Thomas H. Schmid John 2:13-22 Unexpected Emotion The Falls Church Presbyterian Church of Falls Church, Virginia March 15, 2009 The Third Sunday in Lent In Loving Memory of Dr. John D. Moseley Gentle Jesus, meek and mild... What a surprise! Jesus walks into the Temple and clears out the money changers, the people who are selling the birds and sheep for sacrifices, even clears out the animals! Jesus appears to be a man of significant strength and will. He even drove out the cattle and overturned the tables the moneychangers were using to conduct their business. Jesus also appears to be a man of significant emotional strength and feeling. It is hard to imagine Jesus clearing out the Temple in a quiet, even voice. Just as he wept wholeheartedly at the death of his friend Lazarus, don t you think Jesus probably let go on the Temple expedition with energetic anger? I think he did. In a lot of ways, this scene is thought of as uncharacteristic of Jesus. Who would ever imagine Jesus going around overturning tables and telling people to get out of anywhere? Our Jesus just doesn t behave that way! On the other hand, who can imagine Jesus tolerating the desecration of the Temple? Are we to imagine him being so nice that he would walk into the Temple, look around, and say something like, When you fellows finish up the next transaction, would you mind folding your tables, and leading your livestock out of here? We definitely lose something with that scenario. What I think we get in this story is a blast of heart felt emotion. Jesus has walked head on into something that offends him deeply. It touches him on the raw in the most keenly felt part of human existence, and that is how God is treated and respected. Jesus lived among a nation of people who had grown up around the central idea of God. Their entire lore and culture were built around God who had brought their ancestors up out of slavery in Egypt. Everything about their life was intended to honor and respect God. When Jesus comes face to face with disrespect in the holiest of Hebrew places, his response is electric. Jesus expresses incandescent anger. I. As long as I have been preaching, I find it odd that I would not have preached on this passage before. I am certainly very familiar with it. Perhaps I have preached on it and just cannot find it. I ve had a project going over the past couple of years, going through
old sermons from the time I was in seminary and trying to dispose of most of them. There are certain things one s heirs should not be burdened with, and run of the mill sermons are included in that caveat. The stuff from the late 1960s and 1970s was easy to dispose of. One after another, into the trash they went. The congregations of that era must have been very tolerant to have put up with that stuff. Maybe part of their mission was to encourage young preachers. In retrospect I appreciate that now more than I did then. About ten years into it, the sermons began to be what I would call good. Those have been harder to throw away. One day a year or two ago I took five sermons from the 1980s to Starbucks and thought I d go through them and pitch all of them in the course of one large cup of coffee. They were all so good that I brought back four out of the five. Hmmmm, I thought, this is not going to accomplish the purpose of this exercise. I am getting better at it. I m now up to about 1992. Unless I ve got a great new independent idea going, I will almost always go back to see how I have treated a certain passage in the past. Why waste all that work? There are certain thoughts and illustrations that do not have to be reinvented. The sermons are not indexed, but if I am preaching from the lectionary, I can flip back to see what I was doing three, six, nine, or twelve years ago, fifteen, eighteen. I wasn t preaching on the same passages all the time, but I would have been at least some of the time. What I got when I went back to look for John 2:13-22, Jesus cleansing the Temple, was zip, nada, nothing. Maybe there was something I did on this in the years I ve cleaned out. Maybe not. At any rate, I ve made other choices in the last eighteen years, for whatever reason. Who would pass up an opportunity to preach on Psalm 19 if the choir were going to sing, The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God as they did moments ago? I thought about going back to Psalm 19 today for that very reason. However, at the very least I have to ask myself, have I been avoiding Jesus expression of emotion, especially his expression of anger? We think of Jesus the healer, Jesus the teacher, Jesus the preacher, Jesus the man with the parables, Jesus the man with the answers, many of them. I can handle it that Jesus wept in his grief over Lazarus death. Jesus grief legitimizes my own grief in similar situations. But have I avoided the reality that Jesus boiled over in righteous indignation at the disrespect being shown to the house of God? When someone starts overturning tables and making people and animals vacate a public place, everybody must have been in sufficient awe of him to get out of his way. If we, the readers and hearers of the gospel, were not expecting this kind of anger out of Jesus, surely those around him, his followers and his public, were caught off guard by this kind of unexpected emotional outburst from him. We do not read that anyone resisted Jesus in his anger. 2
II. Who knows what anybody is carrying around inside? What is it that triggers the emotions? Love? Affection? Hatred? Joy? Sorrow? Disgust? Alienation? Frustration? Anger? And any number of other emotional responses to any given situation or person or group of people? In the extreme, we are left to ponder what was going on in Alabama and in Germany earlier this week when two men, each with a gun, rode out their anger and frustration on groups of people. The one in Alabama, in particular, seems to have a list of people who had done him wrong, starting with his mother, and he systematically took the life of each in a series of shootings before he took his own life. Gosh, we ve had that kind of thing over and over in the past ten or twelve years, most notably the school shootings at Columbine High School in Denver and more recently the murder of the little Amish girls in Pennsylvania. We can draw psychological diagrams of the murderers, and we can read and discuss alienation and God knows what else, but it s pretty hard to come close to a sympathetic understanding of what was going on in the minds of the perpetrators. Perhaps there have been times when you were surprised at the unexpected emotions that have bubbled up within yourself or someone close to you. Living as most of us do in a polite society and in polite company, we tend to play our emotions pretty close to our chests. How we happen to feel about anything is not necessarily anybody else s business, and a lot of us regard those feelings as the privilege of our own privacy. We have heard the expression, frozen chosen, and while I think that s a little extreme, the expression does at least hint at the way many of us are so guarded about the way we feel. On the other hand, how many of us have been astonished by our own emotions at some memorable moment when all the pieces suddenly fell into place? Surprised by Joy, was C. S. Lewis double entendre, combining his wife s given name with the emotion that was released as he in middle age so wholeheartedly fell in love with her. Or, in the midst of trying to explain the difficulty of a certain situation, you may have been overtaken by tears, tears that you never expected and certainly would not have chosen to shed in the presence of the one to whom you were relating the circumstances. Or laughter, at a time when it seemed out of place. Some of you will remember Frederick Buechner s description of the moment he felt called to faith and perhaps to the ministry, when the distinguished George Buttrick, at the time of the coronation of Elizabeth II, was describing how we crown Jesus king in our hearts, with joy, and Buechner, sitting in the pew, thought, yes, with joy; and with tears, said Buttrick, and Buechner thought, yes, yes, and with tears; and then Buttrick said, and with great laughter. Laughter wasn t in Buttrick s manuscript. Laughter just came to him in the moment. Buechner says, and it was the word laughter, great laughter, that did it. Did what? I m not sure, but whatever it was, it did it for Frederick Buechner. He felt emotional walls tumble down, he saw a whole new path for his life, and he took it. 3
Even though most of us live within certain emotional boundaries, the emotions are powerful feelings, and sometimes take on lives of their own. III. In another galaxy long ago and far away, my dear friend Ted Foote took our confirmation class to visit a large, elegant, old synagogue. The tour guide was an elderly cantor and educator named Moshe Ben Diner, well known for two full generations in our community as a sage of wisdom and a celebrant of joyful living. He showed the children the eternal flame, and the Torah, and all the other fixtures and symbols of Jewish worship. At last he said to the children, What is the holiest thing in the Temple? The children responded with guesses: The Torah? The flame? And when they had run out of guesses, the old man said, The children. The children are the holiest thing in the Temple. You are the holiest thing in the Temple. Now and always. We understand that, like the Temple, this place is just a building. It is set apart for the worship of God, but the greatness of God so far exceeds the little spaces that people make for the worship of God. We can never adequately describe the indescribable or measure the true depth of God. We do try, but what metaphors we can invent are never adequate. We all have our ideas of the sacred. We each have a concept of what is appropriate in the house of God, or anywhere else, appropriate in how we relate to the sacred. Somehow we each have our own concept of what is the holiest thing in the Temple, or in this church, or what is the holiest thing in the far greater Realm of God. Do we think that the children are the most sacred thing in God s creation? Do we think war and peace comprise the most urgent issue? Does the fact that the average winter temperature in Washington, DC is five degrees warmer than it was twenty years ago say anything to us about the sacred nature of God s creation and our responsibility for it? When we see inequality of gender, or race, or sexual orientation, do we have the actual capacity to become angry? When we countenance poverty, abject poverty in spades, and see people who are hungry and homeless and in greater need than they were six months or a year ago, does it touch our sensitivities on the raw? What is it that means so much to us that we experience the unexpected emotional response? What is it that we care enough about that we would actually become angry? Uncharacteristically angry? As we step into the Temple of life and come face to face with whatever is so outrageously out of order with our concept of God, just exactly what does it take to unbutton our souls to let the world know how deeply offended we are when the intentions of God are so roundly ignored? 4
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