In the temple he
found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and the money changers seated at
their tables. Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out… [John 2:14-15]
A besetting
sin of the church and of most of us in it at some time is what we can call the
domestication of God, which is simply the making of idols. And so in its extremes God may come to bear
an uncanny resemblance to a British Tory, or a United States Republican, or to
dear old Uncle Algernon, kind and gentle and mercifully remote. Jesus turns out as portrayed in those
Victorian coloured posters which once papered the walls of Sunday schools,
walking through flowery fields in the sunshine, blessing children and little
lambs, sitting on a rock teaching with uplifting words. Even pictures of the crucifixion, which could
only have been a hideous, filthy and bloody event, seem somehow sanitised. And so
we end up with a sort of benign idolatry, worshipping a God we create, to whom
we make requests. Of course that is in
some respects a caricature... but it is not for nothing that Jewish faith
insisted that you cannot see or image God, and the Second Commandment forbade
idolatry utterly. Jesus, writes St Paul,
is the icon of God. But I do not recall
Jesus portrayed on the Sunday school wall, flailing a whip, tipping up the
tables of the money-changers and scattering it all across the ground, chasing
the animals out of the sacred precincts and opening the cages of doves.
You would
have to be very angry to do that. I hate
to think what the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce had to say about it – they
would have been angry too. The actual
traders, dealers in currency, sellers of sacrificial animals, would scarcely
have been amused. The temple officials,
the junior priests charged to see that it all happened as it should and that
the temple got its share of the proceeds, would have had to face their
superiors who would have been incandescent.
Whose anger was right?
Jesus did it
moreover with a whip in his hand. I
remember back in student days long ago, one of my colleagues who later became distinguished
saying, “Perhaps it was just a very little whip…” He was already instinctively domesticating
and sanitising and constructing idols.
Jesus was in
high indignation. My Father’s house… He had
just come to Jerusalem. This was the
scene he saw in the temple. Ordinary
folk were being shut out by religious rules and by queues and protocols that
favoured privilege, shut out by clamour, by commercial exploitation and
rip-off, by a religious system more geared to its own survival than to caring
for widows and orphans… It was the
incessant din of idolatry, shutting out true devotion and truth.
The silence
and stillness we practise are the obverse of all that. We are laying our idols aside, so far as we
can. And so far as we can’t, we are
helped by the Spirit of Jesus. Anger
too… I sometimes think that anger might
be the last to go. I want to retain
anger, so long as I see people beheaded by religious fanatics, maimed and starved
in the desert by warfare, kidnapped, raped and blown up… Jesus had times when searing anger was
appropriate, with a whip. I carry that
too into the silence. It turns out to be
something that doesn’t necessarily need healing at this time.
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