Comments on John 6:24-35 and Ephesians 4:1-16 for Sunday August 2

Sometimes I wonder whether we can begin to understand this passage unless we are hungry. It’s so easy for those of us, who know where our next meal is coming from, to judge this crowd’s inability to understand the spiritual implications of the feeding of the 5,000. We say, patronizingly, “Of course, these people whom Jesus had fed the day before came back again looking for a free meal and they were put off because Jesus was trying to explain that they didn’t live by bread alone, but by the Word that comes from God.”

Methinks we spiritualize too much.

I think we should take seriously John Crossan’s contention that if the gospel is good news for the poor, than, at the very least, it is about bread.  If we take seriously the Ephesians’ emphasis on unity in Jesus Christ, then the communion table becomes not just a symbol of Christ’s presence, but a foretaste of that feast where everyone in the world has a place at the table and everyone is fed. It’s something we “see” just as clearly as the crowd saw the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 and yet we, like them, do not really believe.

A boy put his meager resources into the hands of Jesus and somehow it was enough. The Sign that Jesus talks about is the same Sign that we experience in those moments of unity when people come together and take care of each other.

There are moments people remember as miracles, of a sort:  the evening the violent thunderstorm blew down the street knocking out the electricity. Neighbors introduced themselves to each other as they moved tree limbs out of the road and patched damaged houses as best they could; the funeral that brought the estranged members of a family together and for a day or two the things that divided them didn’t seem nearly as big as the grief that united them. Common need, common effort, common humanity leads to a kind of communion that we only wish we could experience once in awhile at church.

Over and over again, people in these circumstances ask, “why can’t we always be like this? Indeed during those few horrible days in mid-September 2001 some people ventured that everything had changed. Republicans and Democrats sang together on the Capitol steps. Liberals hung out American flags and conservatives volunteered for community service. Communities responded to acts of hatred toward Moslems by forming protective rings around mosques.

Aid was distributed to those most directly affected by the destruction of the twin towers without regard to differences between CEO’s and janitors. When people come together in genuine community, the maldistribution of bread is no longer a problem.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that is no longer afraid of itself; a world that is not fragmented, but centered in a common humanity or the Common Human Being – the One we all know and love; whose face we see in the face of our brother or our sister.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that no longer is afraid of tomorrow –  that day when there will be no bread – that day, like the others we worry and worry about, never comes if we break bread together on our knees.

“Give us this bread always” is a prayer for a world that is no longer afraid of gods who makes distinctions based on creeds and rituals, but trusts in the God who gives gifts to us, not for our personal enrichment, but for the building up of the organic unity of humanity that Ephesians calls the Body of Christ.

We misunderstand this prayer if we think that once it is answered there is no longer any reason to pray, because the magic breadbox will supply our every need. We only truly pray this prayer if we pray it as Jesus taught us to say: “Give us this day, our daily bread”. It is in the constant renewal of our dependence upon God and in the constant renewal of community so imperfectly effected by the coming together of the Church around the Table – but effected none-th

The first reading this week tells us about David becoming King of Israel. We see the leaders of
Israel’s 12 tribes coming to David. These are proud and independent men. The warlords and tribal leaders of Afghanistan probably are the closest thing we have in this world to these tribal chieftains of Reuben, Zebulon, Naphtali and all the other tribes; men with hard eyes and strong arms and calculating minds. They are not men who are inclined to bow to anyone else. They are not men who give up their authority or their independence easily. Yet they are here today to tell David that they want him to be their king.

How did David become king?

He did not do it in any conventional way.

He was not born a king. He was born in Bethlehem, the last of a big family of boys. In a culture in which the first son inherited twice as much as the second, the best the kid at the end of a line of seven or eight could hope for was to work for one of his older brothers someday as a servant. So David was not born a king – quite the opposite. Neither was that other child born in Bethlehem 10 centuries later.

The other way men become kings is they conquer their subjects. From Genghis Khan to Napoleon, people of modest birth have risen to the heights because of their ability to conquer. David was certainly an uncommonly successful military leader, but these chieftains do not come to him because they have been beaten in battle. That is what is so remarkable about this moment. These tribal warlords are voluntarily surrendering their absolute power to David.

Why?

The Bible tells us that these chieftains say, “You are bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.”

This means they could trust David to understand them. He was one of them. It also meant that David’s fellow feeling for his people gave him a finely tuned sense of justice. We know that David cared about the little guy. Before he became king, he was kind of a Robin Hood figure operating on the edges of Israel. He helped the Israelites capture iron smelting furnaces from the Philistines and gave the Israelites the same advantages both in swords and plowshares that the Philistines had. He also made sure the poor were taken care of, even if he had to “persuade” the rich to share their bounty.

One of the most important affirmations we make about Jesus is that he is “bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh.”

David’s concern for the little guy was part of his appeal. Like David, Jesus is Robin Hood. Jesus robs from the rich and gives to the poor during the offering. And that is not the only way He turns the world upside down. So, be careful about pledging Him your allegiance.

On the evening of
September 11, 2001, the church that I served at the time was full of members and neighbors who had found their way, mostly by word-of-mouth to a special worship service. I remember very little about what was said that night – just an overwhelming feeling of shock and grief.  I do remember, however, just as the service ended, that one of our members sitting in the front row, a good friend, raised her hand and asked, “Roger, can we sing ‘God Bless America?’”

I thought I could get out of it by pointing out that we don’t have “God bless America” in our hymnals, but she insisted that we could all sing the first verse from memory. She was right. We could and we did.

Now you may be wondering what kind of Godless liberal, freedom-hating, terrorist-loving preacher could possibly object to singing “God bless America”?

I don’t. I like hearing a recording of Kate Smith singing about how we are almost 100 million strong as much as the next person. But it just didn’t seem like the right song for that night in church.

It wasn’t the right song for that night because it’s bouncy, upbeat, confident tune just didn’t match the feeling of unbearable horror and sorrow that we felt that night. Admittedly, the repertoire of American patriotic music probably doesn’t offer a song that expresses sorrow. We are an upbeat, positive-thinking, optimistic nation, which is one of the great things about this land, but it also means that we have a hard time dealing with the fact that bad things sometimes happen in good countries.

We need a new David, the great song-writer of the bible, who could shout with joy at the victories the Lord gave him over his enemies, but who could also write the saddest songs in the world – one of which, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” was even sung from the cross. We need a patriot like David, who in our first reading this morning, laments Israel’s defeat in battle at the hands of its enemies, the loss of his best friend, Prince Jonathan, and of Jonathan’s father, King Saul.

We do not have any Davids in America. It’s almost as if tears are unpatriotic. The problem with that is that when patriots don’t know how to cry for their land and what has happened to it, they stop being human and when we stop being human as a nation, we start adding to the long, sad story of man’s inhumanity to man. One of the oldest and most universal insights of the collective wisdom of the world is that human beings never make good decisions when they are only using their heads or only using their hearts. Wisdom is the product of a deep and long conversation between the head and the heart.

That wisdom that combines both the head and the heart is known as “prudence”. “Prudence” has nothing to do with the kind of prudishness that the novelist John Le Carre’ once described as “the ability to spot a sin even before it happened.” Nor does it have anything to do with the over-cautiousness that we often associate with the word. Prudence Is the very practical, situation-based wisdom that chooses the right means to achieve a good end.

David was weeping for a king who was not prudent. Saul, the first king of Israel, is a representative of the mystery of human leadership. Why is it that it is often the leaders with the best credentials that make the worst failures? One only has to reflect on the fact that the three men who came in to the office of President of the United States with the best credentials – who were by far the best prepared to take the reins of leadership – were John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.

Saul had all the gifts that a king needed. He even looked like a king. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. He was brave. He could be cunning. But he was not prudent. Like Richard Nixon, his paranoia got in his way. David was the bravest, most gifted and probably the most loyal of his military commanders, but Saul was jealous when the crowds shouted that Saul had slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands. So Saul plotted to do away with David.

Jonathan, the king’s son, loved David and warned him of his father’s plans. So David fled and lived as a kind of Robin Hood outlaw on the frontier between Israel and the land of the Philistines. Twice, David had a chance to kill Saul. David refused to harm Saul, because Saul was “The Lord’s Anointed” – in Hebrew, the Messiah.

David, too, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, had been anointed by the strange Gandolf-type figure, Samuel, when he was a little shepherd boy growing up in Bethlehem. He believed; everyone, including Jonathan, believed that David would be king someday. But David did not believe in taking history into his own hands. David was prudent. He would not achieve a good end by foul means. In doing so, he only added to his stature when he finally became king.

David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan and the defeat of the Israelite army at the hands of the Philistines is a model of prudence and shows us the path to prudence in public life. Because in his lament David recognizes the fact that bad things do happen to good countries. Especially when they are imprudent. Saul had, as I said, fired his best military commander. He had managed to go from being wildly popular to having really, really low approval ratings. He made a lot of bonehead decisions and never learned from them. He talked a lot about God; he was publicly pious, but he never understood that he was God’s servant, not the other way around.

That, in fact, is the essence of prudence, as we understand it in the Christian faith. We are God’s servants, not the other way around. Think for a moment about those three words, “God bless America”. An English teacher would tell you that sentence is imperative – and those who say it are being imperious. An English teacher would also point out that the sentence should have a comma after “God”. We are saying, “God, bless America!

That’s one of the reasons we don’t sing, “God bless America” in church. We are waiting for someone to write a song that begins, “America, bless God.”

Singing a song like that, of course, would require humility, another virtue that is seldom associated with patriotism in America. Raising the possibility that we might sometimes be wrong, as a nation, is almost grounds for a charge of treason.

In writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Julia Ward Howe was very sure that the Union armies were doing God’s work by inflicting God’s wrath on the slaveholding states of the Confederacy.

Lincoln was not so sure. Shortly after the embarrassing and costly Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln sat alone and wrote on a fragment of paper a few lines, that he probably kept for awhile, believe it or not, in that stovepipe hat that he wore. His secretary, John Hay, found it in his effects after Lincoln’s assassination and entitled it a Meditation of the Divine Will

“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.

In this present civil war it is quite possible that God purpose is something different from the purpose of either party . . . “

O God,

Who calls us to work with you

to turn the lights on again
all over the world.

Sometimes a song,

like the smell of fresh baked bread,

makes us homesick for the world in which we grew up.

We know now that we were seeing you

in all those old familiar places,

and in the faces

and the embraces

that first taught us about love.

We pray,

that when we come to the end of our life’s journey

We will be home again

And know the place for the first time. Amen

In the northern tier of states,

we don’t completely trust

The Easter promise that

New life will rise from the cold earth.

Take today.

It’s the day He cursed the tree

For not bearing figs six months early.

If He were only Mother Nature’s child,

Our seasons might synchronize with the equinoxes.

But no,

Springtime and harvest always come second for this One

Who stands on the far shore with other fish to fry.

Seasons are less important than the points

He wants to make,

Which, like that one about the figs, are often lost on me.

The guy I voted for says we need

More war, not less,

If we are going to get out of this mess

The other guy made to save the world.

All the Messiahs put their trust in power.

But I took the name of a savior who couldn’t even save Himself.

Or make April safe from snowstorms.

As I was hauling my garbage to the curb just now

I sensed a difference.

The thermometer told me it was cold

As January,

But

There was something behind the clouds.

The sun

Had risen

Even though it looked and felt like winter

Something in the air,

In the light,

Said that it was April.

The daffodils believe the sun.

And though by snow bowed low,

They lift their green hearts,

And they grow.

The Physical Education teacher had lost it. He lined us up against the gym wall. We were a bunch of 11-year-old-boys who had been acting like 11-year-old boys. He yelled at us for several minutes. Finally, one kid couldn’t take it anymore. He said something, and the gym teacher hit him – hard. I keep telling myself that I honestly didn’t see it, because I had my eyes closed. I got the message, though. Don’t say anything.

Later, when the assistant principal called me and a couple of other kids who had been in the gym class into his office and asked us what happened, I told him the truth, I guess. I hadn’t seen anything. I knew what had happened, but I didn’t feel like I could tell the real truth.

As we were leaving the meeting with the principal, one of my friends said to me, “Why didn’t you say anything?”  It never occurred to me to ask him, “Why didn’t YOU say anything?”  Why is it my job to say something?  But over the years, his question has haunted me, especially on those days when history repeated itself.

I’ve heard people unfairly judged and run down and I didn’t say anything.

I’ve heard people spouting off half-truths that wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so dangerous and I didn’t say anything.

I’ve been in groups where decisions were made that I was not comfortable with and I didn’t say anything.

I cringe at the memory of the times when I could have, should have, said something and didn’t.

Maybe you’ve never had experiences like that. Maybe you didn’t grow up in a world that told you that you were too stupid or too uninformed to have an opinion. Maybe you didn’t grow up in a world that kept telling you to mind your own business. Maybe you don’t operate in world that says to you, as it so often says to ministers, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about how the world operates. Just keep talking about heaven and keep your mouth shut about how things are run on earth.”

It’s our job to bury the soldiers when they come home in boxes and visit the ones who sitting in underfunded VA hospitals without their hands or feet or eyes or sanity, but if America wants to go to war, that’s none of our business, so we have to shut up about it.

The point I’m trying to make is that this repression of speech goes on more than you might think. And a lot of that repression takes place inside of us – or at least most of us.  I am sure you know people who say whatever comes to mind. My friends who do that tell me that they are constantly receiving disapproving looks and often are not invited back to wherever it is that they said what they said.

I am not one of those people. I learned what I like to call “discretion” at an early age. Discretion is simply the ability to follow the rules and to carry on a pleasant conversation about everything except the elephant in the living room. It’s an invaluable skill for anyone who wants to become a successful preacher.

Jesus never learned the art of discretion – at least not the way the world defines that term. The world believes discretion is to ignore and never question the way things are. Jesus was always questioning the way things are. He questioned why religious leaders were so big on people washing their hands, but not their hearts. He questioned why rich people were patted on the back for giving big bucks that cost them very little and poor widows were ignored when they gave all they had. He questioned whether people who let you know they were religious or claimed to be honest weren’t protesting a bit too much. He questioned our acceptance of invalidism and insanity, our quickness to dismiss the possibility that we can live lives of heroic faith, and our despair about our ability to forgive, when nothing is impossible for God.

It is on Palm Sunday, in Luke’s gospel that the representatives of the powers-that-be, the religious and political leaders, say to Jesus “Tell your followers to be silent!”

And Jesus answers them, “I tell you the truth, if they are silent, the very stones will shout.”

The truth, says Jesus, will come out, even if the rocks have to tell it – or the rock heads, or the rock and rollers, it’s amazing where the truth comes from – the truths that counter the false claims of the powers that be.

One of the characteristics of the powers is how they corrupt language. George Orwell pointed this out in 1948, when he wrote the book 1984. in that novel, the world is ruled by combinations of political and economic and social power that no one dares question. And the slogan of this power is

War is Peace

Slavery is Freedom

Lies are Truth

It just happens that, in 1948, Harry Truman renamed the War Department, established by George Washington, calling it the Department of Defense. Today, the Powers-that-Be do that all the time - finding nice words to describe ugly things - and most of us don’t say anything.

We claim to follow Jesus, but we don’t really want to say to the world what He says to the world: ”If you know the truth, the truth will set you free” (John 8:32).

We can keep our mouths shut if we want to. It appears we do not have to tell the world about this man – this person who was constantly questioning both the Powers-that-Be and The-Way-Things-Are.  Because the Word gets out, somehow. Maybe the rocks are shouting the news. But everywhere people are praising him: in mud huts in Africa, in tin roofed sheds in
South America, in Cathedrals in Europe, in slums and brokerage houses, in peasants’ homes and presidential palaces.

Wherever anyone speaks the forbidden words, “Jesus is Lord”, meaning: Jesus is more important to me than money; Jesus is more important to me than power; Jesus is more important to me than security; Jesus is more important to me than life itself, then all the powers in this world are brought to their knees and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.

“Friday isn’t the worst day”, he said, “On Friday, everything is decided and you just go through it. Thursday is the worst day”, he said, “On Thursday, you have the hope that something will change the inevitable and you know, at the same time, that it IS inevitable.”

That’s what a friend of mine told me the day before his wife moved out. He was a minister, too, so his allusions to Good Friday and Holy Thursday were to be expected and I got them. He knew she was moving out. The marriage had been unraveling for a long time. She had a place to go to. The moving van was scheduled. It was all very civilized and normal.  But he, like Jesus in the Garden, was praying, “Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.”

Only in his case, I suspect it was more like, “Please, please God, make her change her mind”, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to change her mind.

I’ve often thought about his observation that Friday isn’t the worst day, it’s Thursday. It’s not the day of the funeral, it’s the day you get the call from someone you love like life itself; “They say it’s cancer, and they say that it’s too far advanced for them to do anything about it.”

It’s not the day they make you clean out your desk and escort you out the door, it’s the day you get the 60-day notice that the company will be down-sizing and you look around and know you were the last person hired.

It’s not the day the sheriff comes to escort you out of the house, it’s the day you add up what you have and what you owe and the second figure is so much bigger than the first that you can’t ever, ever make them come out even.

It’s not the day your name gets splashed all over the news as the scandal du jour. It’s the day you realize that soon everybody is going to know what you have been hiding all these months.

It’s not the day you die, it’s the day you realize that the slope you are sliding down physically is only going to end in one place.

It’s not the day they close the church and merge the congregation with the one across town. It’s the day you know that no one in their right mind is going to make a decision other than that.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent is a good time to contemplate Thursday faith. Thursday faith anticipates the worst by believing – or to use Paul’s wonderful phrase “hoping against hope” – that even if the worst happens, good will come out of it.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus have this faith.

Jeremiah is watching his nation’s leaders persist in a course that has already brought them to the edge of utter ruin and it is like watching a train wreck. The outcome is inevitable and disastrous in a way that you and I can barely fathom. The Babylonians were going to destroy Jerusalem and its Temple and the result would be not only the political end of Judah but the end of the religion that Jeremiah’s people had followed since Abraham and Sarah left Ur to go to the Promised Land.

Yet, Jeremiah looks ahead and sees a vision of a new faith arising out of the ashes -  a new and renewed relationship with God that didn’t need a Temple or priests or prophets because “everyone will know the Lord, from the least of them to the greatest” and the Law will be “written upon their hearts”.

Now that he is a “celebrity” who is drawing the interest even of the Greeks, Jesus knows the Powers-that-Be can’t afford to ignore him anymore. They will do everything in their power to discredit and eliminate him; something that crucifixion does quite neatly. Yet, Jesus says that it will be his martyrdom – his being “lifted up (on to a cross)” – that will draw all people to him.

Last Saturday, I was listening to a webcast from the BBC of an interview with Sister Frances Dominica who helped found a hospice for children.  In the interview she talked about a mother whose child was a guest at the hospice who said to her, “A friend of mine visited recently and said to me, ‘your faith must be a great comfort to you in a time like this.’ And I said that it was NOT. But what really helped me was another friend who said, ‘Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.’”

My friend’s separation from his wife and subsequent divorce almost 20 years ago was really sad and tough on their kids. But both of them have found new lives and new, very fulfilling relationships – and one of their kids recently said to both of them, “You know, in spite of everything, both of you did a really good job.”

It’s really hard to believe on Thursday that Sunday is coming. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that after the pain and the endings there will be new life. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that good will come out of whatever is going to happen on Friday. But remember that you are a child of Almighty God and Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.

 It’s a mystery about that bronze snake that the Bible mentions and why the symbol for the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, is a snake wrapped around a pole. I’ll bet if you look around your doctor’s office you will see a picture of it.

Why would something poisonous and treacherous become a symbol for healing? Why would the whole world look to a man hanging on a cross? What is there about looking at the very thing you don’t want to look at that becomes healing when you do?

Why is it, for example, that one of the 12 Steps of AA involves making an inventory of all the violations of your own moral values that you committed in service to your addiction? Why is it that people who have suffered some kind of trauma, such as abuse in childhood, often find it healing to go back and face the very things that they may have spent a lifetime trying to forget?

Why is it that the pattern of Christian worship usually involves our coming into the presence of God with prayer and singing and then, almost immediately, forcing us to confess our sins? Why is it that, in fact, the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven is to first of all, admit that we are sinners?

Why is it that, in order to save the world, God sent his only Son to become sin for us? That’s the way the Bible describes the crucifixion. Jesus becomes sin for us. He becomes the snake on the pole.   When Adam blamed Eve for causing him to sin, Eve blamed the snake for being the cause of it all. Funny, how, from the very beginning, nobody takes responsibility for doing anything wrong. It’s always somebody else’s fault. And somebody, somewhere, always has to die for our sins – not to satisfy the honor of a pure and holy God, but to satisfy our consciences that we are not at fault.

When we look at Jesus, hanging on a cross, that is what we see. We see the guy who’s responsible for all the problems in the world – hurricanes and wars and disease. We see the guy who made the poisonous snakes and the guy who led the simple people into idolatry. We see the guy who made people the way they are – never satisfied, always complaining, even when they have it good.

But when we wake up one morning and realize that we hurt like hell and that we are dying – if not physically, then spiritually – and we realize our life is out of control because of our addictions or our bitterness or our dishonesty or our greed or our self-centeredness or any of the dozens of other forms that sin takes in our lives, and we wonder how we can be healed? How we can get rid of the poison that is killing our souls. The word comes to us. “Look at Jesus, just look at him.”

But it seems too easy, too simple; it’s what superstitious people do. It’s what Holy Rollers do. It’s what TV evangelists do. It’s what people who have a simple explanation for everything do. I don’t want to engage in that kind of superstitious idolatry. I’m too sophisticated for that. I know too much theology for that. People in my church don’t do that.

And yet, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

“Believes . . .”

Does that mean that I have read all the books of theology and I have an intellectual understanding of who Jesus is?

Does that mean that I consciously and successfully live a Christ-like life everyday?

Or does it mean that, when I am at the end of my rope, when I am dying of the spiritual poisons that have been injected into me by the snakes of hatred and desire and even, religiosity (the snakes in the story are called literally “Seraphic serpents”), I can look to the Man on the Cross for healing and redemption?

When the woes of life o’ertake me,

Hopes deceive and fears annoy,

Never shall the cross forsake me.

Lo! It glows with peace and joy.

(“In the Cross of Christ I Glory” words by John Conker United Methodist Hymnal #295)

During Lent, I have been reading 40 Day Journey with Parker Palmer, a collection of daily readings taken from the writings of a noted Quaker author and educator. The readings keep directing us to look at the contradictions or paradoxes in our lives. Some of these are irresolvable, such as the tension we all feel between our desire for security and our desire for challenge and adventure. Others are real hypocrisies, as when we project an image of hard-edged arrogance to cover feelings of deep insecurity inside.

Yesterday morning, I read a particularly challenging meditation on how we sacrifice our authentic selves to our need to be “successful” and accepted. And then last night, my colleague, Dianne, and I led a class on “Practicing Prayer”. The focus last night was on “Lectio Divinia”, the practice of praying while reading scripture.

My part of the class was to lead everyone in an experience of “entering the story”. So, I read to them the gospel for this Sunday, John’s account of the cleansing of the Temple. I suggested that they imagine Jesus entering the Temple of their own lives: the sum total of their environment, relationships, values, memories, etc. and imagine him getting angry about something there with a holy, loving anger, because whatever it is, it is hurting them – destroying what they were meant to be as the image of God.

Several people reported difficulty in experiencing this and I can imagine several reasons for that – not least because we often equate Jesus’ love with gentleness. But, I had tried this same meditation myself in the afternoon as I was preparing for the class and found it immensely meaningful. There is a deep contradiction in my life between who I pretend to be on the outside and who I am on the inside. And I could see Jesus entering my life and heading straight for that contradiction.

What surprised me is that, like the priests in the Temple, I challenged Jesus – in a sense, asking him what right he had to destroy this thing in me. And what surprised me even more are the words that escaped my lips: “I’m doing this for you.”

I was deeply shaken by this experience. I realized that many of the worst things in my life are there because I think, somehow, that Jesus wants me to be that way. I am, after all, called to project an image of holiness, caring, and faithful hopefulness even when I don’t particularly feel any of those things.

It does no good to deplore that fact or to go into all the contradictions between who I really am and what I pretend to be retailing them for public consumption. Most religious people, and especially clergy, will recognize them. The point is that the anger of Christ was directed precisely at those things in me – even at the “sacrifices” I have been making to Him and for His sake.

That is precisely the issue in John’s account of Jesus cleansing the Temple. The money changers and sellers of animals were making “sacrifice” possible. But the real sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit that leads to a more authentic life and more authentic discipleship.