The range of Jesus’ ire is impressive. For example, within a very short period of time in Jesus’ life, three things made Him see red, and each one reveals something important about the essence of the gospel.
Jesus’ Anger at Unfruitfulness
The first anger episode occurred when Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem, and He was hungry. Off in the distance, He saw a fig tree, lush with leaves. That usually meant the tree bore figs, so Jesus walked up to the fig tree to feed off its bounty. Whether the tree was in season or out of season is debated, but when the Messiah beckons, we are to be “ready in season and out of season.”55 But this fig tree, lush with leaves, was barren of fruit. In other words, it had been hoarding all its resources for itself. Its mission had become to look good more than to feed a hungry world and a hungry Messiah. Jesus was so angry at the non–fruit-bearing tree that He cursed it.56 After all, Jesus was on His way to the harvest festival (Feast of Sukkoth), which celebrates a messianic inauguration of a time of peace and prosperity when “everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree.”57
When God said, “Be fruitful and multiply,”58 the Lord was only calling us to reflect God’s nature. God is fruitful and multiplies. The fertility of the universe is amazing. The universe contains one hundred billion galaxies, each of which contains one hundred billion stars of incredible uniqueness and diversity.59 When God commanded the first Adam to till and tend the garden and to “conserve and conceive,”60 God was giving humans their prime directive. We were put here not to consume but to conceive. Jesus confronted a culture of consumption, reflected in that fruitless and unreproductive fig tree, with a culture of conception. “Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit,” Jesus said.61 Here was a tree that bore no fruit. “You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?”62 Jesus said things are most reliably known for what they are by examining their fruit. Jesus called His disciples to be more than faithful—He called them to be fruitful. Jesus wants to taste our fruit. The fruit of a tree is that tree come to consciousness. The fruit of a human life is that human coming to God consciousness. When there is nothing to taste, there is no consciousness in that life. And this does not make Jesus happy.
Jesus’ Anger at Those Who Damage Children
If you want to really make Jesus mad, however, so mad that He could sound more like the Mafia than the Messiah, then damage a child. A wifeless and childless Jesus was the biggest patron and protector of children: “If you harm one of these little ones, better for you that a millstone be draped around your neck and you be dropped into the depths of the sea.”63 Or in the secret language of Omertà, “Better you sleep with the fish.”
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Many things are made holy by being turned upside down.
—G. K. CHESTERTON 64
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It is hard for us to imagine how low on the social scale children stood during Jesus’ day. The ancient hierarchy of reverence, with father first, mother second, and child always last, was flipped on its head with Jesus and the Holy Family, where the story revolved around the child, then the mother, and the father somewhere to be found if you looked hard enough.
What made Jesus turn the social hierarchy upside down and place children at the pinnacle? Maybe it was Jesus’ haunting realization that before He would die for us, a lot of children (firstborn sons) died for Him in Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.65 Or maybe Jesus’ tenderness toward those for whom culture had no room stemmed from His sensitivity to being born when there was no room for His mother to give birth to Him. In the parable of the good Samaritan,66 there is a surprise ending based precisely on these lines. The innkeeper makes room for the distressed traveler and gives Him intensive care. Jesus knew from His mother’s stories what it meant for people in need to have no place and no advocate.
When the disciples debated who among them was the greatest, Jesus took a page out of Isaiah 11:6 (“And a little child shall lead them”) by plopping a little one in their midst and saying that the greatest reality was in front of them.67 Jesus was not denying ambitions for greatness. He didn’t rebuke the disciples for wanting to be “the best.” But He reframed the nature of greatness and “the best” in terms of little ones’ capacity to love, to live out of love, and to humble themselves out of graciousness. You want to aspire to true greatness, to being best? Then make yourself small. Become a “little one.” The maximum is found in the minimum.68
Followers of Jesus are all “little ones.” Childhood is not something you grow out of but grow into. “There will be no grown-ups in heaven” might be the best translation of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:14.69 But even more than showcasing a child (not some adult scholar or soldier or priest or businessman) as His model disciple, Jesus made a child the primary metaphor for following Him and for holiness. The greatest gift of Jesus was the “right to become children of God.”70
Jesus’ Anger at Self-Righteous Judgmentalism
The third anger episode that makes Jesus’ inner life less mysterious to us is His “temple tantrum.” As He drove out the money changers from the spaces normally dedicated to prayer for Gentiles as well as Jews, overturning their tables and ATMs, He cried out the words of Isaiah: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations.”71
What is “My house”? The “house” is God’s temple, and in the Hebrew tradition the temple and the garden are different ways of talking about the same reality. For Jesus, the “house” is the same, but the definition of the temple is more precise: the temple of the church, the body of Christ, and the temple of the person, as in “your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit.”72 Two of the most shocking events in the Second Testament, Jesus and the money changers and Peter and the money cheaters, are both cleansing rituals. When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,”73 He was telegraphing the upcoming transition from the temple as a place, to the temple as a people. And just as there was a temple cleansing just before the closing of the placed temple, there was a temple cleansing (Ananias and Sapphira) just after the opening of the peopled temple.74
Something else made Jesus absolutely livid and was perhaps His greatest irritant: self-righteous judgmentalism. Survey those to whom Jesus directed His strongest, most severe words. It was the self-righteous, judgmental Pharisees and Sadducees—those who didn’t see themselves as sinners but who leveled that charge against everyone else. He characterized such people as “blind guides,” “hypocrites,” “fools,” “whitewashed tombs,” a “brood of vipers,” and children of the devil.75 Not exactly kind words from a mild-mannered Messiah.
And to whom did Jesus show the most compassion? People who were involved in immorality of all types, such as prostitutes, adulterers, tax collectors, and thieves. It’s easy for us today to acknowledge that Jesus treated the self-righteous more severely than the “real sinners” without applying this standard to our own context—or to ourselves.
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I want to know this Jesus, though he scares me a little.
—JOHN ELDREDGE 77
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But “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.”76 What He deemed to be the severest of all sins (self-righteousness) is what many contemporary Christians view as a mere misdemeanor. And the sorts of sins toward which Jesus had great compassion and patience are what many Christians place at the top of the totem pole of “serious sins,” deeming them to be felonies. Don’t be deceived: the “odious complacency of the self-consciously pious” is what infuriated our Lord the most.78 Philip Yancey was dead-on when he said that some Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.79
JESUS’ PRAYER LIFE
Prayer is breath, the breath that brings life to the temple and the breath that connects us
to the God who created all temples. God breathed into a duvet of dust and the first temple, the first Adam, came to life. The last Adam, Jesus the Christ, breathed on the disciples, and a new temple, the church, was born. When the heartbeat of the church is something other than being a praying and inclusive church (whether it be missional, organic, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven, or any number of good things), it arouses Jesus’ ire.
Prayer was Jesus’ most important spiritual practice. It appears that Jesus’ custom was to lift up His eyes to heaven when He prayed.80 As with all pious Jews, He may have prayed three times a day this psalm: “O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth Your praise.”81 Sometimes Jesus may have sung His prayers, as His mother did when she sang a prayer of praise, known as the Magnificat, upon meeting her cousin Elizabeth in the land of Judah.82 Jesus probably heard His mother sing this prayer song to Him throughout His growing up: “My soul magnifies the Lord . . . Princes he has dethroned and the poor he has uplifted.”83 Prayer songs may have often been on Jesus’ lips: for example, at the end of His final meal, He and His disciples sang a song.84 One of the psalms of Israel, a song, was on Jesus’ lips when He died.85
Jesus made sure His disciples, then and now, knew they were at the receiving end of His prayers: “But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail.”86 What does it mean to be at the receiving end of a Jesus prayer? Ask Peter. He was at the receiving end of that just-cited prayer of Jesus. But you and I, as disciples of Jesus, are also at the receiving end of Jesus’ prayers. Jesus is praying to the Father for us—for you, for me.87 We tend to ask, “How should I pray?” We don’t ask, “How should I receive prayer?” Yet we are here today because Jesus has prayed for us. And someone, somewhere, has been praying for you. This moment, right now, someone, somewhere is praying for you.
Jesus’ major method of negotiating crises was prayer. In the morning, He was up early—“a long while before daylight”—to go to a “solitary place” to pray.88 At end of the day, He would seek a quiet place to pray.89 Sometimes when He went to prayer at dusk (late and light), Jesus spent the whole night in solitary prayer with His Father. His signs and wonders were often done through prayer, and sometimes only possible through prayer.90 The disciples were so struck by Jesus’ prayer life that they asked Him to teach them to pray as He did (hence the “Lord’s Prayer” in Luke 11:1–4). Jesus was transfigured while in the act of prayer, which was in the presence of some of His disciples.91 In crisis moments, Jesus prayed for strength and for discernment. Sometimes Jesus even fell on the ground and prayed. On the night of His betrayal and arrest, Jesus asked His disciples to keep watch and pray: three times He prayed, and each time He returned and found His disciples asleep.92
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I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains:
From whence shall my help come?
—A SONG OF ASCENTS 94
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Jesus made coming apart to pray a liturgy of life. It has been said He was always “coming apart” so He didn’t “come apart.”93 But going off to a deserted place for some peace and solitude is different from isolation and aloneness. Jesus sought solitary communion with God, which was an expression of solidarity with the Creator and all creation, not isolation from God and the world.
JESUS’ FOUR PRAYER LANDSCAPES
Jesus turned to the natural world as a source of ministration and inspiration. To delve deeper into His relationship with his Father, He conducted sacred pilgrimages to four landscapes of creation. His spirit soared toward heights, heat, water, and garden. Each prayer landscape provided a healing balm to the four broken relationships of human existence created by the first Adam’s disobedience: mountains and Godawareness, deserts and self-awareness, water and others-awareness, and gardens and creation-awareness. The pulls of summit, wilderness, seascape, and garden were almost irresistible to Jesus’ prayer life. The contrasting vistas of mountain, desert, water, and garden were some of Jesus’ prime spiritual resources.
• Mountains are places of joy, revelation, awe, ecstasy.
• Deserts are places of spiritual discipline, introspection, inner struggle, insight.
• Waters are places of relationship, power, peace, connection, trust, nourishment.
• Gardens are places of wholeness, the presence of God, fulfillment, awareness, hope, growth, thriving, fruit.
Mountains: God-Awareness
The mountains are God’s greatest architectural achievements, a temple not made with hands but where one can meet God firsthand if not face-to-face. Mountainness means a bond and bridge between earth and sky. You enter another world when you climb the world of the mountains and breathe the pure oxygen. That is why asceticism doesn’t work in the mountains and woodlands.
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We climb the mountain of revelation that we may gain a view of the shadowed valley in which we dwell and from the valley we look up again to the mountain. Each arduous journey brings new understanding, but also new wonder and surprise. This mountain is not one we climbed once upon a time; it is a well-known peak we never wholly know, which must be climbed again in every generation, on every new day.
—H. RICHARD NIEBUHR 96
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Unlike the ancient Hebrew prophets, who regarded mountains as almost frightful places capable of settlement only by YHWH and assorted demons, Jesus loved the mountains. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus made five treks up mountains, one for each book of the Torah, each mountain pilgrimage leading to a transformation: the bookend stories of the temptation95 and transfiguration;97 the Sermon on the Mount;98 the feeding;99 and the commissioning.100 Treks up mountains are steps up paths of purification and paradise.101
What has been called the “mountain effect” heals the soul in a couple of ways. First, it gives you humility. When you climb to the top of the mountain, you arrive only to see a host of other mountain peaks that invite climbing. The higher the mountain you climb, the more peaks you find.
But the mountains also have the opposite effect: a mountain gives you the confidence that comes from meaning and mission. Mountains are vistas of enlightenment, where you freshen your vision of the world with a godlike ability to “look down” and look farther.102 And in looking down and looking farther, one looks deeper into oneself and God.
The climax of the book of Job is God speaking from the whirlwind, asking Job, “Who are you to inquire after meaning?” or “Where were you when I created the mountains?”103 The mountains teach us that the quest for meaning falls short. Our mission in life is not so much to understand the “whys” of existence or suffering or death, but to live the mystery of existence and suffering and death and to please God.
Water: Others-Awareness
Jesus loved the lakeshore, so much so that He made Capernaum, a midsized fishing village on the border of a trading hub called the Via Maris (Latin for the “Way of the Sea”), His mission headquarters.104 After the first miracle at Cana, the next place Jesus went, and the starting point for His preaching/teaching/healing mission, was the small fishing port of Capernaum, nestled on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee.105 Some have even called Capernaum “the most important place in the history of Christianity,” even the “cradle of Christianity.”106
The Sea of Galilee was also known as Lake Tiberias or, since it was shaped like a harp, the Lake of Kinneret. It was thirteen miles long and eight miles wide. The fishing town of Capernaum, Jesus’ base of operations, was also a bustling border town on an international trade route. Capernaum provided key access to the Jordan Valley, Jericho, and Jerusalem.
Of course, there were other reasons for Jesus’ selection of mission central. Maybe as many as half of His disciples came from Capernaum or its nearby sister city of Bethsaida.107 Most likely, Jesus stayed at the house of Simon and Andrew and their family when He was there, although the
re are some scholars who think Jesus may have had a house in Capernaum Himself.108 It was always dangerous to have Jesus as a house guest. You entertained the possibility of getting your roof ripped off.109
But the biggest reason? Jesus’ boyhood home of Nazareth was a day’s walk away (about twenty miles). Seven hundred years earlier, Isaiah had prophesied about the coming Messiah: “The land of Zebulun and Naphtali [two of the twelve tribes of Israel located in Galilee] will be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the sea, will be filled with glory. The people who walk in darkness will see a great light.”110 Nazareth was situated inside Zebulun’s territory. Capernaum rested within Naphtali’s borders. In one big respect, both Nazareth and Capernaum were alike: they gave Jesus a mixed reception.111
You go to the mountain to make a decision and to face the future with humble confidence. You go to the water for strength and recovery, especially from surmounting setbacks. Where Jesus liked to pray alone on the mountain or in the desert when He was facing a special trial or decision, He used the seashore to keep Him emotionally afloat and to nourish the human in His humanity.
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Jesus is the Word with God, the flesh with us, and the Word made flesh between us.
—AUGUSTINE 112
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While recovery of strength and healing are the primary gifts of the water, what has been called the “island effect” also teaches humility. The bigger an island gets, the bigger its shoreline becomes and the greater its exposure to the vast ocean beyond. The greater the amount of knowledge you accumulate, the bigger your island gets, but the greater the shoreline of the unknown becomes. In short, the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
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