“The Lamb and the Tyger”

March 15, 2009

John 2:13-22

In William Blake’s lovely poem, “The Lamb,” he addresses the innocent animal and speaks of Christ:

            Little Lamb, who made thee?

Dost thou know who made thee?

Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee…

He is called by thy name,

For He calls himself a Lamb.

He is meek and he is mild,

He became a little child.

We teach our children about “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” Our Sunday School pictures show a calm Jesus surrounded by children. This is good. The images are comforting. They help us and our children to rest in the compassion of Christ. They show us all a God of love whom we can approach with trusting faith.

Who, then, is this one that we see in this morning’s reading from the Gospel of John? Who is this one grabbing a whip, turning over tables, and driving people out of God’s temple?

We do not always meet “Gentle Jesus” in the Gospels. It is not the meek and mild One who is so often frustrated by his followers and fed up with the crowds of people pressing in on him. It is not the compassionate Jesus who gets upset with good people who should know better, calling them a “brood of vipers.”

Yet this, too, is Jesus, who comes with whip in hand, tipping over tables, raising his voice.

Where is the good news here? What do we do when we come face to face with the angry Jesus?

Someone once described their situation to me this way: “My life feels like a battleground.”

Maybe you know what that means—the tug of opposing desires, the turmoil of daily life, the conflict with other people—often those closest to you. Maybe you’re living through such a time right now.

There are times when everything gets tipped over, when the very foundations of our lives are shaken. It can happen at a personal level when someone dies, or a marriage collapses, or a job ends.

And as we have painfully learned, it can happen at a global level as well. On September 11, 2001 everything was turned over. Six years ago this week, on March 19, 2003 we invaded Iraq and everything was turned over. In some very basic ways, the life of the world and our lives never got back to what they were before those dates.

And now we are moving through—say it with me, you’ve heard it so often—the greatest financial disaster since the Depression.

So what’s going on? We meet “Gentle Jesus” no more often in our own lives than we do in the Gospels. Where is God when everything is tipped over?

Let’s look again at the day long ago when the angry Jesus turned the tables.

John gives us a vivid story: take in the smell of the animals, hear the cries of the people, watch as the cattle are driven out, the coins are scattered, rolling across the floor, and falling.

Then listen as Jesus shouts into the shocked silence: “Take these things out of here!”

Obviously this was something other than Girl Scouts selling cookies at church on a Sunday morning. What’s going on here? What’s the problem?

When we hear a story like this, we must always remember that Jesus was a Jew and observed Jewish ways. He kept the Sabbath. He participated in the religious festivals. His criticisms, his anger were addressed to his own people as one of them.

The Passover was a pilgrimage festival. People would come from great distances to the temple in Jerusalem. These pilgrims would come to make a sacrifice in the temple. Most likely, however, they would not bring a sacrificial animal with them. So they would buy an animal—a cow, a sheep, a bird—at the temple.

All of the buying and selling took place in what was called the Court of the Gentiles—out of the main place of worship. Those who sold the animals were facilitating the proper and acceptable worship of God.

Of course, the pilgrims would usually arrive carrying Greek or Roman coins that bore the likeness of the emperor on them. These could not be used to buy sacrificial animals or pay the temple tax, so money changers were there—again to help pilgrims in their worship of God. Contrary to our popular understanding, the money changers were not greedy people out to make a buck anywhere they could. They were there to facilitate the acceptable worship of God.

This was a system that worked. It was orderly. It was proper.

And along comes Jesus, who throws this whole arrangement into chaos during a significant feast. Who is he to disrupt worship?

The scandal here is not that the anger of Jesus proves that he is human, like you and me. Jesus was no more “meek and mild” than you or me. The shocking thing is the authority that this human being claims for himself.

When Jesus turned over the tables, most people saw a madman.

The disciples looked at the angry Jesus and what did they see?

John doesn’t tell us.

What John does tell us is that after the resurrection, the followers of Jesus remembered what he said. They remembered what he did. They could look back on that chaos, on the turmoil, on the uncertainty and see that God was at work in this man and in this event.

In the middle of all this trouble, Jesus announces: “Destroy this temple and I will raise it up again in three days.”

No one understood what he was talking about.

Some thought he was referring to the great stone building that had taken 46 years to build.

Not even his disciples understood Jesus at the time.

In the coming years they would watch as he healed the sick, fed the hungry, restored the broken, and forgave the sinner. Often Jesus would challenge the common piety of the day that crushed the human spirit and claimed that some are better than others, some more deserving of God’s favor.

Those who watched followed Jesus would come to understand that God’s will for creation is fullness of life. This is the case with our own slow growth in God’s love as well. It takes time to see and understand: in God’s love your pain is met, acknowledged, and healed. This is a love that desires your wholeness even while you are broken. This is a love that seeks the peace of the world, even while we are engulfed in violence.

It was only after Jesus’ own violent death that his followers came to realize that he wasn’t talking about stones that day in the temple. Jesus was speaking of his own body. He spoke that day of resurrection—the power of God overcoming death.

And this is where the story comes back around to meet our own lives.

In the chaos that we so often feel, in the changes that upset us, we can question the presence or the love of God in our lives.

When life does not go as you might hope, do you wonder if God is angry with you?

When the world seems to be spinning a little too fast, do you find yourself asking “Where is God in all of this?”

This story of the angry Jesus is a gospel story—it is good news. This story suggests that when life is disrupted, when the tables are tipped over, the living God is still at work in us and among us. Indeed, it might be that God is the very one doing the tipping. When the very foundations of life are shaking, God is there, speaking even then of resurrection, of new life.

The system of selling animals and exchanging money in the temple was a good one in general. Our lives usually seem good, in general, as well. Jesus, however, was saying and showing that there is something even better. Beyond sacrifice is new life. Beyond worship is an encounter with God. Beyond our safe and secure ways is the adventure of following in the way of Jesus Christ.

When our own good lives are disrupted, we can look for the ways in which God is offering us new possibilities.

I’m not suggesting a cheerful, “look-on-the-bright-side” outlook—by now you know me too well to think that.

Nor am I suggesting a false piety that says the bad things that happen in life are God’s will. They are not. God’s will made known in Jesus is life and life abundant.

But like those disciples, who years later, after the death of Jesus, after Easter, could look back and see the promise of new life in the Temple chaos, so we, too, might come to see that God is our lives, in our congregation, in our world in ways that are not quickly apparent. Following along with the Jesus who is human and suffers and gets angry, we will discover that we are on a path that leads to life.

When Jesus is angry, we see once more that he is God incarnate—as fully human as we are: able both to laugh and to lash out, able to be both kind and furious.

And when we look beyond the anger, we begin to see the God who is with us in all things, at all times.

William Blake included his poem, “The Lamb” in a collection titled The Songs of Innocence. In Blake’s Songs of Experience we find his poem “The Tyger” that asks of this fierce beast, “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”

Christ the lamb is also Christ the tiger. Christ who comforts is also Christ who disrupts. Jesus who welcomes the children is also Jesus who turns over the tables.

In both the lamb and the tiger we glimpse the God who made us and is with us through all the turmoil and joy that we discover as we live.