An Angry Christ

Can you imagine an angry Christ? We are told that the Gospel portrait of Jesus is that of a joyful and serene man. He has almost complete possession of Himself, his feelings and passions. But this Sunday's Gospel gives a another image of Jesus. It shows his other side, as it were, Jesus explicitly getting angry and being carried away by his anger that he overthrows the tables and whips the moneychangers and vendors away from the Temple.

Rather than subjecting Him to psycho-analysis, it's more beneficial to ask what triggered the anger of Jesus. The text says that the businessmen has turned the temple into a marketplace. In another Gospel, it says, the temple has been turned into a den of thieves. A Scripture scholar notes that whatr made Jesus terribly angry is that the place where the businessmen set up their tables and displayed their merchandise is the area where the poor may worship, thus depriving them of their place in the temple, a place which is actually already somewhere in the peripheries of the temple.

This connects to the second reading that says: "If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy." An affront, a deprivation, desecration of the poor, who are also temples of God, and therefore holy, will certainly invite the anger, nay, the wrath of God. We hope we don't get driven out by an angry Christ. Let's make space for the poor, not only in our places of worship, but in every area of our life.