March 8, 2021
Paulist Fr. Rich Andre preached this homily on the 3rd Sunday of Lent (Year B) on March 7, 2021, at St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, TX. The homily is based on the day’s readings: Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; and John 2:13-25.
Today, our readings are about jealousy and anger. Surprisingly, it is God the Father and Jesus who are expressing these emotions!
So today, we face an interesting question: if God describes himself as jealous and punishing, and if Jesus gets angry enough to throw things, is it OK for us to be jealous or angry?
Six years ago, one of the Lenten disciplines I chose was that each morning, I would name my three priorities for the day. The next morning, I would review what I accomplished the previous day before naming my three new priorities. I’ll be the first to admit: it didn’t sound like a very spiritual discipline.
Like for many of you, there are days when I fail to address even my top priority! All kinds of unexpected requests come in. Add to that changing circumstances, meetings that reduce the time available and add new tasks, mis-estimating how long it takes to do things, and getting side-tracked by lower priorities. Some of that is the nature of the job… and some of it is the result of my choices.
I selected my discipline for Lent in 2015 because I thought that I was making bad choices daily which were hindering my productivity. But soon after Lent began, I realized that God was calling me to spiritual work on a part of myself deep inside: my inner critic. Often, my inner critic is the first and loudest part of me to react to any situation. He finds fault with everything I do, and he clearly does not speak with the voice of Jesus.
For the first eleven days of Lent, by the grace of God, I was successful in keeping my critic from taking over. When I woke up, I would take a few extra minutes for prayer, and somehow, I was consistently able to center myself in a spirit of thanksgiving. Once my critic woke up, he would start complaining as usual about everything I had done wrong in the previous 24 hours. But together, the Holy Spirit and I would calmly listen to the critic, and then gently point out the unforeseen circumstances that had rightly caused me to change my priorities. It was wonderful! My Lenten productivity discipline became something much more spiritual: learning to give myself the same compassion that God gives me.
Compassion. That’s a strange idea to consider on a day when we hear about Jesus getting angry. Did Jesus really act this way? Yes. The early Christians would not have made up a story like this. This story is so inconsistent with our image of Jesus that it MUST be part of what Jesus really did.
Anger itself is not a sin. It’s an emotion, a God-given gift. It is not bad or unhealthy; it’s just uncomfortable. If God didn’t want us to have certain emotions – including anger, anxiety, arousal, envy, fear, loneliness, and sadness – God would not have made us capable of feeling them. To grow in holiness, we need to learn to acknowledge and validate our emotions – they are signals to dig deeper and explore why we’re feeling what we’re feeling. Many of us have spent a lifetime trying to ignore our emotions, so this can be very hard for us.
Ours sins do not come from the emotions themselves, but from the poor choices we often make in processing these emotions. When we feel angry – or anxious, aroused, envious, afraid, lonely, or sad – we need to find healthy and holy ways to channel our emotions. I imagine that at the temple, Jesus’s heart raced, his face flushed, and his fists clenched. When we recognize that we are angry, what should we do? Sometimes, the very acknowledgement is all that’s necessary, but often we think we can let go of our anger and we actually end up holding onto it. There’s a word for that phenomenon: resentment. It has been said that resentment is like swallowing poison and waiting for someone else to die. It doesn’t work!
If we can’t let go of our anger, we must choose healthy ways to act on it. Sometimes, it’s simple. We just need to wait until we’re calm, and then ask the Holy Spirit to guide us as we talk with the person we’re mad at. Sometimes it’s more complicated. If it’s a personal situation that will not change, the best solution may be for us to remove ourselves from the situation. If it’s a societal situation that is difficult to change, perhaps God has placed the righteous anger of the prophets within us, and we need to find ways to effect systematic change.
At first glance, Jesus’ anger doesn’t seem especially healthy or holy. But Jesus does not destroy anything in his zeal. He spills coins, overturns tables, and disburses livestock, but the money changers and merchants can quickly restore order. Jesus does not release the doves from their cages. Recapturing the birds would take considerable effort, time, and expense.
What are we to make of this? John points out that “[Jesus] himself understood [human nature] well.” When we are angry – or anxious, aroused, envious, afraid, lonely, or sad – that does not separate us from God. Jesus Christ felt these same feelings, so we should not ignore them. And like Jesus – and like countless saints who came after him – we can channel these feelings in ways that don’t inflict damage.
My luck ran out on the twelfth day of Lent in 2015. My inner critic woke up first, and it wasn’t pretty. Even as I prayed, my critic wouldn’t stop complaining about the choices I had made previously, forcing me get up earlier than usual that day. Actually, I was working on a homily on this very gospel passage! I realized my silliness when I wrote the following in my prayer journal: “Help me to not be so mad at myself, Lord – especially since I need to write this homily on [properly channeling] anger!” My anger was inflicting damage, damage to myself.
Self-loathing is a lousy motivator, and it certainly isn’t a gift from God. Our dissatisfaction with our sins should not motivate us to hate ourselves, but to see ourselves through God’s loving eyes. Can we look at our sins in the same way that God looks upon us?
Lent is a time of growth. So, let us reflect: how is God inviting each of us to have more compassion for ourselves?