The Third Sunday of Lent, 7 March 2021 - online
The cartoonist Michael Leunig notices it: that in this day and age it seems like ‘Everyone is offended. Everyone is irritable, disagreeable, cranky and nervous. Everybody is jumping at shadows, jumping at conclusions. Everyone is in a bad mood.’
Does this ring true to you? Is it something you notice in yourself? That simmering dislike of the person holding up the queue in the shop chatting, while you wait with decreasing patience wondering if you’ll ever get your turn. The road rage - both with slow ones in front of you and people in too much of a hurry annoyingly up close behind. Shouting at the TV news in reaction to some opinion you’ve grown to dislike being parroted again.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about our society’s poor mental health - the negative effects of the pandemic with its consequent lockdowns and social isolation. These experiences of the past year have certainly damaged us; we’re feeling the cumulative effects of the loss of loved ones, the loss or reduction of work and income, the strains of being stuck at home for prolonged periods, the removal of our freedom to travel (although we mustn’t forget the countless acts of individual and communal neighbourly actions which have nurtured strong social bonds and protected people against stress during this crisis). [1]
This talk about our society’s poor mental health contains contradictions. Our anger, our distress, our depression, is usually depicted as an individual problem - the focus is on what each person needs to do (on their own) to practice ’self-care’. It makes you think that you are the problem which only you can fix. This is rooted in the idea that it’s our malfunctioning neurochemistry or our dysfunctional family circumstances which cause our chronic health conditions, and which should be treated by some combination of therapy and medication. What this ignores is those circumstances ‘outside’ the individual’s control which impact on us physically and on our state of heart and mind. In this point of view, the cause of our mental health problems is not ‘inside’ us, it’s in the world around us, in society and the way it’s organised. As food poverty increases there will be more stressed families. So the ‘solution’ depends on more than counselling services and Prozac; it must also involve a combined effort to address the structural problems which trouble us. [2]
We will get angry - even Jesus got angry. It’s not the healthiest emotion, it can be destructive. Yes, it can be a safety-valve, a helpful release of pent-up pain, but it can cause so much harm. If we can understand it, then we may find redemption in our anger; if we can begin to address what causes it then we’re on the path to making positive change - in ourselves, and in the world.
We may find the image of an angry Jesus unsettling; for it seems so out of character and so removed from the way we expect him to be: gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Yet if we pay close attention to his life story we might see this coming - for what drives his angry outburst is his instinct to protect what he loves: The Temple. As John wrote, it was ‘zeal for God’s house that consumed him’. [3]
He was angry protecting what he loved - for he was a child of The Temple, taken there by his parents as a babe in arms to receive blessings from the elders Simeon and Anna. His love for The Temple grew through his childhood - The Temple as the place where he would learn about the ways of God and his laws, his love for this learning witnessed on that family trip to Jerusalem when he stayed behind to sit at the feet of The Temple teachers.
As he loved spending time at The Temple, Jesus saw everything that happened there. We know he saw the pious scribes walking around in flowing robes, taking the most important seats and enjoying being honoured in The Temple courts. He saw the show they made of giving their offerings out of their wealth, and he observed how the Temple tax system enriched them whilst taking the last pennies from poor widows. We hear a flash of the angry Jesus when he said, ‘Those devouring the homes of the widows and praying at great length for show, these shall receive condemnation in greater abundance.’ [4]
If you love something so good - like the house of God; if it carries deep value to you and to your people - then you’ll want it to flourish in the ways for which it was intended. But if you see it losing its way, its leaders turning a blind eye to the injustices from which they benefit - then you might get angry. But it’s out of love, from the instinct to protect what’s being lost, that this anger rises within you. The Temple is good; The Temple is broken; can The Temple be redeemed? - this is the question that lies behind Jesus’ table-turning act of aggression that day. [5]
Jesus’ instinct was that The Temple could be redeemed - although it would be dismantled completely before it could be restored. In his anger and his sadness at the corruption at the heart of God’s Holy Place he had realised that the present Temple system had run its course; it was morally exhausted. He began teaching his disciples that The Temple would be destroyed - a prophecy which came true in the year 70AD, the decisive event of the First Jewish–Roman War [6] - and that in its place he would be the new Temple - he would be the one to whom people would come to find forgiveness, to find redemption, to find God, to find hope. He began speaking of The Temple of his body: and of his sacrifice to end all sacrifices.
There is plenty of anger being directed at the Church of England today. For if you love being in the house of God then you’ll be understandably upset finding your church doors locked; if you are sustained by weekly worship and the act of Holy Communion then your being denied it will cause pain and even outrage. I’m angry at the Church in the wake of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse which shows how the institution has consistently sought to protect its own, for the sake of its reputation, at the expense of those suffering abuse. [7] In her astonishingly frank memoir of growing up in a clergy family, Patricia Lockwood writes of the feeling of being inside the “we” which is the Church with all its shameful secrets. She writes: “A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth… The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.” [8]
Yet what begins in anger can develop into hope. In an interview this week the Archbishop of York said: “We constantly need to reset our compass, which isn’t quite the same thing as losing it. We’ve learned to accommodate things that we know are wrong, which it would be possible to do something about.” [9]
The force of moral outrage which drove Jesus to expel the moneychangers from The Temple has propelled many other protests for just causes over the centuries. Sometimes our anger just needs healing and forgiveness. At other times our anger can fuel hope; our anger can bring about redemption.
Notes
This began as a rewrite of Turning the tables on the taxman (my Ken Dodd sermon) preached in Somerset, 2018 and in Devon, 2012, but which then took on its own particularly 2021 turn.
[1] Richard Bentall, Has the pandemic really caused a 'tsunami' of mental health problems? Guardian, 9 February 2021.
[2] Colette Shade, Mental Health Is a Political Problem. Tribune, 25 February 2021.
[3] John 2.17 quoting Psalm 69.10. “Anger is the force that protects that which is loved.” Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, quoted in Suzanne Ross, Faith, Beliefs, & Revolutionary Love: An Excerpt from Brian McLaren’s Book, “Faith After Doubt”, RavenReview, Raven Foundation, 22 February 2021. “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, Look upon a little child”: a hymn by Charles Wesley.
[4] Mark 12.40 (using the wording in David Bentley Hart, The New Testament: A Translation).
[5] “The Powers are good. The Powers are fallen. The Powers must be redeemed.” Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination. p.3
[6] Wikipedia: Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE).
[7] Church of England website, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
[8] Patricia Lockwood, Priestdaddy: A Memoir. Chapter 6.
[9] Harriet Sherwood, Britain must reset its compass, from housing to wages, says archbishop of York. Observer, 28 February 2021.
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