When Jesus Riots: Embracing Creative Anger and Holy Disruption
Recently, I've been thinking about anger. Specifically, the kind of explosive, creative anger that leads to transformation. The kind that makes people uncomfortable, that disrupts the status quo, that refuses to be polite in the face of injustice.
I've always wanted to be "that girl" – you know the one. The black girl who snaps her gum, who claps out every word when angry, who rolls her eyes and you feel it in your bones. As Austin Channing Brown writes in "I'm Still Here," she's "the one who always says what she thinks, who begins her sentences with 'first of all' and 'what you're not going to do is.'" The black girl who white people are afraid of making angry.
Or sometimes it's not a girl at all – it's a queer brown boy, flamboyant and confident, ready with the perfect read for anyone who deserves it. These figures represent something powerful: the ability to channel anger into immediate, undeniable presence that demands accountability.
But that's not who I am. I'm the one who remains well-mannered and level-headed in the moment, then goes home to sit in the kitchen with my wife, telling her hours later what the perfect comeback would have been. This can be helpful in certain situations where you stand to lose something meaningful. But it doesn't create the kind of disruption that calls everyone present to account.
This is why I find myself drawn to Jesus's actions in the temple, as recorded in John's Gospel. Here we see Jesus as that person – the one who creatively uses anger right on the spot to make a point. While other gospel accounts frame this as Jesus critiquing abuses within the system, John's version presents something more radical: the system itself is the problem.
To be clear, the system Jesus confronts isn't Judaism itself. If that were his target, he would have gone inside the temple to the Holy of Holies. Instead, he remains in the outer courts, in the space of transaction. He confronts a priestly order with a long history of collaborating with imperial powers, something the prophets had consistently called out alongside the privileging of ritual over justice.
What strikes me most is the methodical nature of Jesus's protest. This isn't a spontaneous temper tantrum – he deliberately braids a whip, carefully orchestrating his disruption. He demands the removal of animals, pours money onto the ground (an act scholar Damon Garcia compares to looting, removing goods from the cycle of exchange and profit), and overturns tables in what today would be considered property damage. These aren't reformist actions – they're aimed at dismantling a corrupt system that had parasitically attached itself to genuine religious practice.
This brings me to Thomas Glave's "Words to Our Now," where he writes about the fear he carried as a young gay Jamaican-American man, alongside "the constant furious rage and shame that I've ever been afraid. Am still afraid. Have ever had to. Feel afraid at all." These words exploded something inside me when I first read them, helping me recognize my own fury and shame at having allowed others to make me afraid because of fundamental aspects of how God made me.
As we navigate our current moment – caught between honoring MLK's legacy and confronting ongoing struggles for justice – I believe we're called to embrace both zeal and anger. The disciples remembered the words "zeal for your house will consume me," or put another way, "passion for your house will be my undoing." Many of us fear this – that the passion needed for these times will cost us too much, strip away too much respectability, threaten our vision of the good life.
The truth is, it absolutely will. But as Audre Lorde teaches us in "Uses of the Erotic," our capacity for deep feeling is vital information about what's possible. When we recognize our deepest feelings, we "begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society."
I'll be honest – as a queer Black woman, I'm tired of being angry. But Lorde reminds us in "Uses of Anger" that "focused with precision, anger can become a source of energy serving progress and change." It becomes "illumination and laughter and protection and fire in places where there is no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter."
Looking ahead, I see challenges that will require this kind of focused anger. The potential loss of federal recognition for my marriage. ICE targeting schools in our community. We'll need to show up with anger and action, even when issues don't directly affect us personally. Any fear we feel must be transformed into deep feeling that leads to action and disruption.
Why? Because we follow a God who riots – riots for the sake of love and justice. Would I prefer to be passed over when it comes to prophetic sacrifice? Absolutely. I'd love to just write poetry and pick flowers. But Jesus shows us that's not possible if we want to dismantle systems of harm.
This transformation won't happen all at once, and it will look different for each of us depending on our personality. The key is remembering that in the economy of God, death is always followed by resurrection. As Johnny Rashid puts it, we must "allow yourself to be motivated by the transcendent in order to enact the imminent."
We follow Jesus, the sent one of God – and yes, the one who snaps her fingers.
