Last weekend —I know you missed me—I was minding my own business at a conference when a very attractive, smartly dressed vice president of American Express raised herself up and with deep-seated anger in her voice accused me of racism. Well, not me personally, but it felt personal in this room of thirty people, a room in which I am not usually present by virtue of its diversity: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, European-Americans (I would have said Caucasian until someone else challenged me to ask if I really thought I wanted to be racially identified with a mountain range in Russia); some of us priests, some of us deacons, some of us lay people, some of us male, some of us female, some of us gay, some of us straight. There were other subdivisions among the racial categories that I just listed which only tended to underscore the salad-bowl like quality of that gathering. The American Express vice president’s accusation of racism, however, came as a shock despite the title of the conference itself which was “Analyzing Systemic Racism.”
What I didn’t tell you was that she was Asian-American and up to that point our discussions had been polite, historical, analytical, interesting. (That’s the kiss of death, isn’t it: interesting.) Part of that analysis had been remembering the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, a blot on the record of our country’s honor and our country’s principles. But it was easy for me to look at that data and say, “Boy, that was terrible,” without thinking I had anything to do with it. But for the Asian American executive from American Express it was personal, and it was ongoing in lots of subtle and not so subtle ways and she was angry about it. At that moment she became real for me. At that moment I had to make room in my life for her anger, for her judgment on my complicity however distanced I may have been from that or from any other event that I as a white American do not have to contend with day after day.
Read, then, or reread, today’s gospel in that light. Think of yourself as a money changer in the Temple, someone minding your own business, someone with an entirely legal occupation, the sky is blue, it’s an interesting time of year—Passover—when all sorts of pilgrims are coming to the Temple, and you’re providing an important service, namely, converting one currency into another because Roman and Greek currency wouldn’t work in the Temple. Then along comes Jesus who ruins your day with his righteous indignation, his anger at a system that had evolved into a form of taxation that hit the poor the hardest. As someone once described it,
The Temple had become a place of crass commerce rather than a house of prayer. The malignancy of greed had metastasized throughout its system.
For that one money changer minding his own business, the systemic continuation of a social wrong became very real, took on flesh, as it were.
How is it that you and I are able to keep others at a safe distance and how symbolic may that be for keeping Jesus at a safe distance? Personally, I don’t do well with anger, either my own or someone else’s. I was resentful being included in the ark of that conference attendee’s anger but had to conclude that it said as much about me as it did about her and that until I could honestly affirm it not just for her but for me, it would continue to separate us.
The same is true with Jesus. As long as I can think about him theologically or historically or culturally or sociologically, all exercises I enjoy doing, I will have continued to keep him at a safe distance. But I can assure you I would not have liked to be in that Temple courtyard with Jesus brandishing his whip of cords, pointing his finger at me and accusing me of hypocrisy, of greed. No, keep that Jesus hidden behind a benign stained-glass window. But Jesus has a habit of trying to break through the safety glass, as it were, and says to me, “Remember that sibling rivalry you’d just as soon not acknowledge? I’ll tell you a story about how my brothers treated me when I came back to Nazareth. Remember when your best friend ignored you or pretended he didn’t know you? Let me tell you about Peter when I was being dragged off to die. Remember how sorry you felt when you saw a mother and her child in downtown Chicago on Christmas Eve when it was cold? Let me tell you what my mother told me about our experience in Bethlehem.”
And so if I can be honest and open about my own hurts and disappointments and failures, maybe then I can connect with the real Jesus: his sorrows, his compassion, his anger, even. I’m no innocent bystander in life’s dramas; none of us are. And god knows Jesus was no innocent bystander — his anger took him to the cross. What then, are the wounds we share?
Lord Jesus Christ, you stretched out your arms of love on the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of your saving embrace: So clothe us in your Spirit what we, reaching forth our hands in love, may bring those who do not know you to the knowledge and love of you; for the honor of your Name. Amen.
