Sermon for March 16, 2025
Lent 2 C
Luke 13:31-35; Philippians 3:17-4:1
Rev. Karl-John N. Stone
What is the “center of the world” for you? Maybe it’s your home or your family; maybe your hometown, or a place with special memories. Whatever it might be, we each might have a different answer. What was the “center of the world” for Jesus? Being someone who was born into a faithful Jewish family 2,000 years ago, the “center of the world” for Jesus would probably have been Jerusalem. Jerusalem is where Mary and Joseph took him to be dedicated at the Temple as an infant. It’s where they took him on a pilgrimage when he was 12 years old, and they couldn’t find him when they left for home because he was learning from the teachers in the Temple. “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house” he explained.
The Temple was considered the “center” of Jerusalem. Jesus even brought his disciples there, and why wouldn’t he? It was what they considered the holiest place on earth, where God’s holiness lived. And the holiest place in the holiest place on earth, the very center of the Temple itself, was called the “Holy of Holies”. A place so holy that no one ever entered, except once per year—on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the day when people sought forgiveness for their sins, and prayed for God to make things right again in the world. On that one day, the priest chosen for the year would enter the Holy of Holies to fulfill his duties. It was a place of sheer silence, a place set apart even as it stood in the middle of all the sounds and commotion and crowds of people that filled the city and the Temple all around it. And when the priest came back out from that place of sheer silence, into the main part of the Temple, he would speak to the people and say the unpronounceable name of God. We think that name sounded something like “Yahweh”—and whenever you read the Old Testament and see “the LORD” written in all capital letters, that’s what it means—it’s the unpronounceable name of God, too holy to speak in any casual way.
The rabbis taught that The Name spoke of God’s merciful nature, as well as being what God said to speak the world into being on the day of creation. So on this one day per year, the priest would speak The Name, and as people sought new life by atoning for their sins, from the center of the world, he would proclaim that the world is being made new through God’s mercy. That’s what the priest meant when he spoke The Name: the world is being made new through God’s mercy. [https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-1331-35-6]
That background information puts Jesus’ lament, that we hear in Luke 13, in context. He’s expressing his deep grief that rather than being the place from where the world is made new through God’s mercy, instead the powers wielded from Jerusalem too often turned it into “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” Violence instead of mercy, death instead of new life. You had Kind Herod, who was Jewish but could be incredibly cruel against his own people—beheading John the Baptist, for example. And you had Pontius Pilate, the authoritarian governor representing the Roman Empire, cooperating with the religious leaders, to crucified Jesus. So when Jesus says Jerusalem is “the city that kills the prophets” he is expressing his grief about all those who use their power for violence and injustice. And even in the Old Testament days, these kinds of rulers in Jerusalem often killed the prophets who dared to challenge them to change their ways and show repentance and mercy. And over the past 2,000 years it seems that regardless of who rules the city, full peace is elusive; and people who try to bring peace are sometime killed.
But back to the gospel of Luke: By this point in his ministry Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem, and he knew what was waiting for him once he got there. Like the prophets before him, he too would be killed for speaking in The Name of God who is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” The Pharisees knew the consequences that awaited him, too, and some of them even tried to warn him about King Herod. It can be easy for us today to caricature all the Pharisees as the “bad guys” who were always against Jesus, because we hear so many stories like that in the gospels. And, yeah, some of them were against Jesus. But on the whole, as a movement within their religion, they were much more complex than that, as today’s gospel reading shows. Mostly, the Pharisees were concerned about being able to practice their faith without interference from Rome’s violence and power, and they wanted to encourage people to recognize the holiness of God and God’s life-giving mercy.
Saint Paul, as he writes Philippians 3, is doing a similar thing. He offers a warning, tinged with sadness, about people who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ”. “Their end is destruction,” Paul says, meaning their ultimate goal is to tear things down, instead of cultivating life; destruction is their purpose in life—even if what they’re doing looks good in the moment, it’s the kind of things that ultimately leave you feeling empty. “Their god is their stomach, the belly.” Saint Paul is not warning us away from eating a delicious meal, but of indulging in appetites that diminish true life in God. It could be personal appetites like addiction to drugs or pornography; or a penchant for violence in thought, word, or deed; or societal appetites like systematically defrauding the poor; or scapegoating vulnerable people.
In contrast, Paul reminds us that as Christians, “our citizenship is in heaven”. This means that the way we live here on earth is supposed be a reflection of the ways of our true home in heaven. It kind of reminds me of when I went to study abroad as a college student. During our training sessions in cross-cultural awareness before we left, they told us: “Remember, wherever you go in the world, you have the privilege of representing St. Olaf College. Make us proud.” They were saying, in effect, you may be studying in a foreign country for a semester, with no one you know to “keep an eye on you”; but your “citizenship” as a student is here at St. Olaf. We’ve been teaching you certain values to carry you through your education and your life—carry those values with you for others to see.
St. Paul could have made his point about “our citizenship being in heaven” by quoting the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s not about “follow the right rules, and then you’ll get into heaven”. It’s about: put your trust in Jesus and his way of life, and then the ways of heaven will flow down through you, to help you live a new life in Christ.
The new life in Christ always comes through the cross; and the ultimate goal, the purpose of the cross as a way of life, is to give us the ability to live sacrificially—prioritizing mercy and love as we strive to follow Jesus in the world. This way of living by love and mercy very often feels like the way of death whenever we come up against the powers of violence and the appetites of destruction. For Jesus, in Jerusalem, this way was his death—yet his death gives us life. Jesus’ calling for us, from the other side of the empty tomb, is to embrace his cross as the true center of the world, and to trust that because of the sacrifice Jesus made for us, the world is being made new through God’s mercy. Amen.