Luke 13:31-35
One of the challenges of today’s Gospel lesson is that just looking at the text before us provides little context to explain why the Pharisees wanted Jesus out of town so quickly. In some ways we might be led to believe that the Pharisees are asking Jesus to leave out of an altruistic desire to preserve his life. We might be persuaded that the Pharisees, the preservationists of the Jewish faith, are trying to save the life of the Messiah. But if we were to read further along in Luke’s Gospel we would know that Herod only desired to meet Jesus. And if we were to fast-forward the text on into the last remaining chapters, Herod relinquishes his control over Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, and in fact hands Jesus back to Pilate. Jesus was in the hands of Pilate, yet Herod relinquishes that authority and in fact did not want to kill him.
So what was the motivation behind the Pharisee’s insistence that Jesus leave their town?
Well, unfortunately that portion of our story is not clear to us from the Gospel alone. It requires reading the verses that immediately precede our lesson.
Luke 13:26 “Strive to enter through the narrow door; for many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able.
Luke 13:25 When once the owner of the house has got up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and to knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, open to us,’ then in reply he will say to you, ‘I do not know where you come from.’
Luke 13:26 Then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets.’
Luke 13:27 But he will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me, all you evildoers!’
Luke 13:28 There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrown out.
Luke 13:29 Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.
Luke 13:30 Indeed, some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”
Luke 13:31 At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you”[emphasis by Walters].
Given the events from the preceding chapters and putting ourselves in the place of those faithful Jewish villagers, who wouldn’t want Jesus to get out of town?
In our story Jesus is doing exactly what we today are most uncomfortable with: he’s upsetting the apple carts of our faith by calling his fellow Jews out of complacency and polite religion. He is calling his brothers and sisters of the faith to embrace the transformed reality of God’s law of Love.
So I ask you today, while we walk our Pilgrim path of Lent, are we falling short in transformation but lagging large in being religious? OR, better put, what does it mean when we profess a faith in the comfortable confines of bricks, mortar, stained-glass, and polished wood; yet when we leave this place of hallowed beauty we return to previous habits of complacency? I confess it is a struggle I face myself. But I dare say that it is a struggle that our God knows we face daily.
And then there are those haunting words of Jesus, in reaction to the holy and safe city “Jerusalem, Jerusalem”. Jerusalem for the Jews, the physical and spiritual home of the Temple, was the guardian of the Faith. Jerusalem was synonymous with the faith of Israel’s children. Jerusalem, as a city, was synonymous with the Temple; the Temple was Judaism. It was the gold standard by which orthodoxy was weighed; its situation was doubly jeopardized in that Jerusalem was also the seat of political authority and the theocratic reality for these Jews. Threats to faith were threats to the state and vice versa. Yet knowing that his teaching would lead only to his own suffering and death he recognizes that Jerusalem will reject him, just as they had rejected so many other prophets who had attempted to reform the sleepy complacency of Israel’s children.
Jesus knows that any teaching that he preached in contrast to a polite and politic Gospel of abundance preached by his contemporaries would disrupt not only his religion but the political status quo as well. And fully aware of history’s repetitive nature, Jesus marches to a certain death that awaits him, yet he will continue to shake things up along the way saying, try and stop me. Jesus’ actions are to be for us, an inspiration of the struggle one faces when we earnestly and heart-fully preach love in the face of consternation; when the dominant forces of society say no, you can’t.
This Gospel lesson reminds me very much of a story I heard on This American Life on NPR just yesterday. This story was about a father and his 4-year old daughter. It was Christmas time and she wanted to know why people celebrated Christmas, so to help answer this question the father bought the daughter a Children’s bible and each night they read a little portion of it telling the story of Jesus’ birth. A few weeks go by and father and daughter are running errands and they drive by a Church in front of which is an enormous Crucifix, at which the little girl very fearfully asked who is that?!? The father, a little embarrassed, said well we haven’t gotten to the end of the story, but that’s Jesus. He was killed because he believed in love of everybody and that we should do undo others as they would do unto us, this got him in a lot of trouble and they killed him for it. Then a week or two go by and both the girl and the father have off for MLK day, and like her inquiry about the origins of Christmas she asked, who Martin Luther King was. Her father replied, ‘MLK was a preacher. The father continues, he believed that all people should be treated the same no matter who they were or what they looked like. The Little Girl says, that’s what Jesus Said. And then she asks… Did they kill him, too? This child’s ability to draw a link between the message of both Jesus and MLK highlights what historically happens to people with dangerous messages. Their lives are at risk. Jesus is aware that his message is a threat to his life, yet he continues with his teaching knowing what will happen to him because he knows it’s right.
At the end of today’s Gospel Jesus says, ‘See, your house is in tact.’ As if to say, your perceived status in God’s eyes is in tact for now, but not for much longer. Your house is in tact. Remember these words, this Gospel, was recounted after his Death and resurrection, these words were written after Rome instituted military authority over Judea changing its name to Palestine, these words were written after the Temple was destroyed. The only house intact for the Jews, the only thing remaining for all their concern over Jesus’ law of love and mercy, the only house remaining for them was rubble.
For all their attempts to preserve the sanctity and orthodoxy of their polite faith, the stubbornness and hardness of heart of the Pharisees, their inability to accept a new law left their city, their Temple, their Holy of Holies in rubble.
Change now, accept the gospel of transformation, so that we may see and stand before our God of love and mercy, and truly say ‘Blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.’
AMEN.
