A woman watches her son, now a man but still in her heart that baby boy whom she caressed with all the quiet passion her heart could bear to feel, in that barn so many years ago. She is watching her son, who bears the volleys of curses from everyone in the room for what he has said. In the heat and light and sound of a synagogue broiling with fury, feet stomping and arms pumping, she catches a glimpse of him, perhaps he of her. What do their eyes say to each other, in their silence amidst the noise? Oh my God, oh my son, why couldn’t you simply keep your mouth shut? Why did you have to go on? This woman must wonder, because she has seen her boy do things that have made her wonder, to hold them in her heart, all her life. Her eyes catch his, and is there in his look a spark of recognition? I’m sorry, mother, I’m truly sorry, but it’s what I must do. But, my son, my boy, don’t you know that this can only end badly? Why couldn’t you just stop speaking? Why did the words keep tumbling tumbling out of your mouth, until everything starts to tumble tumble?
But, of course, Mary had known from the start that her boy was to do strange and wondrous things: everything about this child, now a man, compelled her to ponder in her heart what God had in store for Jesus. Doesn’t every mother wonder, in the quiet dark of the night, after her child has finally drifted off to sleep, what will my baby look like? What kind of person will she be? Whom will he marry? Will my child be happy? And now, this. For a moment, so very brief, everything was OK: he had read from the scroll of Isaiah with such intensity and conviction that for a moment the world outside dissolved and Isaiah’s words became the world, a world in which the poor received good news, a world in which those in cages are set free, those wounded and ill receive strength and health, and those pushed down, pushed aside, and pushed out find the dignity that they only read about in the stories of old. For a moment, everyone in that room closed their eyes as Jesus read, and stopped thinking about Rome, about the taxes they needed to pay to those occupiers, the way the soldiers grab the young girls and smack the young men, the way people are sent away to detention centers with impunity in the name of imperial security. For a moment, everyone in that room closed their eyes and could feel the exilhiration that one shouldn’t feel but imagine anyway that the soldiers’ throats are slit. For a moment, she admits to herself, she feels the same way.
But of course Mary knows, and we know, that the story doesn’t end there. I try to imagine what it must have been like to hear Jesus utter those words, “Today this scripture,” this passage of good news, of healing, of hope, of liberation, these words that speak of God’s coming reign on earth, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” So stirring are these words that our lectionary repeats them, last week and this week. What must it have been like? Recall the words of Dr. King in August of 1963, and perhaps you and I may get a clue:
“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
That portion Dr. King’s speech, now almost 50 years old, continues to stir the hearts of people; my students, so cynical, so world-weary, are caught up in King’s prophecy. Who could keep from jumping out of their seat that sultry day in 1963, and who would keep from sitting still on that morning some 2000 years ago in a small village synagogue? But the story doesn’t end there. Three years, almost to the day, after he gave this speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King and other activists were pelted with bricks and bottles in the Gale Park section of Chicago. Called to bring attention to unfair housing practices in this big, northern city, King wanted to bring attention to the sad fact that segregation and discrimination were national tragedies, not limited to Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas. And for this, angry residents of Gale Park taunted him, jeered him, vented their fury at someone who would dare challenge the way things are. One person held up a sign during a civil rights march that read: “King would look good with a knife in his back.” How could a nation so galvanized by the gracious words, the words of grace, spoken out to the National Mall and into the nation in 1963 turn so quickly and virulently against him in the streets of Chicago? What must have Alberta Williams King, Martin’s mother, have thought and felt as she watched this scene in Chicago unfold? Oh my God, oh my son, this time, just this time, why couldn’t you keep your mouth shut? Can you see that this can only end badly for you?
“Truly, I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” Jesus preaches. Why not? It’s not because Jesus, having come home after a sojourn in the wilderness, has gotten uppity. No. Because thereafter Jesus tells the congregation two stories: of Elijah being sent to and cared for a widow at Zarephath in Sidon, and of Elisha healing a Syrian leper. It’s important to keep in mind that in ancient Mediterranean culture, widows were, like orphans, not only at the bottom of society: no, widows were a drain on the system; they were unproductive members of an agricultural community; they were considered a waste of precious resources in a culture of scarcity. Likewise, because they were visibly afflicted, lepers not only suffered the effects of their disease, but also had to endure the misery of the social ostracism that inhered in their illness: lepers were ritually impure in addition to being sick, and thus were cast outside the community. No leper would have been welcome in the synagogue that Jesus preached in. And then Jesus tells his congregation that not only did two of their dear prophets deign to interact with these excluded, marginal people—of which there were many—that God had Elijah and Elisha engage a foreign widow and a foreign leper. We can try to imagine contemporary corollaries to what Jesus is saying in his opening sermon in Nazareth but I don’t think we need to in order to see why the people in the synagogue, who could barely contain their excitement just a moment ago, are now on their feet and want him dead. Martin Luther King must have known what Jesus felt as his own when that first rock hit him in Chicago in 1966. And the mothers of these two men watching their sons receive such adulation at one moment and such hatred and vitriol in the next must surely have pondered in their hearts what in the world God is asking of them, their hearts must surely break at the realization that for their sons, this will not end well at all.
We celebrate today the waning days of the season of Epiphany. The word derives from the Greek terms epiphaneia, which we can translate into “appearance” or “coming,” a revelation or a “giving light to.” Epiphany is the ancient Greek way of saying a light bulb went off in my head. What light bulb went off in Jesus’ head that made him say these words that so angered his fellow Nazoreans? What light bulb illuminated Martin Luther King’s mind that compelled him northward to the houses and streets of Chicago? What flashed in their hearts, what revelation of God did they seize upon, in these moments of danger? And what was in the hearts and minds of two mothers quietly watching the crowd seethe, the people who want to see their sons dead for the kind of world that they claimed God is calling them to become, a world in which blacks and whites live together in fairness and equality, where Jews and Gentiles receive words of grace equally, where widows are valued not for their productivity but for their inheritance as God’s children, where lepers are welcomed in the synagogue? For a moment, can we not imagine Mary and Alberta King asking God, “oh, let it be someone else’s son?”
But Jesus said what he said and Martin did what he did because they both knew something about what St. Paul says about what it means to love, that to love means not to rejoice in wrongdoing, but in the truth, to rejoice not in the injustice that God finds favor with some people—usually those whom we find favor with—but rejoices in God’s favor to those whom we’d rather not find favor in ourselves. That love, Jesus and Martin discovered, never ends. That love, Mary and Alberta realized, perhaps when they held their respective children in their arms for the first time, and certainly when they held their sons for the last time is what Paul means when he writes “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” That love is good news, but it is tough news. That love that Jesus and Martin lived and died for, that love—are words and actions of grace, but it is not cheap grace. This is what Mary and Alberta see when they look into the eyes of their sons; this is what Jesus and Martin see when they look into the furious faces of those in that Nazorean synagogue and that Chicago park. Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it this way: “To be partakers of the divine nature means we become more and more God-like, treating all with an even-handedness, even those we regard as evil. For you know, even the most evil, the Shipmans, the Saddam Husseins, Bin Ladens – we may not like it – but they remain God’s children. This God, who lets God’s sun shine on good and bad alike; who makes God’s rain fall on all, for all, and we, who want to be God-like, are asked to forgive, even as God has forgiven us in Christ, forgive even that which we consider to be unforgivable.”
Linda and the late Peter Biehl know something about this love that rejoices in truth and justice, that endures all things. On August 25, 1993, their daughter, 26 year old Amy Biehl, a white anti-apartheid activist and Fulbright student, was driving a friend home in a township near Cape Town, South Africa, when a group of black youths pelted her car, struck her with a brick, dragged her out, stabbed and killed her. 4 men were tried and convicted of Amy Biehl’s murder. In 1997, the four men applied for amnesty through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission headed by Archbishop Tutu. At the hearing of these four men, Linda and Peter Biehl expressed their support for the release and pardon of those who killed their daughter. Peter Biehl addressed the Commission in this way, “The most important vehicle of reconciliation is open and honest dialogue…we are here to reconcile a human life which was taken without an opportunity for dialogue. When we are finished with this process we must move forward with linked arms.” In honor of their daughter’s work in South Africa and commitment to social justice, the Biehls established the Amy Biehl Foundation, an organization committed to community building and development in South Africa. Perhaps most strikingly, they hired Easy Nofemela and Ntobeko Peni—two of Amy’s killers—to assist them in the work of the Amy Biehl Foundation. Writes Linda Biehl: “Amy’s legacy thrives in the hearts of all of us who knew her and thousands of people she never met who have been inspired by her story. Perhaps most amazingly, her legacy lives through two men who played a big role in her death. Today, Ntobeko Peni and Easy Nofemela spread Amy’s legacy throughout their community in South Africa. It is their transformation that truly represents the powerful legacy of Amy Biehl. Their transformation is what Amy was working for.”
My sisters and brothers, in a moment we will gather around this table, to remind ourselves what Mary and Alberta and Linda and Peter Biehls knew all too well: that God’s love, that love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, is not cheap and it is not easy. God’s good news is good indeed, but as Jesus and Martin and Amy Biehl knew all too well, that good news is dangerous news too. We gather around this table so that God can appear to us in a new light, in a light that is beyond us, in a light that compels us to see in one another the presence of the divine, especially in those we’d rather not want to see God present in. Let us come to the table knowing that God invites you and me, all of us—whoever you are, wherever you find yourself—in that sacred space where mothers share a meal with those who want their children dead, that sacred inclusive space where we know fully of God’s powerful love, a love that is powerful because it is so difficult, as difficult as a mother watching her child head into a dangerous world in order to heal it. Let us gather together to honor that heart.
