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“Angry Jesus” based on Psalm 19 and John 2:13-22…
Growing
up, I saw a lot of images of Jesus as a clean, well groomed man of
European descent. You have probably seen these images too. His hair
is shoulder length, his mustache and beard and visible but trimmed,
his eyes are light, and the whole thing has an aura of “air
brushed” all over it. His expression is neutral, yet somehow
lightly angelic.
Without
going into the issues with presenting a Middle Eastern man as
European, or even the annoying prevalence of this presentation of
Jesus in our culture, I want to talk a little bit about the facial
expression. My first year here, I was given a image of a smiling
Jesus, and I savor it. Ludwig Fruerbach says that we humans project
what we think are the best and most important characteristics of
humans onto God. If that’s true, than a neutral expression on Jesus
suggests we think emotions are NOT holy. A smiling Jesus is a Jesus
with emotions, rather than a stoic, and I strongly prefer it.
If
you search online for images of “Angry Jesus” they mostly portray
today’s Gospel Lesson. Angry Jesus ALSO has an arm raised with a
whip of cords. For people who were raised with an un-emotive
understanding of Jesus or God as well as for people taught that
emotions are bad, today’s Gospel lesson can be rather distinctly
uncomfortable.
Jesus
gets angry. He acts out his anger. It has consequences. Other
people’s livelihoods are impacted. This is neither a neutral nor a
sugary sweet Jesus.
These
days when I hear this story, I hear it through the ears of the
trainings I’ve done on nonviolent direct action and I think how
brilliant it is! From that perspective, Jesus and his disciples
would have been working together on an action that brought people’s
attention to the issues with the Temple. I’m not exactly sure how
they would have said it, but the Temple had been the center point of
Jewish faith for nearly 1000 years, and as such it was hugely
important to Jewish people of faith. Because of that, the Roman
Empire had taken over control of it. The Empire appointed the high
priests, and the high priests were removed by the Empire at will. So
the Temple was at one and the same time the spiritual center of
Jewish life AND a system that had been appropriated for the exact
opposite of its purpose. It likely is helpful to remember that in
the Jewish faith the first 5 books of the Bible, the Torah, are
central in casting a vision of how God wants society to work. And
how God wants society to work is in a just and equitably way where
even the most vulnerable and impoverished are cared for, and no one
gets rich of of anyone else’s suffering.
Empires,
however, work the opposite way. Control is maintained with violence
or its threats, and the entire point of the system is to consolidate
wealth and power.
Now,
likely most people at Jesus’s time knew this. All of this. But,
they largely ignored it because… well… what are you gonna do?
That,
I’d guess, was the assessment of the issue. Jesus and his disciples
were looking for a way to clarify the issue, and motivate people into
different behavior. What they came up with, a disruption of the
marketplace around the Temple, is pretty brilliant. It always upsets
the status quo when business gets disrupted. (Several years ago I
participated in a Black Lives Matter protest that walked up 5th
Ave in NYC, on a Saturday, in December. I couldn’t BELIEVE that we
were shutting down Manhattan during the Christmas Season. Clearly,
it was decided it was less problematic to give the people a voice
than to deal with the consequences of silencing the people.)
The
action, I think we can say, worked. First of all, we’re still
talking about it. Secondly, the appropriation of the Temple stopped.
While this story takes place in John chapter 2, in the Synoptics
this happens right before “Holy Week” and is one of the two most
significant actions that led to Jesus’s arrest and murder. It
clearly shook up the powers, and was experienced as a threat to their
power.
Which
I would call a nonviolent direct
action well done. And that reminds me that the consequences of
nonviolent direct action can be an increase in state sponsored
violence, at least initially.
With
that as introduction (too long?), I want to give us some space to
lean into the anger that we see in Jesus in this passage. I like to
think that he wasn’t just acting when he gathered cords into a whip
or overturned tables, it was a genuine expression of his righteous
anger with the life-affirming Jewish faith being used to destroy
life.
This
being the one year anniversary of the last time we gathered together
for worship in person (and funny enough, the last time we had an in
person charge conference!), it seems like a particularly appropriate
time to name some of the facets of this past year that can reasonably
illicit righteous anger.
The place to start seems to be
with 2.56 Million worldwide deaths, including over 518,000 in the
USA, many – if not most – of which were preventable if we had
prioritized people over profit.
Being intentionally misled by
leaders about the seriousness of this virus, about what we needed to
do to be safe, about how decisions were being made, and about who was
dying and where.
The simple fact that when it
became clear that the people most impacted by COVID were impoverished
people of color, our government immediate stopped caring as much.
That some churches and other
faith communities choose to ignore pleas by community health
professionals for safe practices and created super-spreader events,
while claiming to act in the name of God.
That decisions about when to
close and when to open were not guided by our Bishop or annual
conference leaders, but simply left up to us. (Not that I like top
down leadership either, but leadership becomes imperative when safety
is an issue.)
That when it became clear that
we needed masks the way we got them was through the works of
volunteer saints (thank you!) rather than the government we thought
was prepared to protect us.
That reopening plans have
continued to prioritize “the economy” rather than the people.
Yes, small businesses are struggling, but there are POLICIES that
could help, instead of risking the lives of the workers.
That police use of deadly force
on people of color JUST KEEPS GOING.
That the 644 billionaires in the
USA have earned $1.3 trillion dollars in the past year1
while 1 in 6 Americans are food insecure.2
That somehow, SOMEHOW, there
still isn’t the will to create universal health care or a livable
minimum wage in our country (or at least its government), even though
we now see that we are only as healthy individually as the least
healthy among us collectively.
That all of the inequalities and
injustices of our society have been on display, and they continue to
be deadly, and there still isn’t a communal will to change.
That the things we need to do to
end this pandemic have been clear for a very long time, but between
political propaganda and the culture war and the need for clear
leadership and a priority on care for the vulnerable, it hasn’t been
done.
I
could go on. But I want to leave some for you to fill in on your
own.
There
is a lot to be righteously angry about. And today, I suggest we feel
it. Feel the anger of the last year, and all the people who have
been lost and all the opportunities that have been lost, and all the
exhaustion we’ve experienced.
Now,
I do NOT want you to let it go.
Not
what you were expecting? That’s fair. I don’t necessarily want you
to keep on being so angry that your blood pressure goes up or you
seek out comfort food, because that just does more harm. But I also
don’t want you to get angry and then “largely ignored it because…
well… what are you gonna do?”
Get
mad. Then get organized. That’s how we change the world. And if
now isn’t the time to organize, then it is the time to get informed,
and to build relationship so we can organize, have direct action, and
make change when the time is ripe. Or, perhaps, now is the time to
get centered into spiritual practice with God, so God can start
pushing and prodding on our hearts to let us know how to organize and
act first. So, I want you to keep righteous anger, and use it as
energy to do good.
Because
that’s how Jesus did it, and that’s how I think God calls us to do
it. Thanks be to God.
Amen
1https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-billionaire-pandemic/
2https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/hunger-coronavirus-economy/
To be fair, I averaged some stats.
Rev. Sara E. Baron
First United Methodist Church of Schenectady
603 State St. Schenectady, NY 12305
Pronouns: she/her/hers
http://fumcschenectady.org/
https://www.facebook.com/FUMCSchenectady
March 7, 2021