2nd Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 3:1-17;
Rom 4:1-5, 13-17; Gen 12:1-4a
YouTube: https://youtu.be/BI2FV2aPiJs
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
MIXED METAPHORS: THE SON OF MAN LIFTED UP
AND WALKING AWAY FROM OMELAS
American author Ursula K. Le Guin, known for her brilliant science fiction novels, wrote a short story in 1973 called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” The story takes place in a fictional, utopian city of “happiness” called Omelas. We aren’t told where it is, or even what time period we’re in. All we know is that all of its citizens have found a way to structure their society to maximize the happiness of all.
All except one, that is. Midway through describing one of the citizens’ summer festivals, the narrator reveals a dark secret: the entire functioning of the city, and all of its happiness, depends on the expulsion, entrapment, isolation, and perpetual misery of a single child kept prisoner underneath the city.
When the citizens of Omelas are old enough to learn the truth about their city, they’re shocked and disgusted. In time, though, most come to accept this injustice for the sake of the city’s happiness.
And yet a few citizens walk away. The story ends with the narrator describing the destination toward which these few people walk: “The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.”1
The whole town knew about the child under the city, but only a few left. The rest accepted the compromise. Most people do.2 Throughout the history of our nationalistic civilizations, most people don’t walk away. They stick around for any happiness they can get.
Or they are stuck as part of the scapegoat class of people. They’re marginalized. The ones on whose perpetual misery the so-called civilization stands. Le Guin’s short story is masterful in terms of symbolizing the scapegoat class of people in terms of one child. In theory, it only takes one child’s misery to ground the happiness of a civilization. In practice, it takes many more — like the dozens of children killed in Iran yesterday because their school was too close to one of our missile targets. And, of course, the tens of thousands of children here at home who live in terrible poverty. And the increasing number of children afraid to go to school or stand at their school bus stop, for fear of masked, unidentifiable ICE agents coming to scoop them up. In theory, it takes one scapegoat that everyone knows about and acknowledges. In practice, it takes many.
The question for us today is, How many does it takes to walk away in order to stop the scapegoating structure of our nationalistic civilizations? How many does it take to walk away? How many does it take to walk from our human reigns built on scapegoating into God’s reign built on love?
That’s the question in the balance in today’s Gospel Reading. Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a ruler of the Judeans. He is a person of power and privilege, a person who accepts the scapegoating structure of the Roman Empire because he does enjoy some benefits from it, even if he’s no where near the top of the pyramid.
This Jesus person, from little old Nazareth in Galilee, is performing signs that he might be the One, the Messiah, the Anointed of God who ushers in God’s reign. Could it be? What would that mean? Jesus being a poor person himself, one of the scapegoated class of indigenous people, how would that work? Afraid, Nicodemus comes to Jesus at midnight to try to find answers to his questions.
It doesn’t start out well. The first thing that Jesus talks about is being born from above, or born again, if one desires to enter God’s reign. Nicodemus is confused already. How can we go back into our mother’s womb? But Jesus insists. We must be born again, born from above, by God’s spirit in order to see the way of the world and walk away from it.
The Son of Man will let himself be the One lifted up as the scapegoat, the lamb of God, for all the world to see. It will be like the bronze serpent lifted on a pole in the Sinai wilderness for their ancestors to look upon and be saved. Even now God loves the world so much that God is sending the Son to be the scapegoat lifted up for people of every time and place to witness. The Son of Man, representing the next generation of being human, is not the one scapegoat in the sense of replacing all future scapegoats. We don’t get off the hook that easy. We have a choice. No, it is more like in Le Guin’s tale of Omelas. People need to know the current way of the world in order to either stay in acceptance or choose to walk away toward something else. Jesus is more hopeful than in Le Guin’s story by offering himself as that something to walk away towards.
At this point in the story, Nicodemus is baffled. He doesn’t understand. As a person of privilege, he has too much to give up to choose walking away. Next week, we will a Samaritan woman who immediately chooses walking away. Ostracized and coming to Jacob’s well in the midday heat, she doesn’t have as much to lose. Here in chapter 3 of John’s story of Jesus, Nicodemus walks away from Jesus — not from the scapegoating system from which he benefits.
But we will see Nicodemus two more times in the Gospel. In chapter 7, Jesus is verbally sparring with a group of Pharisees in Jerusalem, and Nicodemus speaks up on Jesus’ behalf (John 7:50). Is he beginning to see and understand? At the end of the Gospel, Nicodemus appears one last time as someone who helps Joseph of Arimathea place Jesus’ body in the tomb (John 19:39).
Perhaps the crucial moment is unmentioned. As a ruler of the Judeans, was Nicodemus present at the council meeting when Caiaphas the High Priest said the scapegoat thing out loud? As they plot Jesus’ lifting up on the cross, Caiaphas says to the rest of his fellow Judean rulers, “You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed (John 11:50).” Was Nicodemus there to hear the scapegoat principle said out loud? Then, when he saw Jesus lifted up on the cross, did it finally make sense to him? Was his helping Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus a sign that he might be willing to finally follow Jesus in walking away into God’s reign of love?
These are the questions, of course, that are still graciously posed to us. Centuries ago, the Church made a fateful decision to ally itself with empires based on the scapegoating system, explicitly counter to what Jesus is asking us to walk away from. You and I have benefitted from a system in this nation built on the backs of African slaves, on ostracized and sacrificed indigenous peoples, and on a capitalist economy which continues to sacrifice the poor. Granted, it holds up hope in this nation if we were to walk away from the scapegoating elements toward the ideal of all people being created as equal children of God.
Perhaps this stark and violent lapse back into a dark Christian Nationalism is even another clear sign of the choice before us. But here’s that choice: God loves this world so much, scapegoating and all, that God sent the Son of Man, a next generation of being human, to be lifted up on the cross as the scapegoat, as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. God sent the Son in unfathomable love to once again give us the choice. Will we be among those who stay and benefit from the scapegoating of the most vulnerable? Or will we be among those who walk away? Walk away into the reign of the One who sent the Son in such unimaginable and unconditional love? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 1, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/BI2FV2aPiJs
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
Notes
1. Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (Harper Perennial, 2004), 284. Excerpted from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, pages 275-84, originally published in hardcover in 1975 by HarperCollins. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” originally appeared in New Dimensions 3, 1973.
2. To this point, I have followed the summary of Le Guin’s story in Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), 130. Burgis is connecting this story to René Girard’s theory of scapegoating as the ground for all human culture. Interestingly, Le Guin cites the following quote from William James (“The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”) as the inspiration for her story:
