Pay the ghosts: anger and resentment
You walk around mad. You let your anger blind you. We walk around just playing violins behind you.
Eminem
Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up.
John 2
On the Third Sunday of Lent, just gone, I snuck into what may be my last opportunity to attend this Mass slot, this season. Attendance has steadily increased over the weeks with people standing in the entrance lobby for the first time throughout. So we are back to online bookings or, in my case, a chance to nip in for First Mass Of Sunday which, it never fails to amuse me, is on a Saturday. I live right next door. Situational fluency is a perk of proximity.
Anger is the theme on Lent 3 Liturgical Year B Church of Rome. How could I not go? It’s the one thing I do best. Outright ring-fenced anger. My hot red shield. Terrifying to onlookers yet experienced as something of a haven, from within. All based on fear, of course. Disproportionately large bouts of anger are nothing but the flipside of fear and insecurity. The big tough guys are the scarediest cats on the block. Do you like scarediest? I just made it up. I recently finished reading Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and if he can invent horrorshow - still a favourite conjunctive neo-adjective of TV football commentators to this day (it comes from the Russian word for good: khorosho) - I'm having scarediest, stripped as it may be of Burgess's Cyrillic intellectual and cultural provenance. It just makes me feel more scared than when I say the word "scariest", as I say it. I've embedded the past tense into the descriptor. Experiential creativity. Eat that, Anthony.
Take this message out to the world
It was kinda cool when IKEA said bring the outside in in a long-standing TV advertising campaign earlier this century - but when Jesus catches people in a holy space lending money for profit across the tables (bench tables are banca in old Italian –alas the derivative of our word bank as a financial vehicle) he kicks off. There’s no other way of describing it. Christians justify the anger because, well, Christ did it for Christ’s sake….. but also …the key teaching is that we mustn’t let anger fester.
He didn't so much have anything against money lending per se, as much as people interrupting a dedicated place where they could receive God. Indeed, once double-entry bookkeeping was invented, which squares lending money nicely off with the requirements laid out precisely in the chapters and verses of Revelations, Christians have mortgaged and consolidated and doubled-up and cashed-in and let the equity-release flow like a mighty river. Boom and bust is Christian-just.
Let anger come and go
The thing about anger: once we commit it to memory and store it up for the next time we see a person we believe has made us angry, it has already developed into a different animal – it is now resentment. When we are resentful we have moved away from the world, from ourselves, from the bliss opportunity. We are creating the negative narrative and literally stepping into it and living it out.
This, Jesus is keen to point out in a style more befitting of an inner-city street kid than a living deity, is not what Plato had in mind when he painted us a picture of the good life.
Anger in the moment – fleeting, flush and fully integrated: cool.
Resentment: not cool.
The canonical (eye witness) gospels report that the money lenders challenge Jesus. This is rather brave, with the gift of hindsight. All those mortal souls afoot and you’re going for Him? Choose your fights, I reckon.
Jesus is turning the tables over and calling everyone thieves and accusing them of desecrating My Father’s house. The lenders point out that the Temple was built with care and toil and ingenuity and craft and patience and love and took over forty years to complete and consecrate. So how can he accuse them thus?
Personally, I'd have also wanted to have a word with Jesus about my formerly tip-top yet newly smashed and up-ended bench tables, yet in my heart I suspect I would have been too busy scrambling around on the floor in a bid to recover my money.
His story
The words with which Christ replies were at the time and have oft forever since been confused in their interpretation and meaning:
Destroy this sanctuary and in three days I will raise it up.
Book of John
The other Jews are incredulous at this claim from their Rabbi, that he might casually be able to build a mighty house of worship in such a short time span. And single-handedly too. Like, who does this guy think he is? Of course, Jesus is referring to his body the temple. And the rest is history, Like literally. The rest is his story.
The resurrection and the corporeal aside, Jesus is making a super-cute point about anger in the body-temple statement, above, if you can see it. It's as if, in a seething rage, all purple-faced and with eyes glaring and veins popping out of my temples, I shout at you "Come back in three days and I will have destroyed this angry temple called Gary and it will be as if he'd never existed. You'll get a totally calm version. You idiot!" Actually I just added the final insult for dramatic appeal. But you get the point.
Sin: doing good or bad things for the wrong reason
In my church, the deity of Christ, the inviolability of the Bible and the necessity of rebirth through faith in atonement, death and resurrection are three tenets that tend not to meet with compromise – even though Christians differ tremendously in how we shape our own religion for personal consumption.
Heaven is a place on earth
Belinda Carlisle
The Kingdom of Heaven is within
Luke 17:21
And here’s the key, for me. Jesus points out that anger need never be anything but in the moment and then vanished as one might witness in an infant or an animal – for the simple reason that there is never any risk that you will ruin your chances of a good afterlife with bad behaviour in the here and now. For Christians, all born original sinners, all born of original sin, the bad behaviour is a given. It is built in – and we can still all get to heaven. There is no performance and reward correlation.
It is a religion where God has turned Himself into human form, joined us, suffered with us and died for us so that our sins may be forgiven. The penalty has already been paid on our behalf. Christianity is like one massive behavioural debt jubilee. Like, seriously.
All sinners go up, in the sense that heaven (a place within you, by the way and accessible now) is full of sinners. All you gotta do is confess. You will always be forgiven.
So what’s with all the anger ?
I often share the elevator with my neighbour Aisha. When I told her recently that I am fasting (my vanity is my undoing) she said something quite lovely and I’ve most probably remembered it inaccurately so forgive me on the details: she told me that in Islam, each successful fasting window completed in Ramadan (the Muslim fasting ritual comparable to my Christian Lent) is the equivalent of the recital of seventy (don’t cite me) prayers in terms of good behaviour banked for the next place.
You’ll never get to heaven with your AK-47
It’s a bit of a myth buster, I know, but even though most people think Christianity works this way, it simply does not. There was a time under King Henry VIII when the newly formed Church of England went wayward in terms of buying credits for heaven, but the old branches of Christianity (Catholica) hold no truck with rewarding good behaviour in this fashion. Secular society has repeated the lie so often that you simply must think I have gotten this wrong. And yet...Sin. Confess. Atone. Be shriven. He loves you. You will be forgiven.
Kill off the old you and get reborn each day. Begin again. Now. And now. And now. You’ll mess it up. It’s sin. It’s OK. The condition – if you haven’t worked it out already – is unfettered honesty. This is no small ask. Yet there it is. The alpha and the omega of it all. ‘fess up, brother.
There's a beautiful and beautifully hidden self-correcting mechanism herein, of course. I'll say no more, lest it be outed.
Honesty now
More modern branches of the Christian church phrase the deal in a rather more palatable manner – with a sacrament that they term Reconciliation – which involves improving ones conscious contact with God. But I do like the old ways. No sugar coating. We call it Penance. Do this or burn.
Disarmingly beautiful is candour. Like the old Edwardian hospital signs that are to this very day identifiable in the etched stonework of wonderfully corniced and pointed buildings that have long since changed their function in London’s West End – namely Leicester Square and Covent Garden -that read Lunatic Asylum and Hospital For Diseases Of The Skin. Beneath the brutal sheen of truth is the wisdom of the deepest inner security. Afterall, it’s a sermon built on honesty – so we may as well be having it straight.
Know thyself. Unto thyself be true. By their deeds shall ye know them.
One of the things that surprises many newcomers to my church is how we all seem to be rather hypocritical. We gather in groups and sneer and gossip and judge. You’d think that Christians active in the parish would be better than that. Not so and no need either. The Catholic church is old and tends to knock itself. It is wise and secure and ugly enough to withstand the wise cracks such that the mockery often starts from within. I love this self-depracating quality. You have to admit, it’s awfully British.
Marley and me
I’ll sign off with Luke 16. It’s a cool lesson for the approaching festival of Easter. Sort of a warning against cynical patterns of thinking. A gateway into trust and faith.
Luke 16 is a parable, by the way. The bible contains reports of historical fact (canonical gospel) that are often coupled with poems, parables or songs. Deborah's song in Judges 5, for instance. The over-arching ditty of Genesis 1, as another example. The following parable - in which heaven and hell are treated as other-worldly geo-spatial entities is a classic narrative containing a life message.
There are two main reasons for the Bible's coupling-of-fact-and-fiction format :
1: Before the printing press and scriveners, whole stories had to be committed to memory: the Bible, Homer's Illyad and The Odyssey. The Holy Khoran. Such a format makes this easier to do.
2: Non-literal analogy makes story-telling more effective if the function is to learn a lesson for one's personal growth. It makes it more fun, too. All educational (academic) and many historical reporting documents contain them. You have most probably never consumed one that does not.
Here goes;
The rich man, ever consumed by ego and vanity in this life, dies and feels the lakes of fire. He tries to reach out to his former servant, Lazarus, who has passed over to cooler heavenly pastures, in a request that Lazarus pass him down some water.
God interjects that, unfortunately, something of a cavernous breach has opened up between the man and his former servant such that Lazarus is his servant no more. The rich man (who remains unnamed, to force the point home) then makes what I would say is a rather reasonable request – mindful to me of Ebeneezer Scrooge in London author Charles Dickens’ short story of 1849 entitled A Christmas Carol – that, this being the case, might God possibly send forth to warn his still-living relatives that they might improve their behaviour in advance ? A sort of “Oh, if only I’d known….” moment.
They have Moses and the Prophets all accessible to them, replies God. It’s on them. It’s their own responsibility now.
The rich man observes that nobody listens to the religious nutters anymore. It’s gonna take something bigger. A stand-out gesture – to get his living breathing relatives to take note and act.
How about, suggests the rich man, that God sends somebody back from the dead to warn them? Surely then, they’ll stand to attention? That will awaken them to their fate.
So here’s my question to you. Will it ?
Easter this year is April 4th.
He is Risen
Are you getting it yet?
Thanks for reading
We are one
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