NRS Mark 3:1
Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. 2 They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him.
3 And he said to the man who had the withered hand, "Come forward." 4 Then he said to them, "Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?" But they were silent.
5 He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6 The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

Shortly after my mother died in 1982, I was having dinner with my father at a Picadilly Cafeteria in Baton Rouge. We had found a table and had just started eating when a few tables in front of us a family was unloading their trays to have their own dinner. That family happened to be African-American, and as they began to eat my dad leaned over to me and said, "Not too many years ago the very idea of black people eating alongside white people in a restaurant like this would have been unthinkable. I would have gotten up and left before sharing a dining room with a black family."

Now my dad was never a raving segregationist. I did not grow up in a hateful family. My family was maybe a little crazy, sometimes bordering on the nutty, but never hateful. Yet my dad had been raised, and myself as well, in a culture where the separation of the races was absolute. It wasn't just custom; it wasn't just tradition; rather, it was, to our minds at least, the divine order of things. In the same way that the sun rose in the east and set in the west, segregation was just how things were, forever and ever amen. So when the civil rights movement came to town saying, "No, this isn't right; this isn't God's plan," many people became very upset and sometimes violent. Imagine if someone told you that you were living a lie, that what you believed to be true and right was actually false and evil. You might get violent, too.

If you can wrap your head around that kind of gut-wrenching, visceral reaction to change, then you are, I think, on track to understanding why there were people who wanted to kill Jesus. As Christians, of course, Jesus is our hero. He's the Son of God, the embodiment of everything good, right, and true -- all-loving, all-forgiving, all light in whom there is no darkness. So to explain his death, Christians have typically leaned to one or another of several theories, one theological and the other blatantly racist and bigoted. On the theological end, Christians have often explained that Jesus had to die in order to satisfy God's justice. According to this theory of the atonement, God's wrath over man's sin was such that only the purest, holiest, most innocent sacrifice could appease the injury to God's infinite righteousness. Unfortunately, that leaves us with a very blood-thirsty, vengeful image of god that is not finally true to the God revealed in Jesus.

Maybe because that theology is so stark and fatally flawed, Christians have often been tempted to explain the death of Jesus as the dirty, nasty work of "the Jews." According to this theory, "the Jews" killed Jesus because his goodness revealed their evil. Hence, "the Jews" have called down the curse of God on their heads. There's so much so wrong and so unbiblical in this kind of thinking that it really beggars the imagination, but tragically, it's exactly this kind of racist thinking that has fed generations of anti-Jewish hate, distrust, and violence.

Yes, Jesus is our hero and we confess him the Son of God, but Jesus also came preaching and teaching a message that was and still is profoundly unsettling. But because we've heard that message so many times, we often miss just how disturbing it really is. For example, we've all heard the words of Jesus' familiar call to discipleship, "Come, follow me." Yeah, right, follow Jesus, good idea. Who could argue with that? But notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say, "Follow the Torah." He does not say, "Follow the Bible." He does not say, "Follow the teachings of your wise and revered pastor." Instead, he says, "Follow me," which means he equates himself with the whole word of God. In other words, Jesus says to the tax collectors, prostitutes, and all the other sinners outside the pale of righteous living, "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light" (Matthew 11: 28-30).

Wow, that's an incredibly bold thing to claim, and claiming exactly that, Jesus put himself on a collision course with an expression of Judaism we know in the New Testament as the Pharisees. Now we've all seen way to many "biblical" movies where the Pharisees are the squinty-eyed guys with the long beards and the funny clothes that were just out to get Jesus. Not true. They were really our kind of people. They believed in the Bible; they believed in following the Bible in both its spirit and letter; they believed in what we'd call the word alone. So who was this Jesus to claim that he could take the place of Moses and the prophets? Who was Jesus to speak on his own authority, rather than on the authority of the rabbis and the revered teachers of Israel? If someone were to come along telling people not to worry what the church teaches or what the bible says, but just to follow him, we'd probably be upset, too. Especially if that person were to build up a following of outcasts and misfits and various lost souls, or worse, were to snag our children or grandchildren, we might want an eye kept on that kind of person, or perhaps even have that kind of person "persuaded" to move along and stop disturbing our peace.

But the Pharisees weren't the only people Jesus offended, nor were they, by any means, the most dangerous. Besides claiming to embody the whole will and righteousness of God, Jesus also identified himself with the Temple in the same way he identified himself with the Torah. The Temple, you remember, was understood to be the place where heaven and earth meet, and that through the Temple the blessing of God flows to all God's people. Jesus, however, condemned the Temple in Jerusalem as an institution that political intrigue and power grabs had corrupted and irreversibly profaned. That Temple would be destroyed, said Jesus, but after his suffering and death, he would be raised to become, in effect, the true Temple, the living Temple in whom God and humanity would finally be reconciled.

That was not good news to people who considered the Jerusalem Temple to be the very heart and soul of Israel. And it was positively blasphemous and treasonable news to the handful of people who presided over the Temple and who had the political pull to stop that kind of talk. Imagine if you were to stand on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, and there declare that you looked forward to the day when the whole place would be leveled and you would be raised up to be the font of all goodness and virtue. I could be wrong, but I don't think you'd make it home for dinner that night.

When you look at the how, why, and what of Jesus' death, I think you begin to see that the people involved weren't all that different from us. They weren't all evil; neither were they puppets whose strings were being pulled in heaven. They saw themselves as defending what they believed to be good and right. They acted to protect what they had been taught and knew in their bones to be holy and sacred. And it was precisely for people like them, and like us, that Jesus suffered and died:
" to heal us of our blindness;
" to save us from our certainties;
" to shake the foundations of our world for God's Kingdom to come in power and glory.

In the Name of the Father, and of the + Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.