March 8, 2015, Third Sunday in Lent: John 2:13-22
When the disciples try to explain Jesus’ wrath, they quote Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” John neglects to include the verse just before it, however.
What is Jesus so mad about? He has recently been to a family wedding, a joyful event, where his mother imposed on him to help out with the wine. Now he goes to Jerusalem after a few days at home with his mother, brothers, and disciples. Is he upset with his family?
When the disciples try to explain Jesus’ wrath, they quote Psalm 69:9, “Zeal for your house has consumed me.” John neglects to include the verse just before it, however: “I have become a stranger to my kindred, an alien to my mother’s children.” Is Jesus suffering rejection from his family, or maybe more likely a sense that his calling is separating him from them? His mother seems to have annoyed him just a bit by asking him to do something about the wine shortage in Cana. And why does John take the story and put it at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and not toward the end, as the synoptics have it?
Could this be more like Jesus coming to take up his identity as the son of his father, as well as that of his mother Mary and his family? There is a faint echo of the young boy Jesus astounding the elders in the temple at the age of 12. He knows the temple is his because, as he thunders, it is his father’s house; he knows the business he must be about. From this view, Jesus’ rage at the sellers of sacrificial animals and the money changers takes on a richness. As the Passover lamb, which he will be at the end of John, he knows that animal sacrifices will no longer be necessary.
