Readings – 1 Corinthians 1:18-25, John 2: 13-22
May I speak in the name of God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
I love Giotto’s painting of the scene in the Temple in Jerusalem that forms the centrepiece of today’s Gospel. It has a raw edge that defies any domestication of Christ; Jesus, a cold fury on his face, is whirling the whip above his head, but he looks more than anything like he’s about to punch the moneychanger nearest him in the face.
The reception of this story by the Church in the present moment fascinates me. The Giotto painting is the source of countless memes, little social media slogans, in the churchy parts of Facebook and Twitter, where people say that Jesus angrily whipping the money changers out of the Temple is the Jesus they emulate. The funny thing is the same people find the idea of the wrath of God absolutely taboo, as I suspect most of us do, dismissing it as primitive and theologically dubious.
We don’t like the idea of God’s wrath in the abstract, but we like the angry Jesus when his fury is directed at people we disapprove of. After all, we’re not the sort of people who would set up a stall in the cloisters at Salisbury Cathedral to sell animals for sacrifice and exploit continental tourists by offering them a terrible exchange rate for their Euros. It’s OK for God to be angry at people like that, the sort of people who make us feel a bit smug and superior, but we’re quite sure God would never be angry at us.
We only need to spell that approach out to realise how ludicrous it is, a cheap co-option of God as a sort of magic totem who is always on our side. Please God, we’re more mature and self-aware than that, open to understanding that the Jesus who judges the moneychangers has not only the right, but the duty, to judge us. We must know that the God who knows every hair on our head also knows the darkness that rests in each of our souls. We also know that any representation of a human being without shadow isn’t a human being at all but a cartoon, a caricature, and that anyone claiming to be such a flawless being is a liar. If Jesus Christ, who is God, is correct to be angry at the moneychangers in the Temple, then He must also at times be correct to be angry at us.
The season of Lent calls us into that uncomfortable reality, the reality that we all sin; that we have all taken the gifts God has given us and misused them; that we all from time to time want to make other people responsible for the evils of the world and the problems of our own lives, the better to deceive ourselves that we are never wrong and never responsible for the things that go wrong.
Embracing the idea that there are times when God might reasonably be angry at us is an uncomfortable reality but also a healing one. “Healing?”, I hear you ask. Yes, very much so, for two principal reasons. Firstly, it liberates us from being prisoner to the so-called wisdom of a society that seems to demand that we’re always perfect, and is ready to pounce on any mistake we make. This is the Internet driven world of the 2020s that generates those stupid memes where people say they want to be like the angry Jesus of this Sunday’s Gospel reading. A world that glorifies self-righteous anger, where people delight in writing vicious online reviews of any company whose staff members ever slip up or hound into distraction people who write something stupid on Twitter. That game has no winners, for in a world where everyone is expected to be perfect, nobody can ever be at peace.
Secondly, embracing the reality of our own sinfulness liberates us not only from the false standards of the world around us, but from our own unreasonable demands of ourselves. Acknowledging our sins and confessing them before almighty God isn’t something we should do in the delusion that we’ll suddenly be perfect afterwards. Instead, confessing our sins to God should allow us to discover that his love for us is constant, not something that we earn by being “good”. In allowing God to love us in our sins, we are enabled to love ourselves just as we are.
Liberating ourselves from the delusion that we are particularly good people allows God to heal us from our narcissistic desire to police other people’s souls; when we admit that we ourselves stand reasonably under judgement, we are liberated from the need to stand in judgement of others, with all the toxic self-righteousness that generates.
That might seem to leave us with the seeming conundrum of how a loving God could ever be angry, but which of us has never been angry with the people we love the most when they seem determined to hurt themselves and others?
In discovering that God’s love for us is constant even when we don’t deserve it, our desire to do good ceases to become a game we play to avoid the judgement of our neighbours or to escape the vengeance of God, but something we do in loving response of God’s love for us.
Keeping a good Lent, where we acknowledge our own failings and come to God full of sorrow for them, is a bit like a visit to the dentist – the anticipation of it is awful, the reality often quite uncomfortable, but afterwards we feel a lot better for it. Some of the muck that has been building up around our hearts and minds has been cleared away by the great physician of the soul.
Here too is at least part of the message about the Cross that our reading from St Paul speaks of this morning. The world looks at a Church that is deeply flawed and which has often failed and deems it to be a lie: surely if the Christian faith were true, it is often proposed, then the Church would be full of miracles and wisdom, and not the often pedestrian and sometimes frankly grubby institution that it too often is. But in that, it keeps good company with the apostles who fled from Christ on the Cross, but then in moments of clarity that often came long afterwards, made some sense of what Christ’s life, death, and Resurrection had been about, a new way of understanding the world that shattered naive expectations of fixing the world through wielding power or being very clever, and instead opened the way to loving life in all its flaws and frustrations.
Lent is a time to abandon the world’s demand that we either demonstrate ourselves to be wise and powerful or else we are worthless; a time also to abandon the temptation to demand of ourselves that we are perfect and its inevitable side-effect, the corrosive self-hatred that results when we inevitably fail to live up to that unrealistic self-image. Come to your brother Jesus Christ exactly as you are, open up yourself entirely to him, even the bits you like to hide from yourself, the bits that make you angry at yourself, and allow Him to love you just as you are. Such self-honesty can be something of a crucifying experience, but it is through that that God leads us on to the Resurrection that lies at the conclusion of every Lent.
Now to the only wise God our saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.
