Grace to you and peace from our loving God, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I really love this text. We get to see a fully human side of Jesus. He is fully in there, in the middle of life and work, getting his hands dirty, taking a stand for what is right.

Do any of you get tired of the Jesus we keep hearing about? You know—the gentle Jesus, meek and mild. Well, I do. I even heard recently about a movement to reclaim a more "manly" Jesus. I'm not sure what that's about, but the idea may be worthwhile in the context of this scripture. The Jesus that is often spoon-fed to Sunday School students—at least the stories I remember about Jesus from my days at First English Lutheran's Sunday School in Richmond, Indiana. That Jesus was too often just plain boring.

I remember my beloved Sunday School teacher, Miriam Erk, reading to us when I was in the early elementary grades. She came to mind as we memorialized her best friend and cousin, Marcella Calvert yesterday. I remember pictures in her Sunday School class of a very gentle man with a beard, and there were or so my memory has it—always birds around, very gentle and happy birds, flying near Jesus, or lighting on his shoulder or outstretched finger. It was much like the depictions I see of St. Francis.

Well, you know, I loved that image for a while. It was comforting and gentle, and loving. But I really began to tire of it after a while. I don't want to be irreligious or blasphemous. I just want to be honest. I got bored of those stories, and I suspect that has something to do with my love for the event in Jesus' life we call the cleansing of the temple.

Too much of Christianity is judged by that "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild" image of who Jesus was and is. Too many of us have swallowed that image whole and unquestioned. Too many of us are placid and uninspired and unresponsive to the injustice that we see around us, and too often the judgments leveled at Christianity have a real basis in fact. We tend toward the comforting side of our Savior and shy away from the take-charge, powerful, active, confrontational side of Jesus. And I suspect many Christians would just as soon not have to deal with this passage about Jesus clearing the temple of the money changers. Many, if I don't miss my guess, wish this story had never made it into the scriptures.

But it's a great one.

As Christians we think of Jesus as the lover of our souls. What are we to make of this picture of an angry and powerful Jesus? How are we to understand this scene? Is the whole idea of what I take to be an angry—at least passionate—and action-oriented Jesus foreign to a loving God?

For many of us the ideas of divine love and divine anger or wrath or even power are incompatible. They simply don't fit together. And this conclusion would be accurate if Jesus' angry act were merely some uncontrollable, irrational outburst of passion. But Jesus' anger or zeal and clearing of the temple may be understood as the reverse side of holy love. This was a blazing fire that sears but purifies. It was not simply a display of temper.

Which is to say, there's a tough side to the love of God. Divine love is not soft indulgence with the sinfulness of human beings, nor is it a sentimental indifference to moral integrity in human affairs or divine-human affairs. Jesus' anger is an expression of divine love.

It's wrong for us to set the anger of Jesus and his love for us over against each other. Divine anger is holy intolerance for those things that are hostile to our being rightly related to God. The Bible doesn't attribute to the God we worship moral flabbiness. Divine love is a consuming fire when it encounters sin and evil. What is it John says of Jesus, having the disciples quote Psalm 69, verse 9? "Zeal for thy house will consume me." Righteous anger is the tough side of love.

We're confronted with this truth in our text. The Temple of God was being desecrated by commercial interests and sell-out priests. It was a place for people to come into right relationship with God, but traders and priests and money-changers were making that difficult by their activities. And so, holy love in the Temple became fiery wrath against everything that blocked people from worshiping God in spirit and in truth.

So, what do we learn from this encounter of Jesus in the Temple? What does the tough side of divine love mean for us?

First, our relationship with God is made possible because of Christ's atoning work which we mark in this season of Lent. Through all of the struggles of his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus Christ was reshaping the divine-human relationship. It included the agony of Calvary to restore an eternal relationship with God. There is no salvation without judgment. We don't experience God's love without also knowing God's deep displeasure with our sinful condition. In the cross, we experience the tough side of God's love as well as the forgiving side. And we're reminded by the cross that forgiveness comes at a cost. Our forgiveness was made possible through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. When we experience God's mercy and God's grace, we need to remember the cost they involved.

Second, the tough side of God's love is important for us in our relationships with others. It's easy for us to turn love into a form of sloppy sentimentalism. When that happens, Christian love has been badly distorted. Often that distortion gets worked out at a practical level when we place justice and love in tension with each other. For Christians, there is no such tension. For Christians, there is a very close relationship between love and justice. That's exactly what was happening in Jesus at the Temple. His all-consuming love for people would not permit him to allow anything to get in the way of proper worship. Righteous anger can only arise when we love others and find that injustice is hurting those we love. Righteous anger is evidence that we are Christian, that we have values. Anger means values have been violated; anger is a sign of values.

In all the circumstances of life, love compels us to be sensitive to injustice and to strive for justice. Love compels us to act, as did Jesus, forthrightly, powerfully, and with conviction for the sake of justice. Indeed, love without justice is no love at all. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper than emotional bosh."

Christians in positions of power, whether they be a parent, college president, or business executive, may claim to be acting in the best interests of their children, faculty and staff, or employees, but they may be the very ones who abuse power and act unjustly. To love is to act justly toward others and to seek justice for others, for we worship a God who is an advocate for all victims of injustice.

Christians these days tend to shy away from power. It has become a dirty word. We've developed the idea in the church and elsewhere that power corrupts. "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." But I say to you, it isn't the powerful act we should shy away from. It is powerlessness. It is powerlessness and passivity, either perceived or real that invite abuse, neglect, violence, and corruption. As long as we are clear about and do not compromise the values of love and justice that motivate our actions, we need not fear corruption.

Third, we learn from Jesus this morning that righteous anger is a fitting Christian response to sin and corruption. As human beings there are things that make us angry. Anger is a normal part of being human; it is not a sin to feel anger.

It's only when our anger is directed solely toward selfish or vengeful ends—it's only when we lose the perspective that justice and Christian values give our anger that we need to step back from it. Then it becomes important for us to deal with it as soon as possible.

Unprocessed anger can be a destructive force within us. Behavioral medicine research has recently demonstrated that simmering anger eventually stresses blood vessels and can lead to high levels of "bad" cholesterol. Anger alone has been determined to be a risk factor for heart disease.

We are reminded this morning that there are times when we become angry because of something that violates God's will for human life. That type of anger isn't motivated by selfish needs, but by our love for God. That kind of anger is a gift, and it is then very important for us to channel our angry feelings into constructive action to accomplish the purposes of God.

And if we don't, then we are guilty of sin. Righteous anger is an expression of our love for God and for the divine mission in the world. It can be one of the greatest motivating forces in our lives for bringing about positive change in this world.

This morning, the gospel is asking all of us, "What really makes you angry?" "What injustices have you experienced in your lives, and where does thinking about that injustice lead you to act on behalf of others?" Jesus is bringing us an incredibly powerful challenge this morning. He walked into his father's house and found people doing things with it that shouldn't be done there. He was angry, and he acted constructively on that anger.

People all around us are now doing things in God's house that they should not do. They and we pollute God's water supply and air supply and food supply. We make war against one another in places created by God for peace and justice. We allow disproportionate educational funding that is based on prejudice and school district rather than on righteousness and the inherent worth of every child.

So, what is it that makes you mad this morning? Look with the eyes of Jesus on that anger and pain. Don't feel the need to turn away from it. Rather, turn that anger and zeal into a righteous motivation for action on behalf of justice and love and the kingdom of God.

May God help us all as we seek to learn from the tough side of divine love to appreciate the cross of Christ, to value love with justice, and—with Jesus—to use righteous anger and zeal for God's purposes. Amen.

May the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep our hearts and minds through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord unto eternal life. Amen.