November 20, Reign of Christ C (Luke 23:33–43)
In a blockbuster movie, this is when our hero would leap from the cross.
On a recent sunday, the church I attend had an evacuation drill at the end of worship. The congregation left the sanctuary in an orderly fashion and regathered across the street for an outdoor fellowship hour. While people of my generation may have been reminded of school fire drills, our younger friends have a different frame of reference. We need to know what to do if someone shows up armed and determined to kill.
Who saves us? The question has been on my mind since the Uvalde school shooting. Security footage showed law enforcement officers standing, waiting, doing what amounted to nothing for an excruciating length of time. I compare this to the pastor at the church I attend, who saw an unfamiliar figure wearing a large backpack come into the sanctuary during a service the day after the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and launched into a power-stride down the side aisle, heading toward the possible trouble rather than away.
I suspect we all subscribe to some mythology about heroes. They give battlefield speeches in Shakespeare, raise a cheer when they appear at the crucial moment in Marvel movies, and rush into the burning building rather than away from it. And finally, in our contemporary popular culture, they appear in a variety of gender and racial identities. What they all have in common is their commitment to save whoever needs saving, to leave no one behind, to vanquish evil.
