Gospel Reading: Luke 13:31–35
For Sunday, February 24, 2013: Year C—Lent 2
“Slow your roll!” she yells at her dad. Her father and I look at one another and we laugh. Slow your roll. Where does his teenage daughter come up with such sayings? And what’s the correct response, when your daughter says, “Slow your roll?”
Rewind a couple thousand years: “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!”
Rolling with Inevitabilities?
Reading Luke 9, “Slow your roll” is precisely what I want to say to Jesus. The Urban Dictionary says “Slow your roll” is a term “used to inform a homie that he's getting outta control and he might want to shut the hell up before he gets beat the hell up.”
Slow your roll, Jesus. Seriously.
Is there an inevitability to the death of Jesus? An inevitability of martyrdom?
The Price
In 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of his own death, saying, “Well, if physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.” He had received death threats and thought that he might one day be assassinated. It would be four more years until King met his death on the balcony at the Lorraine.
Perhaps, like Martin Luther King, Jr., did, Jesus understood that his own death was a possibility. Maybe he understood that Jerusalem would kill him like it had killed other prophets. But could he have avoided it?
And if it was inevitable, would his message and ministry have been in vain if he had not died?
Why Does it Take a Death?
Others have been martyrs before, and others will be again. And if I had to look through all the 8 billion people of the world, there’s no way that I could point to the upcoming martyrs. I couldn’t have predicted the 23-year-old woman who was brutally raped in India becoming an icon for ending rape culture. And yet, her death has the possibility of changing cultural norms of brutality that have been systematically enforced for hundreds of years.
But why does it take a death? Why are we such a hardheaded people that we only get a message when someone dies a violent death?
That 23-year old didn’t have to die. For years, women have been protesting the rape culture in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn’t have to die. There was a movement toward equality already happening, and many people understood that race and poverty were evils that needed to end.
The Hardest Question
And maybe we could have gotten the message of Jesus as strongly as we receive it now, if he had just slowed his roll. Not headed in for death, but instead, embraced life, lived a long time, and didn’t die on a cross on a hill in Golgotha.
Why will we not be gathered?