Violence and Jesus of our faith simply do not go together. All through his life Jesus has preached love of God and love of neighbor. He has also given us the touching and classical parables of all times by the names ‘The Good Samaritan’ and ‘The Good Shepherd’ to prove his point. He has also sacrificed his own life out of his pure love for others, for no fault of his. So, it becomes difficult even to imagine violence by such a person.
There is no dispute that Jesus is the Son of God. It is a late realization of his disciples, post Resurrection. As a human he lived exactly like one of us even in human limitations. We clearly come across two instances of his anger: (1) He used expletives like hypocrites, broods of vipers, whitewashed tombs, sons of murderers, etc. against the Pharisees and (2) He used violence while cleansing the temple in Jerusalem. So, there must be some strong reason for such a drastic deviation from his normal behavior resulting in violence. With the Pharisees, clearly the reason was their duplicity. But, for violence in the temple, the reason doesn’t stand out clearly; it emerges only when we put together all the four gospels and read them between their historical background. So, it is necessary to see Jesus from the historic perspective since he too has addressed himself most of the time as Son of Man.
Alex Mascarenhas SJ
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