“And when he had made a scourge of small cords, he drove them all out of the temple, and the sheep, and the oxen; and poured out the changers’ money, and overthrew the tables; And said unto them that sold doves, Take these things hence; make not my Father’s house an house of merchandise. And his disciples remembered that it was written, The zeal of thine house hath eaten me up.” (John 2:15-17). It may be hard to reconcile the seemingly lovey-dovey, turn the other cheek Jesus with the guy who started turning over tables and brandishing a whip. In fact, if we knew that as part of our efforts to repent and turn to the Lord He would storm in and start upending our lives and forcefully chasing out all of our bad habits and sins and addictions and old grudges and petty jealousies, we might be more than a little hesitant to open the door when He starts knocking. We’re all for the Lord’s tender mercies, but most of us are more than a little skeptical of the Lord’s tough mercies. In fact, if Christ comes in swinging a whip and dumping all of our secrets, hopes and dreams onto the floor, we would most likely not even call it a mercy at all. But it is. The Lord is nothing if not longsuffering, but sometimes He’s suffered enough, and so have we!. After giving us plenty of chances to put our house in order, sometimes He’s got to come in and help us clear it all out, not little by little but all at once. The Lord has big plans for us. As much as we want to figure everything out on our own terms and at our own pace, the Lord needs us now. The Lord needed Jonah in Nineveh, and if that meant He had to stuff him in the belly of a whale for a couple of days to sweep out all of His servant’s doubts and prejudices, then that’s what He had to do. The Lord couldn’t wait years or decades for Paul or Alma to finally come to their senses and start doing the right thing. They were destroying His church now, and He needed to go in there with a whip and some tough mercies to get them to point all of their considerable energy and charisma in the right direction. On the day that the Lord cleared out the temple, just a few days before He was completely done with His mission, right after the last of the sheep and the oxen and the coins were taken out, Jesus healed the blind and the lame, and children cried out and spoke marvelous things, and none of those miracles would have happened if Jesus hadn’t busted out some tough mercies. “Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.” (CS Lewis). I know that the tough mercies of the Lord can seem painful and scary at first, but God wants us so much to get to where He has planned for us to go, and sometimes we just aren’t moving fast enough and those tough mercies get us there a little quicker.
