A conflict, very familiar indeed to us in our own lives, runs almost the whole way through the Gospels: a conflict between patience and impatience; love and anger; peace and violence. Jesus is angry and impatient with the religious Establishment of his time again and again – the instances are too numerous to mention. He says that he brings “not peace but a sword” to the inter-generational tensions of his time, telling his would-be disciples that they must break with their families and past lives. He looks thoughtfully at the pollution of the Temple by noise and commerce, and takes violent and dramatic action against it. He curses the fig tree that symbolizes for him the inert unproductiveness of Jerusalem, the capital of his culture. But all of this anger stems from love, and is a very familiar phenomenon to all of us if we stop to think about our many and varied feelings about our family, friends, church, and nation.

These conflicts run all the way along his path of the Messiah, and in them we can see him feeling his way into what it means to be the one who ushers in the Kingdom. The tradition, of course, sees it as a path of lordly power; but he has a different sense of his tradition. His path begins as a way of love and gentleness, in which he calls his disciples and teaches them; moves among the flowers of the desert and the abundance of the seashores. A beautiful time: but he does not yield to its temptations. He never claims the Messiahship. When anyone asks him “Are you the Messiah?” he replies with a question: “What do you think?” or “What kind of Messiah are you expecting?”

–Mary C. Morrison in Pendle Hill Pamphlet 260: The Way of the Cross