Any portrait of a "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" smacks squarely into this week's gospel lesson: Jesus as an enraged, whip- wielding zealot. At heart, however, we tend to like this portrait of Jesus just as we all cheer when the cheek-turning good guy in the movies finally hauls off and punches the loathsome bad guy in the mouth flattening him with one powerful blow.

From the comfortable distance of 20 centuries, it is easy to look disdainfully at the presence of the money-changers and animal- selles in the temple court and to define their motives as spiritually perverted and exploitatively profiteering. But, from the perspective of a virtually obedient first-century Jew, Jesus' actions are both motivationally mystifying and culturally threatening.

Furthermore, this event takes place during…