In college, I had a choir director who was very inspirational to me. He was an interesting man, coming in and fighting the expectations and loss of the previous director, while he himself was very different. He was passionate, and unapologetically emotional, and that is what made the music he made so brilliant.
Like any teacher, he would get frustrated with us sometimes. Some days we would come into practice unprepared, distracted, or just feeling off. Sometimes he would notice this and address it. A quote he said several times that stuck with me was on days he got angry. He would say “The only time I am angry with you is when I know you can do something well, and you are choosing not to live up to your potential”. This is an extremely fatherly thing to say. My dad would say something similar, but slightly more juvenile when I was growing up. He made it clear the only times I would be grounded are when I knew something was wrong, and I did it anyway.
This fatherly anger is the emotional state of Jesus in John 2:13-25. Upon entering Jerusalem for Passover, He sees the temple being used for profit rather than worship. He knows the people know how to honor God, and know the day they are celebrating, and because they are choosing to defile it, He becomes righteously angry. In an outrage, He makes a whip, chases the merchants out of the temple and flips their tables over. You can almost hear Him saying under His breath, “I know you know better than this”. The verse that frames this context if John 2:17, when the disciples realize what was written about Jesus in the prophets, “Passion for your house consumes me”.
Many people look at this passage as wildly out of character for Jesus, but that is because we only see the action of wrath, and not the love that is fueling it. The difference between this act and the modern examples of hate crime and terrorist attacks we see is that today, many times the people who are being attacked are doing nothing wrong other than existing or practicing a different lifestyle, and the people who attack them are often outsiders. Here, Jesus is a Jew, attacking practices within the Jewish temple. He is not attacking them for merely existing differently than Him, but He does this because He knows that they know what they are doing is exploiting the people, the city, and the temple. The people in the temple should not have been surprised, and they would have felt deeply convicted of their wrongs. Of course, as a response, they launch an attack on Jesus because they are unwilling to confront their own sin, and prefer the structure of social exploitation they have set up under the guise of religion.
So in the face of this willful disobedience to God, what Jesus does is the most loving thing He could do. Like a father grounding a child for intentionally breaking the rules, or a choir director frustrated at his students choosing not to live to their full potential, Jesus gets righteously angry, field from a place of deep passion and love. He wants to see His people do better. He wants to see them choose righteousness, even when time and time again they choose disobedience and deceit. God’s wrath is not incongruent with His love. In fact, His love is what fuels His wrath. He wants to see His children choose love and compassion over greed and selfishness, and sometimes watching your children go too far down the path is just too much to bear, and the only option is radical intervention.
It is because of Jesus’ “passion for his house” that we sometimes learn lessons the hard way. It is because of God’s deep love for us that we are not always going to be happy and comfortable. He wants us to learn to reflect His love in the world, to obey Him, and to deal with others honestly and compassionately, and sometimes we need a slap on the wrists to remember the path we are called to walk in. That doesn’t mean God doesn’t love us, but in fact proves the depth of His love to want to give us correction and guidance.
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