We all have our breaking point. For each of us it’s different, it’s unique. We each have our limit where we feel we can take no more. And we snap. We get upset. We might yell. We might throw something or slam something. Or worse. The stress of daily life and our ability, or perhaps our inability, to cope with that stress causes it all to bubble up and erupt. I’ve been there. As a father. As a husband. As an employee. As a human being. We see it in the world.
It’s human nature.
You see it in the Gospel today. I’m not saying that Jesus lost it and snapped. I’m not saying that He was out of control, because He was not. But He definitely got upset and clearly had enough. And He let those in the temple know about it.
I read this reading and I almost feel the anger and disgust in Jesus’ heart. And then I read the last verse. I had never really paid attention to this verse before, but today it sticks with me, it pierces me.
But Jesus would not trust himself to them because he knew them all, and did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well.
Many people believed when they saw the signs He did, the miracles He performed. But He would not entrust Himself to them. To us. He knew what was going to happen. He knew how things could change, the possibilities of human nature.
He understood it well. Perhaps almost too well. Perhaps after His outburst in the temple, Jesus felt once again, perhaps in a different way, perhaps for the very first time just how it feels to be a human, with all the emotions. Surely, he experienced emotions prior to this, but perhaps this was the first time, or at least the most intent time, where He truly experienced and felt what it truly meant to be human and what our struggle is.
He did not need anyone to testify about human nature. He himself understood it well.
Maybe He got a good taste of the human experience here in the temple. Maybe it scared Him a little, thinking of the possibilities, thinking of the pain and flood of emotions that run through us as humans when we face stress and trouble and problems in our life, when we face the ugliness of this world. I think that just as Jesus is God, today, He shows us His humanity.
There is just something about that line that strikes me, a sense that Jesus finally understood what it was like to live in the human condition. My RSV bible says it another way, that Jesus himself knew what was in man.
He knows what is inside us, what we are capable of.
Which is why He came. He came to save us from ourselves. That’s why God gave us the commandments we read about in the first reading today. He gave us those to save us from ourselves, but to truly save us, He had to become one of us, and experience what we experience firsthand, that through the ugliness, a beauty would emerge. And He wants our beauty, our inner beauty, to emerge from us.
Jesus knows us too well. He knows what we are capable of, the pain we are capable of inflicting. And yet He sees our possibilities, what we are truly capable of, the good that we are capable of radiating.
Jesus sees the ugly in us. And He sees the beauty. And sometimes he flips up the tables in our life and cracks the whip to get our attention, because our ugly is overshadowing the beauty. But He does so out of love. Because He Gets It! He Gets Us!
He understands our human nature because He is human. He felt it to. He has it. And this fills me with comfort because I know that He is there alongside me, and all of us, knowing what we deal with. While may get distracted from time to time, as long as we desire to get better and do better, I think that’s what He expects of us. He knows our human nature and that we will sin. He just wants us to get up and do the next right thing, forgive and seek forgiveness, and try to do better the next time – for Him. As Thomas Merton said, I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You.
He will be pleased if we try and put in the effort, He will see the good within us, the love within us and He will draw it out. Because really – deep, deep down – that is our human nature.
EX 20:1-17; PS 19; 1 COR 1:22-25; JN 2:13-25
