"Making a whip of cords, [Jesus] drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables."

– John 2:15

It’s not the Jesus most of us like to imagine. There he is, in the Temple, swinging that whip of cords, pushing over the tables of the moneychangers, scattering the sacrificial animals (who, with their mooing and bleating, are making an unholy racket). If you looked on his face that day, you would have seen a steely determination, yes – but also anger: a great deal of anger.

Yes, Jesus did get angry. He was human, after all, and human beings do feel that emotion called anger. On this occasion, Jesus’ anger becomes sharply focused, in the form of rage. Everybody gets out of his way, because it looks like this man – this madman, it seems to them – could really hurt them.

And what is it that’s caused Jesus, son of God, to lose control in this way? It can only be one thing: injustice.

The sacrificial system in the Temple had evolved, over the centuries, into an efficient machine for fleecing rich and poor alike – earning a great deal of money for those insiders who ran it. If you went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, your goal was the Temple. What you did there was sacrifice an animal, according to the law of Moses. You could bring your own sacrificial animal, of course, but if you had traveled a great distance – as many of those pilgrims had – this was impractical. And so you brought money instead – coins jingling in your purse, that you would use to purchase a beast for the sacrifice.

There were lots of animals for sale, in and around Jerusalem, but the law of Moses said you had to have a perfect animal, without mark or blemish. If you bought one anywhere other than the Temple precincts, you had to bring it before an inspector, who would tell you whether or not it met the grade, according to ritual law. It was far safer to buy a sacrificial animal from one of the vendors in the Temple courtyard, for these beasts had already been inspected. The quality was guaranteed – and no wonder, because those merchants regularly slipped a few coins to the inspectors.

There was something else. If you had journeyed from one of lands of the Jewish diaspora – from Greece, or Egypt, or Asia Minor, or even distant Rome – the coins in your purse would have been imperial coins, with the Emperor’s likeness engraved upon it. You could use these coins just about anywhere in Jerusalem, except for the Temple precincts: for the image of the Emperor was considered idolatrous, an affront to God. In order to buy yourself a sacrificial animal, you had to first exchange your money for Jewish coin, that bore no image of a human face. The moneychangers who performed this little transaction charged exorbitant commissions – but the poor worshipers had no choice, because it was a monopoly. They got them coming and going, those Temple merchants. It was a notoriously corrupt system.

In swinging his whip of cords – overturning the moneychangers’ tables and scattering the sacrificial animals – Jesus is concerned not with the proximity of money to a place of worship, as some have assumed. He didn’t care about that. No, Jesus is angry at the injustice of it all: at the fact that the Temple itself has been made into a huge and corrupt machine for cheating the out-of-towners out of their life savings, money they have stored up for this once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage.

If Jesus were to show up in our world today, I wonder what he’d find to get angry about? I can think of something. It’s described in a story I’d like to share with you: a true story. I found it in People magazine, of all places – not my usual source of sermon material, but it’s a story that speaks to my heart, and I think it will speak to yours as well.

***

It’s a story about a three-year-old boy named Gift – Gift Msunzi. His family lives in Malawi, a tiny, impoverished nation in southeastern Africa. His parents – who are Christians – named him Gift, because they saw him as a gift from God.

One day this past January, Gift rose with the dawn, as he always does. He had been feeling sick, with flulike aches and fever, but this morning he felt much better. He raced outside to the home of his best friend, James, and the two young boys went out into the street to play soccer – or, at least, their three-year-old version of it. Here in their village, called Gwengwere, they didn’t have a regulation soccer ball – or any ball at all, for that matter. So, Gift and James made do with a piece of refuse. They kicked it through some muddy puddles left over from the previous night’s rain.

At noon, Gift’s mother, Esther, called him to come for the day’s first meal: a local dish called sima, made of cornmeal and water. Gift sat on the dirt floor of the home he shared with his parents and two brothers – a 10-foot-by-10-foot hut, with a thatched roof and not a single stick of furniture. That was when he started feeling sick again. "Pick me up, Mommy," he pleaded. Setting down Patrick, her 4-month-old, Esther took Gift into her arms. She noticed that he felt feverish. The aches and pains of the past few days had returned. The muscles of his jaw grew so tense that it locked into place. Something was very wrong.

The frantic Esther called for her husband, Patris, who was working in the family’s cornfields – the family’s sole source of income, which averages less than $100 a year. Carrying Gift on his back, Patris ran two miles to the health clinic. There was only one staff member in the clinic: not a doctor, but a medical assistant. He spoke the words the Msunzi family did not want to hear: it was acute malaria. Gift was already suffering from anemia; with the malaria on top of it, the outcome could be organ failure, coma or even death.

Patris knew he had to get his son to the hospital – but how? The nearest one was nineteen miles away, and there was only one ambulance in the entire hundred-square-mile district. But it was the family’s lucky day. An SUV was passing by, filled with United Nations aid workers. Patris pleaded for a ride, and the driver offered to take father and son directly to the hospital.

Getting there would prove to be only half the struggle. The little boy still faced overwhelming odds. The most successful cure for malaria is a cocktail of medicines called ACT, or "Artemisinin Combination Therapies." The good news is, this packet of medicines costs a mere $1.20 per patient. The bad news is, it’s not available to the vast majority of people in Malawi. The government of that nation is as poor as its people. It can’t afford to pay for the bulk order the pharmaceutical companies require.

Stretched out in back of the speeding SUV, Gift was fading fast. "He stopped talking," his father said, describing the scene later. "I called ‘Gift, Gift,’ – but he wouldn’t answer. He was just crying." Then the boy went into convulsions. It was 3:30 p.m. when they finally made it to the hospital, but even then it took fifteen minutes for a nurse – the only pediatric health-care worker on the staff – to see him. By this time the little boy was frothing at the mouth. His eyes were rolling back in his head. The nurse gave him a shot of quinine – the only malaria medicine she had – and phenobarbitol for the convulsions. But this was all but useless, because Gift’s disease had already progressed so far.

Patris held his son’s hand as little Gift lay in a simple bed in a bare room, connected to an IV. Later he would talk about how his middle child was known around the village for his sense of humor. "He liked to go up to adults and say, ‘You can't fight me, I’m very brave,’ his father recalled. Now his son was fighting for his life, and he needed all the bravery he could get.

Esther finally arrived about 6:00 p.m. A fellow villager had taken her on his bicycle to the highway, where she had caught a bus. By the time she arrived, the convulsions were over. "We thought maybe he was getting better, said Patris, as the boy lay peacefully in the hospital bed. "He never talked. We didn’t know it was the end."

By 6:30 p.m., Gift Msunzi, the little boy who thought himself so very brave, was dead. The next afternoon, that single district ambulance became available, and his parents brought him back home to Gwengwere. The entire village wept for the lost boy. In Malawi the average life expectancy is only 39, and the infant mortality rate is one in nine, but no one could believe that little Gift, of the big smile, was gone forever. "He was a funny boy – he just liked to play," said Likiana Chimchere, mother of Gift’s pal, James. Likiana knew what this sort of grief was all about, for in 1997, she too lost a son to malaria. "He got sick one day, and the same day he died," she said softly. "Just like Gift."

Some women of the village washed Gift’s body and laid him in his family’s hut. They covered him in the brilliantly-colored cloths called kangas. Throughout the night, a choir of women sang hymns over the boy. The melodies floated softly through the village. Relatives crammed the Msunzis’ tiny hut. At times Esther broke down, fleeing to the neighbors’ home next door for a few moments of refuge from the pain and confusion. Neighbors did about the same thing they do in our country: they brought food. Some of them brought money and other small gifts as well, as they could afford it.

This past January 17, just two days after Gift Msunzi was kicking a makeshift ball through the mud-puddles, the village of Gwengwere prepared for his funeral. Around 1:00 p.m. the village leader announced that the time had come for final goodbyes. Gift’s parents and close relatives touched the boy one last time. Two men arrived with a small wooden casket with a white cloth attached to it, and gently laid Gift inside. Then, according to custom, they tucked around him all his earthly belongings – two changes of clothing. A number of children filed in, for once solemn and silent. One of them was Gift’s buddy James, holding tight to his mother’s hand.

"Who will play with my son now?" Chimchere cried. "He was his only friend." Gift’s older brother Dixon, age seven, fell to his knees in sobs, then flung himself against a wall, wailing uncontrollably.

The 30-minute service took place in a nearby field. A Christian preacher read scripture and spoke fervently about "the river of death." Mourners trudged to the burial ground on a muddy, winding path through the corn. Amid reverent silence, several men lowered Gift into the earth, then took up hoes to fill the grave. [Richard Jerome and Mary Green, "A Family’s Fight for Life, " in People magazine, 3/13/06, pp. 104-109.]

***

I’m sorry to bring you such a sad and depressing story on such a bright and beautiful day, but I really do think it does us good to hear a story like that from time to time – because it helps put a human face on the poverty that afflicts so many of God’s children. Behind each of those child-mortality statistics from Africa is a smile, a laugh, a loving embrace that a child’s family will never know again.

The greatest tragedy, of course, is that deaths like these are so very, very preventable. All it would have taken to protect Gift from malaria would have been a few dollars’ worth of mosquito netting for him to sleep under at night. Or, if he got the disease anyway, it would have taken only $1.20 worth of medicines to save him. That’s the price of a large coffee at the 7-Eleven.

Or, look at it another way. I’m receiving chemotherapy for cancer right now, and the bill for that treatment, when everything is said and done, will very likely be close to $120,000. That’s not what I’m going to pay, of course; the insurance company will come along and negotiate a lower price, then they’ll pay the lion’s share of what’s left (for which I’m very grateful). What I’m thinking about, though, is the total cost: $120,000. You do the math: a medicine cocktail that costs $1.20 would have saved that Malawian boy’s life. At that rate, the cost of one patient’s cancer treatment, here in the Western world, would save 100,000 third-world kids from malaria. Is the value of my life, in the eyes of God, truly greater than theirs?

Now here’s a statistic that will really blow your mind. You know that $120,000 that my cancer treatment’s probably going to cost, that could save 100,000 kids from dying of malaria? That’s equivalent to the cost of about one minute of the war in Iraq. But that’s just a reflection of our national priorities, isn’t it?: war first; costly medical treatment for Americans, second; inexpensive public-health intervention in the third world, dead last – and I do mean "dead."

Jesus once said, in Matthew, chapter 10:

The Christian preacher who spoke at little Gift Msunzi’s funeral was very likely a Presbyterian. The article in People magazine doesn’t say so, but I do happen to know that Malawi was evangelized by Church of Scotland missionaries, and that Presbyterians are the largest Christian group in the country today. So when that preacher showed up to minister to our fellow Presbyterians over there, in their hour of grief, he could very well have quoted that verse from Matthew 10: "So do not be afraid, you are of more value than many sparrows." I believe that’s the way God looks at them; would that we could do the same.

If Jesus did show up in today’s world, with his whip of cords in hand, I don’t think he’d find any price-gouging of the cost of sacrificial animals to get upset about. But I do think he’d get angry about this: that his children in many parts of the world are dying, and we could stop so much of it so easily, but we don’t.

Yes, I know it’s a huge problem, and yes, I know that anything you or I could do as individuals would be just a drop in the bucket. But those drops add up; they surely do. Did you know that our church’s mission giving has not been staying the same in recent years, but has rather been going down – and that similar trends have been happening in most of the other churches of Monmouth Presbytery? Across the country, in fact, giving is down, and more and more local churches are feeling strapped for funds, so they’re keeping more and more dollars to spend locally. The Global Mission Unit of the General Assembly has got people all signed up to go overseas to serve as medical missionaries and other church workers, but they don’t have the money to send them. I think Jesus would get a little angry at that, don’t you?

One Great Hour of Sharing is coming up on Palm Sunday. It’s a major offering that makes possible a great deal of good work in the world: refugee relief and resettlement, self-development of people, hunger programs. It’s a one-shot deal, that offering – but by God, it’s a start. Each of us can make a difference by making more than just a token gift to that special appeal.

We could all do so much more, as well, when the time of the annual stewardship campaign comes around. Another few dollars a week may not sound like much, but a portion of each dollar moves on up the line as our church’s mission giving, and that can make a tremendous difference to people in need around the world.

Each of us can also make a huge difference by simply remembering something I hope we’ve all sensed today, as we’ve heard the sad story of little Gift Msunzi: that our neighbors are not just those who live across the street, but also those who live across the world. Our closing hymn is all about neighbors: and more than that, it’s a hymn from Africa.:

Let us pray:Jesus, precious Lord,

fill us with your love till it fairly overflows.

Show us how to serve, according to your example.

Teach us to reach out, bringing hope to all the world.  Amen.

Copyright 2006, by Carlos E. Wilton.   All rights reserved.