God Identifies with the Victims.

Luke 13:22-35.

I.

            Jesus continues to walk through Judean villages, on his way to Jerusalem.  Luke recounts someone asking him a question about how many people will be saved.  It is a pointless question, rooted at best in curiosity, and at worst as a trick to get Jesus to say something unorthodox or unpopular.  If he implies, for instance, that non-Jews could be saved, Jesus is inviting harsher attacks from the establishment.  Some folks seem to have a stake in believing that as few people as possible will be saved – including them, of course.  It’s like being saved has to be a very exclusive club, or it wouldn’t be worth striving for.  It’s like there is some sour, smug satisfaction some people get from believing that hell will be very densely populated... with everyone but them.

            Jesus doesn’t take the bait.  He says, in effect, “Don’t worry about many or few.  Your job is to strive to enter the narrow door, which means living the life of love, justice, forgiveness, and peace now, in your relationships today.  Many will try to enter.  It’s not easy.  But if you’re worrying about the head count it is an indication that you’re distracted from what is really important. 

            “For the time will come when the door of the Kingdom will be locked from the inside.  And maybe you will be the one standing outside ringing the doorbell, saying, ‘Lord, open to us!’  And the Lord will say, ‘I have no idea where you’re coming from.’  And you will say, ‘We ate and drank with you, and you taught in our streets!  How can you say you don’t know us?’  And the Lord will say, ‘I do not know where you come from; go away from me all you evildoers.’”

            Mere association with Jesus, simply showing up to eat and drink with him, just listening pleasantly to his teaching but doing nothing about it, not letting what he says transform our life, not living according to Jesus’ way, won’t save us.  To gain entrance into the Kingdom of God we have to participate in the Kingdom of God now. 

            The Kingdom of God is like a round hole.  We are like square pegs.  We can hang out with Jesus, call ourselves by his name, listen and even wholeheartedly agree with his teachings, but if we don’t actually shave off our hard angles and sharp edges, if we don’t become transformed into round pegs, we will not fit though the round hole.

            If we don’t sand off our selfishness, our greed, our gluttony, our carelessness, our violence, our fear and anger, we will not fit.  If we try to take all our baggage with us, we will not fit.  If we are still loaded down with self-righteousness, exclusion, superiority, and pride, it’s not going to happen, no matter how much we know and like Jesus, no matter how vociferously we proclaim ourselves to be “Christians,” and especially if we are very proficient at looking down on others and gloating in their anticipated exclusion, we will certainly not fit.  We will hammer at the door like indignant and inconvenienced customers, and the door will remain shut.

    

II.

            Jesus says, “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.”  Notice how he continues to speak in the second person: “you,” “you,” “you.”  It is not those other people who get excluded; it is “you,” the people to whom he is speaking, those who are most sure of inclusion because of being such great Jesus-supporters, these are the ones who don’t make it.  The ones who, instead of following Jesus, invest their energy in trying to figure out how many will be saved.  The ones who rely on their connection to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the loyal and religious people, the ones who maybe even applaud Jesus and argue on his behalf, but do not do what he said to do.

            Regret.  Remorse.  Anger.  Sorrow.  Resentment.  Hurt.  Blame.  Grief.  These are some of the feelings represented by the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”  Colossal disappointment!  They are all dressed up and completely expecting to have the door opened to them and find welcome, reward, appreciation, and gratitude.  But they are still square pegs.  They still can’t fit through the narrow, round hole that is the Kingdom of God.

            There’s a great African-American spiritual that has a refrain that goes: “The people keep coming but the train has gone.”  It is a theme that runs through Scripture.  The Kingdom of God is more than showing up.  You have to show up on time.  There is a narrow window of opportunity and you can miss it.  Procrastination can be fatal.  The time for action is now.

            Then Jesus continues in a way that is likely to offend some of his hearers.  He says: “Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God.” God is gathering his children from the four corners of the earth, not just from Israel, not just those who consider themselves to be the chosen ones.  Not just those who have the Scriptures, the traditions, the rituals, and the ancestry.  The ones who imagine themselves entitled will have to stand to the side and watch as people they dismissed as condemned riff-raff joyfully file into the banquet all ahead of them. 

            “Indeed,” Jesus concludes, “some are last who will be first, and some are first who will be last.”  God’s love is pervasive in creation; God’s Spirit is everywhere; Paul says that Christ’s “act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.”  But it is possible to cut yourself off from this life; and we do this by cutting-off others: if we try to make ourselves first we will be made last, if we try to save our lives we will lose them, but if we lose our lives and put ourselves last, at the far end of the table, we will be made first, receive life, and be invited to the head of the table.

III.

            In the middle of this discourse, Jesus is interrupted by some Pharisees who tell him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”  This may be taken as a warning or a threat.  On the one hand Jesus was usually in conflict with the Pharisees.  On the other hand, some Pharisees could have recognized Jesus as Jewish teacher who deserved to be protected from a slimeball like Herod.  

            In Jesus’ reply he refers to Herod as a “fox.”  It was not a compliment.  Foxes were considered sly and nasty predators.  Jesus tells them that they are to inform Herod that he has work to do, healing and liberating people from demons, and he’ll be done when he is done, and not before.  He’s headed for Jerusalem anyway, which is outside of Herod’s jurisdiction. 

            Herod does not have the power to obstruct Jesus’ plan, which is to go to Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed.  He is a prophet, and that is the place where prophets get lynched.  If it weren’t for the gospels no one would even remember Herod anyway.  He’s not significant enough to get in the way of this movement.

            Jesus says, “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”  That’s because Jerusalem was the only place where sacrifices could be made, and Jesus intends his death to be the final sacrifice that ends all sacrificial solutions to the problem of human sinfulness.  His death will reveal what many of the prophets preached, which is that God does not desire literal sacrifice which involves deliberate and deadly violence against an innocent victim.  God does not desire that the people find their unity by ganging up on someone, or their animal substitute, and killing them.

            Jesus will demonstrate that God identifies with the victim.  We see this throughout Jesus’ ministry with victims of disease, possession, exclusion, injustice, violence, and hatred.  Jesus intentionally hangs out with precisely those individuals whom society deems expendable.  He re-deems them as beloved of God, and it is with these, who are, like him, “rejected stones” that he builds his new community.

            This is incomprehensible even to his disciples, let alone to a society that worships the strong, the winners, the successful, the attractive, and the popular.  It is not until after his resurrection that his disciples begin to get it.  And Christians would become known for nothing so much as service to the needy, the losers, the disenfranchised, and the victims.

IV.

            Thinking of this leads Jesus to meditate on the holy city of Jerusalem, where he is headed.  His words are full of sorrow and longing.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!  How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!  See, your house is left to you.” 

            He compares himself to a mother hen trying to gather her chicks under her protective wings, but the children of the city do not come to her.  They prefer to be on their own, making their own decisions… and so they are left vulnerable, exposed, and will eventually be destroyed when the city finally reaps the consequences of its injustice and violence, and the Romans demolish the whole place, about 40 years after Jesus says this.  They prefer to be the children of the city, rather than the children of God.

            It is not something that Jesus is very happy about.  The one who identifies so closely with the victims also feels in advance the pain and horror that the children of the city will suffer, some of the very same people who will scream in a frenzy for his death.  Surely the words in the book of the prophet Ezekiel are in his mind: “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God.”

            Jesus is there, with the ones who suffer, breaking the cycle of violence by taking the world’s violence on himself, absorbing it, disarming it, neutralizing it, revealing its fundamental evil, and transmuting it into the way of life.

            So he concludes his words to the children of the city by saying, “And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”  He is quoting Psalm 118:26, which we usually repeat when we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  It is a hymn that was among the Psalms always sung at major Jewish festivals, including Passover.  People will pointedly sing it when he enters Jerusalem, as they spread palm branches and garments on the street ahead of him.

            Is that when the children of the city see him?  Or is it when they nail him to the cross and raise him up to die in the sun?  Is that when they truly see who he is, the very living presence of the God who created all things, with them?  Or is it now, every time we eat the bread and drink from the cup, proclaiming his saving death and resurrection, that we see him, in the communion we share together, in the mission for which we are given energy and power?

V.

            Maybe we can only see him when we see him as the victim of our own violence.  Maybe we can only see him when we are killing him, that is, when he is exposing our sinfulness, and forcing us to look at ourselves, our behavior, our society, our thoughts, and our words… and grieve.  Maybe we see him most clearly when we are finally made aware of the victims of our own policies and decisions, the people we are harming without even being aware of it, all over the world.  Maybe we encounter him most directly in the people we allow to go to prison or throw into detention centers, the people whom we choose to sacrifice supposedly for the greater good.

            Or, to go even deeper, maybe we can only see him when we identify with him, and see how he shares our brokenness, our vulnerability, our diseases, and our mortality, our death.

            We cannot see him from the perspective of our successes and triumphs, because all of these are at someone else’s expense.  We cannot see him from the perspective of our entitlements.  But only from the perspective of the last, the least, the ones at the bottom, the victims, do we see how we are lifted up with him, gathered under his maternal wings from north and south and east and west, brought to the front of the line, along the narrow way and through the open door, into the loving arms of the living God, singing “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”.

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