We are still here in the season of Lent. I imagine some of you may be fasting. Some of you may have given something up. All of these are an important part of Lent.
But ultimately, Lent is about Jesus’ journey to the cross. In fact, in the gospel of Luke, from the end of Chapter 9 until the cross, the story is about Jesus going to Jerusalem, going to the cross, and what happens along that road. In 9:51, Luke says that Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem. And Lent is our time to accompany Jesus on that journey. To journey to the cross.
Of course, this journey begs the question, why did Jesus die?
Now, right now, I’m not talking about the theological reason why Jesus died – that his death somehow brings about forgiveness of sins. Instead, I’m talking about the historical reason that Jesus died – why did the Roman empire decide that this Jewish rabbi was so much a threat that he had to be crucified.
Let me say a little bit more about this because the theological explanation for Jesus’ death has become some central to Christianity that I think it’s easy to lose sight of the historical reason. So let’s review Paul for a minute. You see, Paul went around trying to help both Jews and Gentiles believe that Jesus was God’s son. But there’s just one problem. Jesus died and everybody knows God can’t die. So Paul came up with a really brilliant answer to that question – let’s say he was speaking to a Jewish audience who said, “This Jesus guy sounds great. But we can’t get over his death.” Paul might say something like, “You know how we Jews have the sacrificial system? How the high priest will slaughter an unblemished lamb so that our sins will be forgiven, well Jesus was the last sacrifice. He was the great lamb whose death means that sins will forever be forgiven.” And maybe the next day, he was talking to a group of Gentiles who had been influenced by Greek philosophy. Maybe they say, “This Jesus guy sounds great. But we can’t get over his death.” Paul might have said something like, “You know how your philosophers talk about justice. Well, you see, we are all guilty and the just thing is for God to condemn us. But Jesus took our punishment for us in his death so that God’s justice could be met.”
In other words, for first century people, the theological explanations were in response to theological questions. What was a given was that the Roman empire killed Jesus by nailing him to a cross. And so, today, I want us to think about not about why Jesus died from a theological standpoint. But why did he die from a historical standpoint. Why was Jesus’ teaching and actions so threatening that people in power wanted to kill him.
And what we find, is that people in power wanted to kill Jesus after he did something that we would think would be unequivocably good. In Mark, it takes Jesus all the way to the beginning of Chapter 3 before the rulers want to kill him. What had he done? Healed on the Sabbath and healed in the syagogue? In Matthew, the same thing. He healed someone with a withered hand and the rulers decide to kill him. In John, he raised Lazareth from the dead and the leaders began plotting his death. Only a few verses before the passage we read today Jesus healed a woman who was crippled and the synagogue leader responded with condemnation to the woman saying, “Come to get healed on another day. Don’t get healed on the Sabbath.”
It seems that whenever Jesus healed someone, especially on the Sabbath, there was controversy. In fact, virtually everytime Jesus showed up at the synagogue, the local church of the day, there was controversy.
And I think it has to do with the fact that Jesus always valued people more than rules. He valued love more than law. And he rejected any and every theology that said people were to blame for their own pain.
Let me explain. In Jesus’ day, people who had some type of physical disability – whether they were lame or blind or had lepresy or whatever – it was believed that they were being punished for some sin they had committed. But time and again, Jesus says it’s not so. Time and again, Jesus says that those who suffer are not anymore or less sinful than anyone else. It’s nice, though, to be able to explain people’s pain by saying they get what they deserve. We still do this today don’t we – maybe not for people who are sick but for people who have other kinds of pain. To the mother whose son is in prison, we say, she must have been a bad mother. To the man who can’t find work, we say he must be lazy. To the poor, we say, they don’t work hard enough. We don’t have to look very hard to see the ways that we still blame people for their pain today, do we.
And I think this is why in almost all of the healing stories, Jesus tells the person that their sins are forgiven before he heals them. It’s not so much that Jesus is forgiven them for some bad thing they did. It’s more that Jesus is setting them free from the judgment that has blamed them for their own condition. You are blind and forgiven. You are crippled and forgiven. You are poor and forgiven. Your son is in prison and you are forgiven. You are no worse than anybody else because you have pain.
But then Jesus goes a step further. You see, not only were people blamed for their own suffering, they were also classified as unclean. In other words, to be unclean meant that you were cut off from the rest of your people. Because it was believed that your condition, your defilement, your sin, was contagious, you weren’t allowed to be around people who weren’t unclean. In fact, if you were unclean, you had to shout out, “Unclean Unclean” to people who were passing by so they would know not to come near you. You were suffering physically, you were cut-off socially, and you were condemned.
But Jesus doesn’t follow the rules. He touched unclean people. He forces other people to interact with unclean people. Several times in the gospels, Jesus calls an unclean person to come to the front of the synagogue. Now this was a big deal because unclean people had their own section to sit in. So let’s imagine that this is a synagogue. The main door, the wide door, is for all the good, clean, righteous people to enter. Now unclean people could still come in, but they had to come through a separate door, a narrow door. They had to sit in their own section so that no one would have to come into contact with them. So what does Jesus do? He calls the unclean out of their section and asks them to come front and center. In other words, he not only touches those who are unclean, he forces all the other good, church folks, to come into contact with them also.
And so we come to our passage today where Jesus says wide is the gate that leads to destruction and narrow is the gate that leads to life. Now 2000 years later, we hear this teaching and think that Jesus is talking about walking the straight and narrow – something like Johnny Cash might sing about. Today, it’s easy to hear this and think Jesus means that we need to resist the many temptations of the world. But for first century hearers, Jesus’ meaning would have been obvious. They know where there’s a wide gate and a narrow gate – the temple. Except Jesus changes it up – it’s not the wide gate you should enter. The gate for the righteous. In fact, Jesus says that gate leads to death. Instead, it is the narrow gate – the gate for sinners, for the unclean, for the despised. That is the gate that Jesus says leads to life. And that is the mentality that God Jesus killed.
For Jesus, it’s not enough to just heal and restore those who were labeled unclean.Jesus tells all the good church folk, that if they want to find life, if they want to find God, then they have to enter the narrow gate.
They have to make common cause with the outcast, with the unclean. They have to risk their own cleanlinenss, their own reputation, their own position to make common cause with those that were most hurt by the system. That is entering the narrow gate.
And saying things like that will get you killed.
After Jesus says that, we read that Herod is after him. But Jesus doesn’t back down. He calls Herod a fox and he freely acknowledges that he is going to Jerusalem where he indeed will be killed. But then he uses the image of a mother hen saying, “I’ve longed to gather my people up like a mother hen gathers her young.” Think about these two images for a minute – the king as the fox – a predator and Jesus as the mother hen. Foxes are known for coming in an attacking chicken coops. And hens are known for protecting their young, even if it means she dies for it. We have two images of what it means to be a king – the king who kills and the king who protects, even dies to protect.
The season of Lent, this journey to the cross, reveals to us what kind of king Jesus is.
Jesus is not the fox preying on our weakness, but the hen willing to die to protect us.
Lent also shows us who we are called to be. We are not called to be like the fox. We are not called to go through the wide, respectable gate.
Rather, we are called to be like a hen, to risk everything to protect the weak and the vulnerable.
Of course, we know this is easier said than done right. Because foxes still attack. The powers of this world still don’t take kindly to their systems being challenged. And yet, here we find the great paradox of the gospel. The paradox that says the wide gate, the safe gate, the powerful gate is the one that actually leads to destruction. And the narrow gate, the vulnerable gate, the marginalized gate is the one that actually leads to life. So may we all have the faith to journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. May we have the faith to enter through the narrow gate. May we have the faith to trust in the great gospel paradox that says the last are first, that says those who risk all for the weak are the ones who gain everything, that says the hen is greater than the fox.
Amen.
