Did you have a bad day son?

Matthew 21:12-16

        Sometimes you'll run across someone who usually is nice and calm, easy going and pleasant who is perhaps a bit testy. You ask them "are you having a bad day?". We all have our moments. Lord knows working for the state I see some really stupid stuff go on. Every once in  a while though either me or one of my colleagues simply get fed up and disgusted with some of the stupid stuff. You can be focused on doing a good job, working for your fellow man and trying to make things better but then perhaps there is a glaring moment of stupidity that intrudes and you lose it. Perhaps most bureaucracies are like that.

        Jesus lost it. It is truly wonderful to see how Jesus reacted. It was not all peaceful like, he was genuinely angry and so much so that he was compelled to overturn the money changers tables. Bravo!

        I saw a video on face book of two opposing groups demonstrating in Oklahoma. On one side of the street was the Westboro Baptist church with their usual virulent hate mongering and placards. On the other side of the street were good Oklahomans telling their brothers from the Westboro Baptist church how wrong, wrong hearted and hateful they are. In between were traffic and the police. Perhaps it was tense but eventually some of those good Oklahomans got fed up and tried to cross the divide with police trying to intervene. Perhaps it was a mob mentality, it's hard to say from the video but those errant Baptists went running (in fear for their lives I suppose). I pray it would not come to that. I hope they simply got the message that many good people were informing them of their errant ways.

       Getting fed up or angry seems normal sometimes. At least we know that Jesus experienced that feeling when he entered holy space that was being defiled. So I would think perhaps there is no sin in getting angry. Jesus showed us many human emotions, crying at the death of friends, heartfelt love and warmth to the children, exasperation when the disciples just didn't 'get it'. What makes strong emotions into sin is going from anger to violence against a fellow human being.  Perhaps those good Oklahomans were on the verge of that, perhaps those Westboro Baptist folks felt their own emotional moment - fear.  Emotions are not bad, they tell us something guttural. We react in a wholly human way and we must learn from that and engage ourselves in evaluating why we reacted and what were we reacting to. Jesus certainly did.

       I can't help but think of the strong drive, emotion if you will, and strength needed for the 'moth' to break it's cocoon and come out as a butterfly. But oh, how beautiful the result when such emotion and strength is channelled. During Lent we are challenged to be more human, to see Jesus' humanity and prepare for new life withing ourselves, a gift of Jesus' embracing humanity himself. He is the template for us for dying and rising that is witnessed in the butterfly.

        Can we use all our strength and emotions for good? 

Then Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer”;
   but you are making it a den of robbers.’

The blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he cured them. But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the amazing things that he did, and heard the children crying out in the temple, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, they became angry and said to him, ‘Do you hear what these are saying?’ Jesus said to them, ‘Yes; have you never read,
“Out of the mouths of infants and nursing babies
   you have prepared praise for yourself”?’