THE CONTEXT OF JESUS’ ANGER

In the gospel this morning we see Jesus expressing intense and animated anger at those conducting commerce in the temple.  He enters the temple and starts ransacking the place.   And not only did he throw out the merchants and money-changers, he even ran off the cattle!   “Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and cattle.” (2:15) Can’t you just picture it, cows and sheep and people fleeing in terror for this carpenter-teacher gone berserk?

So what got him so miffed off!  Was he angry because there was money being made in the temple?    Was he angry because the money-changers were likely charging exorbitant exchange rates so people could pay the temple tax, taking advantage of the Passover situation?  These may have been factors, but I don’t believe they are the key factor in this story. 

If these are not the key factors in triggering Jesus’ anger, then what was his anger all about and what is this story about?

This story is not about making money in the temple.  This story is not about bingo, youth car washes and fund raising events, as a few people have tried to convince me over the years.  That stuff is so superficial compared to the deeper message of this story.

For a few moments, I will take you into deeper waters regarding this story.  You’ve heard me say it before, and I will say it again:  to understand any given Biblical passage, context is everything.  Context!  Context! Context is everything!   If you do not respect the context, you can use the Bible to support just about any twisted conclusion you desire. 

For example:  In Leviticus 20:10 it says, “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death.”   So what do we do with that?  I think it is safe to say that if we were to take that verse literally, and out of context, the population of the United States would be significantly less.  

Or in Ephesians 6 where the apostle Paul says, “Slaves, obey your masters with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart… render service with enthusiasm…”  During the dark period of slavery in our nation’s history, slave holders used this verse to reinforce the institution of slavery.  Like I said, “Context! Context! Context is everything!”

To understand this gospel for today we need to see it in context.  What is interesting is that this same story appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke but in a completely different chronological sequence.  Matthew, Mark and Luke have this event positioned after Jesus entered Jerusalem the last week of his life:  Palm Sunday – Passion Week – Holy Week. 

But in John, this story appears at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry right after he performed his first miracle in John’s gospel, the Wedding at Cana of Galilee where Jesus turned water into wine. Is it a different event than what Matthew, Mark and Luke record?  I don’t think so.  John has Jesus attending three Passover festivals, including the final one mentioned by Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew, Mark and Luke mention no other Passover except the final Passover.  If Jesus did this twice, the gospels surely would have mentioned it.  And if they would have seen him coming the second time they either would have stopped him or for sure would have got out of his angry way before he arrived.   It’s just that John chronologically re-positions this story because, for John, the chronological order was not what was important, but the meaning that John saw in the story in relation to other things that Jesus did.  John sacrifices the chronology for skillful theological framing. 

John wants his readers to see a relationship between this story and what happened at the Wedding of Cana immediately before, and what happened immediately after, that being Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus.  So what happen at Cana?  You know the story?  Jesus transformed water into wine and saved the day!  The water Jesus used was in huge jars used for purification practices, such as ceremonial washing.  We might say the water jars represented a faith that was obsessed with purifying self before God and others.  Jesus transformed this water into something very different – wine!  In fact, it was the best wine that anyone had tasted!   Right from the beginning John wants his readers to know that Jesus was about transforming and ransacking a system that had purification and ritual at its center, to a personal blessing not only for the bridal couple, but for the entire community.   Do we hear a faint echo of John 3:16 here?  “For God so loved the world, that God gave…”

Immediately following Jesus conversed with Nicodemus, the Pharisee.  The Pharisees were among the most strict and devout.  Jesus told Nicodemus about a whole new kind of thing; a rebirth; a total transformation; a new way of thinking, a new way of believing; a new way of living – a kind and quality of life he had never known.  It was so radical it could only be described as “rebirth.”  (3:3)

You see, religion had become so straight-jacketed with purity laws and oppressive customs that took precedent over knowing the heart of God and living life with a sense of joy. Jesus' anger in the temple was prompted because people were consumed with religious processes and practices and not with knowing the heart of God; not with a loving relationship with God.   The money-changers represented a legalistic sacrificial system gone wild! The temple was the literal and symbolic center of a religious system that focused on human ritual and not on God. John told this story to clue the reader in that Jesus' ministry would ransack and transform the accepted definitions of faith practice and replace it with God's new definitions.

John's gospel, as well as the other gospels, show Jesus intentionally doing many things that would have made him ritually unclean and unacceptable in terms of the religious purity system:  touching lepers, speaking openly with a Samaritan women, going into a graveyard to meet with a demon possessed man, eating with outcasts and sinners, healing on the Sabbath and much more.   All these acts made Jesus unclean according to the legal system of the Jewish faith. Jesus sought to redefine and transform people's understanding of purity and impurity, and transform religious faith itself.

In the first chapter of John’s gospel we read, “It is God the only Son, who is close to the father’s heart and makes him known.”  (1:18)   This verse is one of the most astounding statements in all of the scripture.  It says nothing less that it is Jesus who makes known the God’s heart!  There are so many other things that John has Jesus saying that reinforce this same truth:  In chapter 10 Jesus says, “The Father and I are one”  and  “…the Father is in me, and I am in the Father.”  In chapter 14 Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.” 

John wants his readers to know that no ritual practice or process of any kind can ever make a person right with God.  The only sacrifice that can put people right with God is the sacrifice of Jesus, to which he alluded in today’s gospel:  “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.”   Two verses later we are told he was referring to the temple of his body – in other words, his crucifixion and resurrection. 

The mighty temple that had been under construction for 46 years, and all that it represented in terms of their faith ritual and practice, was being ransacked and transformed by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Jesus was gutting an entire system of religious belief and practice.  The implications were staggering!

The bottom line was then, and still is now, that genuine faith practice and authentic worship is not the act of a person doing something in order to gain God's favor or deserve God’s love. Genuine faith practice and authentic worship does not begin with your righteousness, but rather it begins with God's loving and saving action in Jesus Christ.  Genuine faith practice and authentic worship is always our thankful response to God's grace.  Of course, sacrifices of various kinds are still appropriate expressions of faith practice and worship: thanksgiving, offerings and tithes, hymns of adoration, deeds of love, service and justice, but they all belong to the realm of our response to God’s love.  The core of our faith is not what we do, but what God has done first; on our behalf in Jesus Christ. 

In 1 John, chapter 4, a little treatise toward the end of the New Testament thought to perhaps have been written by the very same author of the gospel of John, we read, “God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that God loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”   (1 John 4:9-10)

My dear friends:  Just as Jesus walked into the temple and ransacked the place with a holy anger that moved those early believers into the deeper waters of God’s astounding love; he desires to walk into your life and mine and ransack any false notions we might have that we can save ourselves by our own righteousness, our own goodness, our own piety or practice, our own self-help efforts; and replaces it all with a love that begins with him, that reveals to us, through faith, the very heart of God. 

Like he blessed the Wedding at Cana with undeserved grace and personal involvement, he blesses us with the same undeserved grace and the same personal relationship that is like the taste of the best new wine.  

Like he offered Nicodemus a whole new quality of life and transformed living based on a loving power outside of self, he offers us the same kind of rebirth by grace through faith.

Like he changed the focus from the old temple of bricks and mortar, to the new temple of his crucifixion and resurrection, he changes our focus from all the false Gods we worship to the true God whose heart Jesus reveals; whose heart knows us; and whose heart we can know.    Amen.