"But Wasn't Jesus Angry in the Temple?"

Try as I might I have not found one verse in the various reports of Jesus overturning the tables of the money changers and driving out the animals from the temple which says that He was angry. Not one.

Instead, an entirely different word is used by John to describe how Jesus was feeling at the time.

"And His disciples 

remembered that it is written,

 'The zeal for Your house will eat Me up'." 

That's John 2:17. The quote within is from Psalm 69:9.

What is zeal? 

Zeal is very earnest or strong enthusiasm for something. It has no connection with anger at all.

Someone said to me once, "But He used a whip to drive out the people!"

It doesn't say that - it says something quite different.

"And having made a lash He drove them all out of the temple enclosure, both the sheep and the oxen..." John 2:15a. 

The 'all' in that sentence obviously refers to 'both' of the two types of animals listed, which in those days were quite domesticated and used to being around people. He would have needed a whip to get them moving.

Artist renditions (paintings) can give a false impression of what happened.

We can easily get a false impression by looking at art, paintings by highly regarded artists who interpret a scene according to how they see it. Their perception often falls short of Biblical truth, in much the same way that popular Christian music, especially since 2000 or so, contains themes which cannot be backed up by a thorough knowledge or study of Scripture.

It's possible that there were actually two temple cleansings by Jesus, and that John's record occurred at the beginning of His ministry. Even so, Mark tells a more complete story than any of the others in chapter 11 of the event near the end of Jesus' ministry, and within it is enough extra detail to show that Jesus was nowhere near anger when He cleared the temple. Mark's story starts with Jesus riding into Jerusalem to the extraordinary acclaim of the people along the way. When He reached Jerusalem He entered the temple.

"And when He had looked around, observing everything, since it was now evening, He went out to Bethany with the twelve." Mark 11:11.

He had all night to plan what He was going to do. There was no sudden rush of anger here but a carefully calculated plan to draw attention to what was wrong in the House, and to draw attention to Himself as being authorised to be about His Father's business. 

Then, "On the day following" (verse 12) "they came to Jerusalem and He went into the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and buying in the temple..." (verse 15).

One of the biggest triggers for anger is when we encounter the unexpected. Jesus had been in the temple many times; He was not surprised or angered by what He saw, but He was certainly stirred up to finally do something about it. His course had been set.

See also Breaking Free from Anger, Fury, Rage and More here.

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