Imagine my delight and my surprise! Walking through the displays last fall at our annual “Art, for Heaven’s Sake!” my eyes fixed on one painting in particular. It was a painting of Jesus. Never, in all my study of art and history and theology, had I seen anything like it. The artist? Joanna Mersereau, a prominent Inland Empire watercolorist. Her work was featured in our 26th annual art show in 2005, and has continued to delight and inspire us each year since. This particular piece features Jesus in the middle of the 11 male disciples. Bread and chalice are brushed gently into its frame, suggesting that this is a rendition of the last meal Jesus ate with his friends. While the 11 disciples are uniquely expressive, it is Jesus that stands out…as a redhead! Finally, a Jesus who looked like me! A Jesus to whom I could relate more completely! Jesus… a redhead… imagine that!
Imagine my surprise when a member of our congregation, independent of my noticing the painting, noticed also, purchased and gave it to me with the words, “I’d like to hear a sermon about this!” I present to you evidence #1 that Jesus may have been a redhead… [put painting on altar]
Evidence #2 that Jesus, perhaps, was a redhead: I submit to you today’s gospel reading in which Jesus goes into the temple and throws a royal fit! We all know that redheads are often accused of having short tempers, of being easily angered and hot-headed personalities…so too Jesus in this particular story.
As I read over this familiar story of Jesus angrily turning over the moneychanger tables in the temple—a story I’ve read dozens of times through the years— I couldn’t help but think of the many stereotypic accusations about anger and redheads. For the first time, with the able assistance of this beautiful painting, I began to wonder, was Jesus really a redhead at heart? And if so, what might he teach us about the role and place of anger on the journey of faith?
Following Jesus as we seek to do, and looking at the gospel narratives for other evidence of Jesus’ angry outbursts, we find none. Oh sure, Jesus expressed agitation with the disciples who repeatedly failed to discern his message. He became irritated with the established religious leadership for their consistent failure to follow the spirit of the law. He even showed impatience bordering on disturbance toward the crowds who selfishly followed him only to have their own needs met, or their own values justified, and whose self-serving focus prevented them from seeing the larger kingdom—a kingdom of love and grace and compassion, open to all—a kingdom about which Jesus taught and into which they were being invited.
Yet in all the stories we have of Jesus, this one of him visiting the temple wins, hands down, the contest for intensity of angry reaction. We can surmise that this incident in the temple really happened. We make this assumption based on the fact that the story is found, in some form, in every one of the four gospel accounts, surviving the travails of history and the biases of copy editors who may have wanted to delete it. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the story is placed near the end of Jesus’ ministry, even during that final week which begins with his triumphant and iconoclastic ride into Jerusalem on the back of that donkey. Later in Lent, we will explore how that ride was a direct threat to the political and religious leaders of his day. For now, we can see that in the first three gospels, the very placement of this story of Jesus’ anger aligns him against those in power.
In contrast, John’s gospel author places the story at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus. Why? For the same purpose, no doubt: to introduce Jesus’ unwavering confrontation of the political and religious leaders of his day, to make sure that readers of this gospel understand Jesus’ absolute focus on speaking truth to power.
In the version of the story we read today, we see Jesus at the end of his rope, literally and figuratively. Holding firmly to the end of a whip of cords, Jesus seems to be lashing out in every direction. Crack! There go the coins, flung onto the floor of the temple. Crack! The moneychangers flee for safety. Crack! Jesus yells to those selling doves and sheep and cattle, “Get those things out of here…” Crack! “Stop making God’s house a marketplace…”
Historically, there is little doubt that this incident took place near the end of the ministry of Jesus, during that final week, as his path took him through the streets of Jerusalem, to the olive groves on the city’s outskirts, and wound back and forth again into and out of the very seat of political and religious power that was Jerusalem. Even if the authorities were not out to get Jesus before his foray onto their turf, his redheaded behavior in the temple that day sealed his fate. Before him, loomed the cross.
With the benefit of 2,000 years of reflection, we have the luxury of pondering why Jesus would risk it all there in the temple that day. To ask this is to ask also if there is ever a place for anger in the Christian journey, and the answer, at least from this redhead, is a decided “yes.”
Scholars and preachers, professors and authors agree that Jesus’ anger in the temple was not an isolated or unexpected hissy fit. His anger had been seething for three years or more. Jesus had seen the ravages of the systematic oppression wrought by Rome. He had healed illnesses that deeply wounded those whose sins were blamed for their illness by a religious hierarchy firmly entrenched. In his three or so years as an itinerant teacher and healer, and in the thirty or so years that preceded them, Jesus had seen it all…and it all came to that proverbial head for Jesus as he strode into the temple and allowed his volcanic anger to respond to the injustices of the system. We can almost hear his booming voice amidst the cracks of the whip, “Enough!”
I am reminded of an email that arrived just after the group of Redlands UCC representatives had returned from their trip to Centro Romero on the Mexico/US border two weeks ago. There they had seen the former friendship garden between our two nations bulldozed to make way for the wall. There they had seen poverty made real by our nation’s policies. There they had also heard stories of people determined to clean up their river water, fouled by the systematic disposal of waste from their own country’s industries. Needless to say, it had been an emotional—and an uncomfortably illuminating—trip across the border. The email about it was from Rev. John Walsh, Chaplain at the University of Redlands and a member of our congregation. He wrote, “The US border agents asked me if I had anything to declare as I crossed back over the border into the United States…‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘OUTRAGE!’” John, by the authority vested in me by this painting and through today’s Jesus model, you have just been granted an honorary doctorate in redhead!
Is there a place for anger on the journey of faith? You bet there is. The Rev. Devin McLachlan, Rector of the Episcopal Parish of the Messiah in Newton, Massachusetts, a growing congregation just outside Boston, wrote a few years ago about this passage of scripture in a sermon entitled, “Making a Whip of Cords.” Devin, who gratefully gave permission for me to share his words, preached about the anger of Jesus. He noted that in his own family of origin, anger was not done well. As a child, he would often be frightened by the anger, for it was a predictable portent of violence to follow. In contrast, preached Devin, Jesus’ anger in the temple that day was more than predictable. “The folks in Jesus’ community argued and fought and insulted each other; the gospels are full of insults and snappy retorts. And Jesus was not alone in criticizing the Temple – many Jewish communities in his time felt that the temple was more a ‘den of robbers’ than a house of God, and some Jews boycotted Temple rituals…So, few people would have been surprised at Jesus’ anger. Anger was culturally accepted…no one in Jesus’ time was saddled with a childhood of pictures of Jesus as…blond, blue-eyed [and] always looking up to heaven with a somewhat dopey, passive expression…today, Jesus stands with a whip in his hand, furiously driving animals out of the temple courtyard, overturning tables, scattering coins and doves and worshipers, consumed with a fiery zeal. It’s not the Jesus we normally depict in stained glass windows, plaiting together scraps of rope in order to make a whip.”
Is anger an appropriate companion on the journey of faith, we ask on this Celtic Sunday? Apparently so. Devin continues to notice that this story “…is a key text of justice…a parable of the passionate, prophetic drive to make real God’s call to justice, to respond with fervor against corruption, exploitation, anything that comes between God, anything that favors the rich over the poor, the strong over the weak. But,” he notes with incredible insight, “if you have grown up with violence it is hard to move from the Gospel scene to the message of justice, because it is scary to have Jesus act this way. It isn’t safe.”
Rev. Devin McLachlan is, I believe, correct. Such anger is not safe. Anger is not safe for us if we grew up in families where anger and violence were intertwined…nor is anger safe if we see anger as the call to follow Christ more completely. Devin goes on to tell of a former neighbor of his—Vida Scudder—who was a professor at Wellesley and a life long Episcopalian. Professor Scudder crafted this grace she would offer before meals: “We have food. Others have none. God bless the revolution.” This revolution, of course, is the same revolution in which Jesus cracked his whip of cords. It is the revolution about which we read throughout scripture…a revolution of economics, in which goods and services and checkbook balances are equalized. As I listen to the daily financial reports of our current global situation, I have to wonder if God’s revolution is being born yet again…
Devin McLachlan speaks of God’s revolution as one that “…welcomes anger…[anger] that, through eyes of love and compassion, sees truth, and, with courage, speaks truth to power.” I agree: the anger of Jesus is anger that sees that there are things to be angry about: hunger, violence, poverty, cancer, pink slips, bigotry; that in our towns there are people who must choose every day between rent and food; that every week in our county—more than in any other county in our nation—there are immigrant families who are torn apart by raids forcibly sweeping through their places of employment and private homes, and gathering in their wake, even legal residents and citizens. You see, anger that sees and seethes as did the anger of Jesus, is anger that makes us ultimately call out to God. Like the good Celts of old, we are urged to acknowledge that nothing is outside the realm of God’s interest and God’s action…even our own anger…
On this Celtic Sunday—this beloved day of our church year—when we honor the cycles and rhythms of life, when we give thanks to the Divine for the abundance and diversity of creation through which God is viewed each hour, what would it be like for us to honor the cycles of our own emotional life? What might it be like for us to tie our own metaphoric whip of cords by acknowledging our anger in our prayers? As Devin once again writes, “To tell God—I am angry. I am angry about what I hear on the news; I am angry about what happened at work on Tuesday; I am angry about that guy that cut me off on the [freeway]; I am angry that some people have to choose between rent and food…”
Today, as your pastor and as your fellow-traveler on the journey, I welcome you to my world…a world where anger can be a helpful companion.
