It was not an idle threat. “Run for
your life! Herod’s on the hunt. He’s out to kill you!” That is what a small but
insistent group of Pharisees told the young outspoken rabbi after a
particularly fiery sermon on the hillside.
The peasants who listened to this upstart teacher and preacher were
becoming agitated and on the brink of turning unruly. The Pharisees understood: that was not good,
and it needed to stop.
Jesus had been firing up the crowds as
he made his way toward Jerusalem, and his parables and sermons had become more
pointed and controversial as the days and weeks went by. Tales of mustard seeds and fig trees had
become motivational stories of faith and mighty images of a new kingdom.
In addition, strange and unsettling occurrences
were on the rise. The crippled were walking, and the blind were regaining their
vision. The world was changing. The Pharisees understood: that was not good,
and it needed to stop.
The peasantry - the poor, the hungry, and
the outcasts – had been listening a wee bit too listened intently to Jesus’
message. Not
surprisingly, they ate it up - all this talk of the last being first, and the
first last. What better news could there
be for them than the promise of an improved existence the moment God’s kingdom
broke through into the unfair and unjust world they knew?
The ruling class – the affluent, the
powerful, and the temple elite - heard (or at least had heard of) Jesus as well,
and they did not warm to his potent message of transformation. Change like that scared them – as well it
should. The first being last, the king
overthrown – that was unthinkable.
The Pharisees knew that it was only in
their best interest to do something – to take some action against this young
rabble-rouser. In order to protect their
own authority, they realized that they had to protect the interests of the Jewish
King Herod.
How best to do that? How best to protect Herod’s stature, his
assets, and his reputation as the most authoritative provincial Jew in the
Roman Empire? Those were the Pharisees’
questions, and they named King Herod’s deepest fears.
It was not an idle threat: “Run for your life! Herod’s on the hunt. He’s
out to kill you!”
And well the Pharisees knew that Herod
was not one to be messed with when it came to politics and power. After all, he had beheaded John the Baptist
on a whim and served his head on a silver platter at a palace banquet not all
that long ago. And Herod – in his heart
a rather brutal bully - really did not have much personally against the
Baptizer either.
But this fellow, Jesus, was a different
story. The Pharisees witnessed him
developing a following among the lowly – and that was not good. He was starting to become an annoyance. He was capable of disrupting the fragile
balance between sacred and secular rule.
He needed to be eliminated – for everyone’s sake. If he would simply leave the area, then he
would be under someone else’s jurisdiction – and all would be well – or at
least out of their hands.
It was not an idle threat: “Run for your life! Herod’s on the hunt. He’s
out to kill you!”
But Jesus was not about to be bullied –
by temple or temporal power, by Pharisee or King. And so in the heat of that particular
exchange, he makes two forceful – and very different - statements in response
to this not-so-idle threat.
The first is an outspoken retort – a
“so’s your mother” sort of comment – marked by his own brand of name-calling
and putdowns. “Tell that fox (meaning Herod) that
I’ve no time for him right now. Today and tomorrow I’m busy clearing out the
demons and healing the sick; the third day I’m wrapping things up. Besides,
it’s not proper for a prophet to come to a bad end outside Jerusalem.”
As Methodist pastor Adolph Smith
writes, what “Jesus is saying really is ‘Tell Herod
that he is not in control of my destiny. God is.’ In other words, Jesus is
stubborn and willful enough to stick to his guns in the face of government
opposition and continue to do what he is doing simply because he believes that
is what God wants him to do. God is in control, not Herod.….Herod will be at
best an actor in a play that God is writing. Jesus knows the will of God, and
Herod's threats will not cause him to deviate from it.”
In short, Jesus has a will of iron. An
inspiring stubbornness characterizes him when it comes to focusing on his
mission, doing God’s will, and living each day as he believes God has called
him to live. He is unyielding in the
face of enormous political and social pressure.
I wonder if the Gospel writer is
suggesting that we too can be like that – we who call ourselves Christians – a
term we should not apply to ourselves lightly, by the way. I wonder if the writer is suggesting that, like
Jesus, we too can be strong in our faith and unyielding in our focus on the
mission to which he has called us as the church.
After all, he has chosen us – you and
me – to be his hands and feet, to be his heart in our own time. That is why we are here this morning, isn’t
it? Because we have experienced Jesus and all he stands for in our own lives.
We have felt his lifeblood flowing in
our veins. We have heard him calling us
from a hospital bed. We have seen him in
the eyes of the hungry. We have wiped
his tears from the faces of the elderly.
We have sensed his presence in this place where we gather for worship
each week.
The question for us then is simply
this: Have we allowed his will of iron
and his inspiring stubbornness to blossom in us, his followers?
I said that in this story we read Jesus
made two statements. The first was his
outspoken retort in response to the Pharisees’ warning. “Don’t threaten me. I have work to do,” he says in no uncertain
terms.
The second statement is opposite in
tone. It is not an angry outburst, but
rather a heartfelt lament – an outpouring of grief for the Holy City and all it
represents. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem….How often I’ve longed to gather your children,
gather
your children like a hen,
her brood safe under her wings - but you refused
and turned away!”
In one of the most beautiful images in
all of Holy Scripture of the divine as a feminine presence, Jesus shows a side
of himself so different from that of the in-your-face upstart rabbi we saw
earlier in this passage. Even in our
churches today where language is still dominated by male-oriented images for
God, it is hard to ignore this image where Jesus likens himself to a
mother hen.
In these verses, we see a Jesus who
weeps, a man who nurtures, a savior who protects and saves in the only way he
knows in light of what he knows about God –
protects and
saves not through military might, not through political maneuvering and
intrigue, but through uncompromising compassion.
It was not an idle lament: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem….How often I’ve longed
to gather your children,
gather your children like a hen,
her brood safe
under her wings - but you refused and turned away!”
Jerusalem, of course, is the Holy City,
the City of the Temple, the City where God resides, the City of the Jews. For the Gospel writer of Luke particularly,
nothing insignificant ever happens in Jerusalem. It is a city filled with deeper meanings and
connections. As Episcopal priest Barbara
Brown Taylor writes, “When Jerusalem obeys God, the world spins peacefully on
its axis. When Jerusalem ignores God, the whole planet wobbles.” And Jesus knows that it is wobbling now.
Taylor continues,” If you have ever
loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’
lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into
them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world --wings
spread, breast exposed -- but if you mean what you say, then this is how you
stand.”
It reminds me of the story of a
terrible night when a fire swept through an old farmstead. The horses and cows housed in the barn
managed to get out and flee to safety.
Each animal in its own way strove to survive and protect itself and its
young.
The next morning, the farmer went to
survey the damage. Parts of the barn
were burned. The farmhouse was spared, but
all that was left of the henhouse was charred rubble.
As the farmer sorted through the debris,
he came upon one hen lying dead near what had been the door of the hen house.
Her top feathers were singed brown by the fire’s heat, her neck limp. The
farmer bent down to pick up the dead hen. But as he did so, he felt movement.
The hen’s four chicks came scurrying out from beneath her burnt body. The
chicks survived because the shelter of the hen’s wings had insulated them,
protected and saved, even as she died to protect and save them.
Why did Jesus choose the image of a
chicken? Surely to be a leopard or a
lion or just about any predator that would have a fighting chance against the
fox and all he symbolized would have been better and, in the end, might even
have saved him.
However, to quote Barbara Brown Taylor
one last time: “But a hen is what Jesus
chooses, which -- if you think about it --is pretty typical of him. He is
always turning things upside down, so that children and peasants wind up on top
while kings and scholars land on the bottom. He is always wrecking our
expectations of how things should turn out by giving prizes to losers and
paying the last first. So of course he chooses a chicken, which is about as far
from a fox as you can get…
…Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in
this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between
the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no
rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her
own body. If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.
Which he does, as it turns out. He
slides up on her one night in the yard while all the babies are asleep. When
her cry wakens them, they scatter. She dies the next day where both foxes and
chickens can see her -- wings spread, breast exposed -- without a single chick
beneath her feathers. It breaks her heart, but it does not change a thing. If
you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.”
We know through Gospel narratives such
as Luke just where Jesus stood – strong in his faith, uncompromising in his
mission, unyielding in his focus on restoring and transforming the world.
The question for us then is this: In this world that is not black and white but
rather a million shades of gray, where do you stand? And its corollary is this: What do you stand for?
by Rev. Nancy Foran, Raymond Village Community Church
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