Hilton Head Island, SC – March 4, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 11:29-36; Luke 11:37-44,53-54
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – As he went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him to speak of many things, lying in wait for him, to catch at something he might say. – Luke 11:53-54 (RSV)
This Lent we are following Jesus on a long, slow journey he took on his way to Jerusalem, and Palm Sunday, and Good Friday, and Easter. Along the way, he said and did some things that are not recorded in the other three Gospels. Luke recorded several parables on this journey not found in the other three Gospels, the best known being the Parable of the Good Samaritan and the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
According to Mathew and Mark, Jesus spent virtually all of his public ministry in the Galilee. According to John, Jesus probably spent perhaps 85% of his time in the Galilee, and the other 15% in Jerusalem, when he went there for the four required feasts of the Jewish year. But according to Luke, Jesus maybe spent 90+ percent of his time in the Galilee, and then took several weeks or a few months to go from Capernaum on the Galilean lake, where he lived, to Jerusalem and the events of Holy Week.
On this extended slow trek from the Galilee to Jerusalem that Luke describes, Jesus also had some apparently unavoidable confrontations with some theological enemies. That had happened in Galilee as well, but these were apparently new Judean enemies with whom Jesus managed to lock horns on his journey to destiny.
In both of our readings for today, we heard about how this happened. In the first reading, it is almost as though Jesus intentionally provoked these people. Luke writes, “When the crowds were increasing, (Jesus) began to say, ‘This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah’” (11:29).
What follows that verse is quite cryptic, so allow me to offer a supposition. The prophecy of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible is a very odd little book. Here is a shortened version of what the book of Jonah says. God commanded Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, and to tell the Ninevites that God was greatly upset by their wickedness. But Jonah did not want to preach to a crowd of nasty Gentiles, so he took off for Spain, and was swallowed by a great fish (not a whale, but a “great fish.”) There is more to the story than that, but I’m not going to give the details, except to say the great fish coughed up Jonah on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and he did go to Nineveh, and he did tell the Ninevites that God was going to destroy them in forty days, and every man, woman, and child repented, and God spared Nineveh, and Jonah was mightily angry that God did that, and God told Jonah he shouldn’t be angry, because the Ninevites did what God told them they should do.
Now please listen carefully. The Ninevites were Gentiles; they were not Jews. Luke was a Gentile; he was not a Jew. And here is Jesus, a Jew, somewhere between The Sea of Galilee and Jerusalem, telling a large crowd of Jews that they are an evil generation who are seeking a sign from God, and the only sign they will get is the sign of Jonah. Then Jesus said a couple of very cryptic things, which I won’t even attempt to explain, because it is far too cryptic for me. But Jesus ended this part of what he said by adding this: “The men of Nineveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (11:32).
Luke doesn’t explain that statement, nor does he claim that Jesus explained it. So please indulge me as I try to explain it. Here is what I think Jesus was implying: He was speaking to a Jewish audience, and he was calling them an evil generation. Not surprisingly, they were not delighted to hear this. Furthermore, he reminded them, which presumably they knew, that the prophecy of Jonah said a huge city of Gentiles all repented of their sins because of what a Jewish prophet told them, while he, Jesus, a Jewish prophet, was telling them to repent and they weren’t doing it! Their obtuse refusal to pay attention to Jesus and to admit their own sins angered Jesus. So the Gentile, Luke, used this incident to suggest to Jews that the Jew, Jesus, was turning to Gentiles, because they were more open to his teachings than were the Jews. And that was almost guaranteed to incense many Jews. And that creates enemies. And Jesus already had many enemies in the Galilee whom he had happily left behind on his courageous journey to Jerusalem.
The first generation of Christians were almost all Jews. From the second generation on, almost all Christians were Gentiles. The Gentile, Luke the physician, the only Gentile writer in the New Testament, was the first New Testament writer to note this pattern. He expanded on it in the second New Testament book he wrote, called the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. None of the other New Testament writers saw it as clearly as Luke, because all of them were Jews. The earliest efforts to create Christian converts were directed toward Jews, but ultimately it was unsuccessful. So the missionaries decided to go among the Gentiles, among us, among non-Jews.
Up to the time of Jesus, Jews had never attempted to convert Gentiles to Judaism. If Gentiles wanted to become adherents of the Jewish religion, they were welcomed, but they were never actively sought. By the end of his public ministry, Jesus was telling Jews that they were an evil generation for rejecting his teachings. In so doing, inevitably Jesus was adding yet more enemies to his rapidly-expanding list of adversaries.
In all four of the Gospels, the most obvious enemies of Jesus are identified as the Pharisees. There were never very many Pharisees, but they had an influence on first-century normative Judaism that far outweighed their actual numbers. They were experts in the Old Testament law. They interpreted it in the strictest of terms. Whatever you think the Puritans of seventeenth century New England were, the Pharisees were that to the nth degree.
Jesus was a reformer of Judaism who tried to lead it away from puritanical Pharisaical teachings. Again to put it into an American historical analogy, Jesus was Roger Williams, abandoning the colony of Massachusetts to form the new colony of Rhode Island, where all varieties of Christians would be welcomed, but especially Baptists, who had been forbidden to establish churches in Massachusetts.
People who care about religion care deeply about it. Many will go to every possible length for their particular version of religion to triumph.
In the 1920s, there was a great and tragic split in American Protestantism. At the time it was called “The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.” The fundamentalists evolved into what now are known as the “evangelical” Protestant churches, only a few of which are still essentially fundamentalist. The modernists became what now are called the “mainline” Protestant churches. In the first century, when Jesus was alive, the Pharisees were somewhat similar in theology and outlook to the evangelicals. In theology and outlook, the modernists were like the followers of Jesus. By no means is that a totally accurate or fair analogy, but there are sufficient similarities to make it at least an apt analogy.
In the second reading for today, a Pharisee invited Jesus into his home for dinner. Luke tells us the Pharisee was “astonished” that Jesus didn’t wash his hands before he ate, as the religious law decreed he should. To that Jesus said, “You Pharisees wash the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of extortion and wickedness” (Lk. 11:39). Had Dale Carnegie then been alive, he would have told Jesus in no uncertain terms that was no way to make friends and influence people.
Then, said Luke, Jesus launched into a no-holds-barred attack on the Pharisees, using words that are also included in the Gospel of Matthew almost verbatim. But Matthew has Jesus saying these things to the Pharisees in Jerusalem itself only couple of days before he was arrested and crucified, whereas Luke has Jesus saying these things in a village somewhere close to, but not in, Jerusalem several weeks before Holy Week. In other words, in Luke’s telling of the story, Jesus was building up his case against the Pharisees as he slowly wended his way to the holy city, but Matthew has Jesus unloading on them after he entered Jerusalem.
Does it matter when or how it happened? Maybe yes, maybe no. To Luke yes, and to Matthew yes, but from two very different perspectives. Again, please listen carefully. We all have our own individual way of perceiving who Jesus was, and what he said, and when he said it --- IF he said it. But from Luke’s standpoint, Jesus was having so much resistance from the leaders of Judaism in trying to reform Judaism from within that he seemed to realize at the end of his life he was might have to rely on Gentiles to become the bearers of The Message. The irony is that The Message became largely disengaged from Judaism and became a new religious entity, which fairly soon came to call itself Christianity.
Luke gives us a postscript at the end of Chapter 11 on what Chapter 11 was really all about. He writes, “As (Jesus) went away from there, the scribes and the Pharisees began to press him hard, and to provoke him to say many things, lying in wait for him, to catch him at something he might say” (11:53-54).
Normally it isn’t the ordinary followers of any religion who engineer the major changes that come about in that religion; it is particular leaders who do it. Hindu extremists opposed the growing openness of Mohandas Gandhi to the ideas of Muslims and Christians, and a Hindu extremist shot him dead. Extremist “Christian” racists opposed Martin Luther King, and an extremist racist shot him dead. Extremist Black Muslims were incensed that Malcolm X at the end of his life made overtures toward mainstream Islam, and a group of extremist Black Muslims shot him dead.
For the past two thousand years, many Christians have claimed that “the Jews” killed Jesus. It was not “the Jews.” It is a deliberate and dangerous slur to say that “the Jews” crucified Jesus. It was a dedicated small group of Jewish zealots who were convinced Jesus was a threat to proper Judaism who engineered the crucifixion of Jesus. Pontius Pilate would never have reluctantly agreed to order Jesus crucified had he not feared an unpredictable riot might ensue if he failed to order it. “The Jews” did not kill Jesus, and “the Gentiles” are not therefore innocent of his murder. Jesus was executed by the behind-the-scenes machinations of other zealous Jews. Religion can produce wondrous or disastrous results on any culture or society in any time or place. Religious zeal can move mountains, or it can erect crosses.
Eventually normative Christianity came to proclaim that the crucifixion of Jesus was the sacrificial atonement of a totally innocent man which produced the salvation of a sinful humanity. Thus it was suggested that Jesus’ death was a crucial factor in God’s plan for the salvation of the world. (The word crucial is deliberately chosen. It comes from the Latin word crux, which means either “cross” or “crux.” In substitutionary atonement theology, the cross is the crux of the matter. It is the notion that Jesus took our penalty, the one we deserved, upon himself.) That is one way of understanding the crucifixion.
There is, however, another way of perceiving the cross. It also may be seen as an historical inevitability, given the number and strength of the enemies whom Jesus had brought upon himself by his courageous teachings throughout his ministry, but especially toward its momentous last days. No doubt countless innocent people have been executed for crimes they did not commit. Jesus certainly was innocent of crimes both civil and religious. However, no one could realistically claim he had not deliberately ignited opposition to his teachings. It may be that he was sacrificed, but he was no sacrificial lamb. If he was a sacrifice at all, he was a sacrificial lion. Jesus intended to provoke the wrath of his adversaries, because he decided it was the only way he might get them to re-think their wrong-headed religious principles.
In a few instances it worked. A handful of un-named Pharisees in the Gospels were very much attracted to the message of Jesus. One of them, a man named Nicodemus, was important in one of the earliest and one of the latest episodes of Jesus’ ministry, according to the Fourth Gospel. Another, a Pharisee who never knew Jesus, became Jesus’ primary champion after he was knocked from his horse on the road to Damascus by a vision of the resurrected Jesus. He, of course, was Saul of Tarsus, otherwise known as the self-proclaimed apostle Paul.
My guess is that Jesus became convinced that he was going to die a violent death. I also suspect he became increasingly discouraged the closer he got to Jerusalem, which he knew was the end of his road. But he kept doing what he thought was right, what he believed God wanted him to do. Being the primary actor in a huge shift in the history of humanity is inevitably painfully difficult. Jesus sensed that was what was happening as his life was swiftly winding down. But he confidently and defiantly went ahead, trusting that God was with him in his what he was doing.
O Love, how deep, how broad, how high!