the demands of his own justice against himself. By justice we deserved the whip; by charity the whip falls on Jesus.

The destruction that our sins merited he allows to fall on himself: “for ours were the sufferings he carried; ours the iniquities he bore; by his wounds we are healed.”

The religious leaders of Judaism received the brunt of Jesus’ anger because they should have known better. It does not seem wrong to speculate either that he was so rough with them because their sorry state made him love them more.

His harshness and his dramatic outburst may well have been intended to shock them into repentance. To say Jesus’ was a “tough love” in their regard is perhaps too glib, but it conveys well the point I am making.

With what intensity he must have gazed on them when he threw down the definitive gauntlet, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up!”

With what strength, sweat and trembling emotion he must have roared those words!

With what desperate hope his heart must have been beating as he sought to penetrate the sepulchers of their hearts! It was easier for him to raise Lazarus from the tomb than to move their wills to repentance!

Jesus’ “zeal for the Father’s house” was, and is, his zeal for us, for it is in us, not in magnificent buildings, that the Father wishes to dwell.

What keeps him at bay? What stirs his zeal in both righteous anger and longing love if not our refusal to turn to him in truth, in loyalty, in sincerity, in humility, in utter love?

Our self-justifications, our rationalizations of sin, our modern-day idolatries, our overweening arrogance, our banal mundanity, our refusal to trust, to let ourselves be forgiven and loved and healed: how he longs to liberate us from these!

“Oh that today you would listen to my voice! Harden not your hearts! O that you would walk in my ways, then would your prosperity flourish like a garden and your peace flow like a river!”

In this mad, lunging, whipping Jesus there seems to burst forth the pent up rage of God and of holy men against that spoiler and destroyer of the hearts and lives of his beloved children: sin and its father, the Devil.

And we must not think that our “little sins” (whatever that means) do not still enrage our God. His zeal for each one of us is no less hot today than it was in the year 30 AD.

The danger of accommodating our sins and then, like the “robbers” above, crying, “Jesus! The Church!” is a permanent temptation for us.

Maybe beside our picture of the Sacred Heart or our Crucifix, we should have a picture of the angry Jesus with the whip in hand.

Maybe then we might remember how his body was scourged and destroyed for us because of his zealous and jealous love for us.

Maybe then we might be less inclined to reduce Jesus to a harmless, static and saccharine idol, adjectives we might equally apply to the quality of our faith, hope and love.

Maybe then we can find the zeal to put our own house in order, to whip ourselves into spiritual shape.

Maybe then we can be consumed by love for him as his was consummated eternally on the Cross for us.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, March 19^th, 2006