And making a whip of cords, He drove them all...out of the temple. John 2:15

It is difficult to conceive of Jesus as ever being angry. Perhaps this is because we foolishly assume that there is no room for anger in love or in loving relationships. We can more easily accept anger in a person such as St. Paul, who told his constituents at Ephesus to “be angry but do not sin” [Ephesians 4:26]; and yet the degree of anger demonstrated by Jesus within the circumstance of our Gospel lesson may disturb us at times.

Both the humanity and the divinity of the loving Jesus may well have been indicated in the temple incident. We may sincerely question what might be the reaction of Jesus to some of the “temples” we have erected to the glory of God – the Jesus whose concern for the poorest of the poor is far above any multimillion-dollar sanctuary that His more affluent children may raise up and support in His name.

There is time for anger. We ought to be angry about anything that comes between a person and God, about people’s misguided focus upon places in which to worship rather than persons to serve, about questionable activities in God’s house, about poverty and injustice and war, about the self-centeredness of most of us who put our personal comfort and welfare above the dire needs of millions of God’s human creatures that inhabit our planet.

There are times when it may be sinful not to be angry in our kind of world. We need to be aware, however, that God-pleasing anger results in the kind of actions that heal those who hurt, support those who suffer, and bring God’s love to bear upon those who are estranged from God.