Righteous anger

 Okay.

We know that Jesus is without sin. That's sort of a definite part of the Christian faith, Christ as a perfect, sinless man, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. If you don't think that Jesus is perfect, that he was sinful in some key way and that his perfection isn't real or important, then skip ahead a few paragraphs, because certain things in the Christian faith remain true whether you believe in them or not.

If Jesus is sinless, which we believe that he is, then what he does is sinless by definition. That is, he can't do anything sinful, since it would be mutually exclusive with his perfection. If he's sinless then he can't commit any sins by definition. Now that we've covered that, we can get into his outrage in the temple. You need to understand that when he is clearing people, sellers, animals out of the temple, he's not doing it calmly and placidly. He's angry. Zeal for the house of the Lord consumes him. It's a matter of him looking at injustice, looking at people standing between humanity and God through exploitation and profit seeking, and did something about it. 

Now, I'd like to offer the following hot take: It was good for Jesus to clear the temple. I know, I said that something Jesus did was good, wow, very brave. But hold on a moment, it's worth discussing that you don't have to make any apologies for Jesus clearing the temple. If anyone says something like 'Jesus was angry and threw people out of the temple by driving them out with whips' your response as a Christian should simply be 'Yes.' 

Yes, Jesus did clear the Temple. Yes it was necessary, and beyond that, yes, it was good. Don't make excuses for it, and don't minimize it. And don't minimize the anger of Christ either. This is one of a very few parts of scripture in which Jesus shows and displays anger, and we should, as the kids say, let him cook.  

If you saw the movie 'Inside out' from Disney, which was a while ago, the essential message was that all the core emotions that you have are good and good for you, they just have to be used correctly. Anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, they're all good in the right way, and place. They're all helpful, and none of them are 'bad'. This is true in the case of Christ too. His anger isn't misplaced here, it's a good thing. He is rightly angry at the division between God and humanity, and sought to address that injustice by driving out everything that would stand between people and God. 

But then what?

That's the big question that lurks at the base of it all, isn't it? The big question that lurks behind everything is the question of what does Jesus do after he's done driving everyone out? He doesn't just cast them all out with whips, once he's done that, he stays in the temple to teach. And that's a real difference right there. This is what law and gospel looks like in practice. If there is sin, it has to be addressed and corrected. This is the law part, and this should be the best reminder to anyone that it's not as though old testament God is mean, and new testament God is nice. In the New Testament, there is still law. God, in the form of Christ, is present, and rightly angry. He wants to see the behavior stopped, and stopped hard. But he doesn't replace that bad behavior with nothing though. He replaces it with gospel, which is the point. 

Jesus sits down in the temple and teaches from that point on, you know. He teaches about grace, the Gospel, forgiveness and life. The purpose of anger isn't anger for its own sake, rather the anger is to remove what divides, and to replace it with reconciliation and forgiveness. The problem these days is that you're told to just keep everything under wraps, to not have discussions of any topic that matters, and to let people drift away if holding the relationship together becomes too difficult or taxing. But anger isn't a sin, you know. It's not inherently sinful. But it should be used for a good and fruitful purpose. That is, your anger should be used to move through sinful behavior, and towards reconciliation. Reconciliation that would not be possible without the anger.

Do you think for one moment that if Jesus had been passive in the face of the commerce in the Temple that they would have stopped? His anger was right and justified, and served to put grace back in the temple where there had been only works before. Properly considered the anger is the surgeon's scalpel, the dental drill, the thing that removes the death and rot so that healing can happen. Your anger hopefully is the same. Anger isn't a sin, but it is supposed to drive forgiveness, grace and reconciliation. You're supposed to be angry but not sin, to be impelled to make things right, to insist that forgiveness is there, even though sins have to be repented of. As Christians, you're not supposed to ignore injustice, nor to dismiss it, or claim that it doesn't matter. You're supposed to deal with these things head on, and to be angry where anger is required. But that anger must lead to repentance, and that repentance must come with forgiveness. This is a Christian absolute. And if that's the case, you're not going to be as tied up in knots about whether anger is or is not sinful, but to ask what the purpose of that anger is, and to ensure that it moves into a good direction.