Thinking about the Cleansing of the Temple as a jealous rage refocuses our attention not on Jesus’ righteous anger but on God’s jealous love.
Vicar Lauren Mildahl
The Third Sunday in Lent, year B
Texts: Exodus 20:1-17, 1 Corinthians 18-25, John 2:13-22
God’s beloved, grace to you and peace in the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A lot of people really like “Angry Jesus.”
I’ve noticed especially among my fellow seminarians–we love this Jesus, whip in hand, flipping the tables of stagnant religious institutions; we love imagining him breaking down oppressive systems and driving out those who benefit from them and ushering in justice for all; we are inspired by him, bursting onto the scene at the beginning of his ministry (at least in John’s version) speaking passionate and prophetic truth to power. Maybe it’s because we think we can diagnose everything that’s wrong in the world and in our churches and we imagine that this will be the kind of thing we’ll do when we become pastors and leaders. “Give us a whip,” we think, “Give us a whip like Jesus and we’ll clean things up around here.”
And I think there is a true impulse there.
I do think that standing on the side of justice requires some anger. There is a truth to this anger – when we recognize that something has gone awry, and we cannot stay silent. And anger has a purpose–when something is wrong, anger can supply the energy necessary to make the changes that need to happen. Some tables do need to be flipped.
But, at other times I am very uncomfortable with this image. “Angry Jesus” can become a convenient figure to hide behind, and I’m uncomfortable with the way that even well-intentioned activists and allies can respond to injustice with blind anger, not ready to listen and learn, but only eager to fix everything immediately or burn it all down. It is easy to whip ourselves into a frenzy – and feel righteous doing it – until our anger creates more victims.
So, I am a bit wary of this story.
Especially since it seems like such an outlier in Jesus’ ministry. Jesus did not make a habit of brandishing whips and turning tables, he was much more likely to heal and feed and teach, even his enemies. And how could Jesus, whose own experience of being whipped we will soon hear about on Good Friday, respond in this encounter, even in righteous anger, with violence? What happened to God’s love?
But, maybe, in a way, this story is about love. Love has many faces. Sometimes it is sweet and tender. And sometimes it is impassioned and intense.
And sometimes, love is jealous.
“Jealous” is the adjective God uses in our reading from Exodus, when God commands the Israelites not to worship any other gods: “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” And since I was a kid, this line has always confused me. Jealousy is bad, isn’t it? It seems like basically the same thing as envy or coveting – which the last commandment tells us not to do! Then why would God admit to being jealous?
This must be something different. Not a sinful kind of jealousy, but a jealousy that’s actually hard to imagine. A jealousy without possessiveness or resentment, a jealousy that is entirely fierce devotion. It is jealousy that desires the reciprocal devotion of the beloved, but which is completely entwined in a passionate intensity to protect and provide for the beloved what is best for the beloved. An incredibly zealous love.
God’s jealous love is what prompts God to remind the children of Israel of all that God had done for them: “For I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery!” As if God were saying “This is how much I love you! These are the lengths I have gone for you. And all I want is for you to let love grow. To love me back and to love one another so that you can have what is best for you: abundant life. I am jealous for you.”
But even if God’s jealousy is not a sinful kind of jealousy, it is still not a pleasant experience.
And it strikes me like a weakness. God’s jealousy is a love that wants so badly to be loved back but will also fiercely guard the freedom of the beloved. Because love without freedom isn’t love at all. So the God of power and glory and wisdom and honor and to whom belongs everything in heaven and on earth and under the earth doesn’t exercise that power to force us to love in return. We have a choice. And God chooses to open God’s self to the ache of jealousy and the pain of unrequited love. God chooses weakness, chooses vulnerability, chooses jealousy – which seems utterly foolish for the creator of the universe.
But the apostle Paul reminds us: “God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.”
God’s foolishness is love. God’s weakness is us.
God’s jealous love for us is what leads Jesus all the way to the cross. Embracing the ultimate weakness and humiliation for our sake and for the sake of what can be built and created and grown and repaired through the foolishness and weakness of love.
And so the scene in the temple takes on a different meaning if we think of it not as righteous anger prompted by injustice, but instead as a kind of jealous rage.
Because it wasn’t the Romans that Jesus drove away. It wasn’t the empire built on violence, who were exploiting and oppressing Jesus’ people. There was plenty of justice to proclaim among them. But it was God’s own people, the ones who had come to God’s own house, the ones who had let their love for what was on their tables turn their hearts from God.
When seen as a jealous rage, all this business with the whip and the flipping tables — that wasn’t a punishment or a rejection, that was love, jealously intervening on behalf of the beloved.
As if Jesus were saying: “Get rid of those tables! Forget about all that stuff – it won’t love you back. I freed you from Egypt and I am freeing you now from the system you are trapped in. I’ll crack this whip if I have to, to remind you that you don’t need to live like this, devoted to these fleeting things and putting up tables as barriers between one another. Come back to me! Come back to each other!”
Jesus is pleading with them with a passionate jealousy, begging them to step into the abundant life of divine love.
Inviting them to come back to the world imagined by the Ten Commandments. A world where they take care of each other, respect each other, where thousands of generations are cherished and beloved and blessed. A world where they love God back and they love the world that God loves.
And this invitation is for you too.
This Lenten season of confession is an invitation to examine our tables and everything we have put on them, everything we love that cannot love us back, everything we use to separate ourselves from each other, everything that the world says is wisdom and strength–and invite the Holy Spirit to knock our tables over once again!
Then we have a glorious chance to put those tables up again – but this time to fill them with weakness and foolishness, with love and care for one another. This is our chance to respond to Jesus’ jealous rage with a jealous intensity of our own, loving our creator – a God who is able to be loved, who wants to be loved, who chooses weakness and foolishness. And to love each other just as jealously.
There is a place for righteous anger. But there is also a danger that if we spend all of our time and energy turning over tables, we’ll never get around to sharing the feast of abundant life around the bigger and better table that God jealousy wants for us.
In the name of the Father, and of the ☩ Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
