Lent 2C, February 24, 2013; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God our shield and defender, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

Today’s Gospel text strikes me as a little strange. It’s strange to be catapulted from Luke’s account of Jesus in the wilderness before his ministry began, past miles of travel, teaching and healing all around the Galilee and beyond, to the middle of the Gospel of Luke, at the end of chapter thirteen. (Next week the scheduled portion is back in the beginning of chapter 13.) The slow, almost leisurely pace of Jesus’ ministry which includes story-telling, prayer and Sabbath meals gets completely eclipsed in our Lenten reading of Luke’s Gospel.

Furthermore, these five verses are peculiar and difficult to translate and interpret. It seems to me that a lot gets lost in translation across language and culture. What we can understand clearly is that this passage begins with a warning that Herod wanted to kill Jesus. This Herod was Herod Antipas, ruler of the Galilee, and he had already killed John the Baptist. (NB: In Luke’s narrative there’s no mention of his father, Herod the Great’s desire to kill the infant Jesus.) But the name Herod, father or son, would have been enough to make Luke’s audience hiss.

Notice that it’s some Pharisees who brought this warning. We Christians are so conditioned to think of Pharisees as “the bad guys” of the Gospel stories – but I don’t think that’s an accurate portrayal at all. Luke describes at least three meals that Jesus has with Pharisees and we can assume that there were more. Any sense of a negative view of Pharisees from the Gospel stories of Jesus is anachronistic – representing disputes that arose in communities at the end of the first century (long after Jesus had died) after Rome had sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple, but even then they were not “the bad guys.” In Luke’s account, Jesus spends a considerable amount of time with Pharisees and it’s a complex picture that Luke paints. In this story, some Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod wants to kill him, and just after this passage they invited him to a Shabbat meal. They were keeping an eye on him.

Sure, there is tension here – there’s disagreement about what can and cannot be done on the Sabbath, but it’s a debate among friends, not enemies. In spite of what you might have been taught in Sunday School, the Pharisees were literate, moderate, clean, polite, upstanding members of society. They were concerned with the renewal of Jewish spiritual life just like Jesus was. We really don’t have a lot of historical information about the Pharisees. But whether Jesus was a Pharisee (as Rabbi Berman suspects) or a friend of Pharisees, we should understand that we have a lot in common with them and we should probably refrain from disparaging remarks about them in our discourse.

So some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” In other words, get away to safety. Maybe they were concerned for Jesus’ safety. Maybe they feared for their own safety because he was hanging around with them. Or maybe it was a mischievous suggestion that attempted to silence Jesus by making him afraid. Whether a friendly and helpful tip or not, Jesus would not go away because of the threat of Herod Antipas. In other words Jesus would not stop his healing and liberating work because of the risks associated with crossing a wicked ruler and a corrupt government. His naming of Herod as “that fox” is funny and dismissive. Herod considered himself a lion – the Lion of the Galilee. Foxes are opportunistic scavengers. Jesus was resizing Herod with a word that would make his hearers laugh (even if nervously). Think Wile E Coyote.

The words that Jesus says about his work are probably idioms for day by day followed by a certain day – as in “the day is coming soon enough that I will be finished, but it’s not here yet.” Nevertheless, Jesus and Luke’s audience know what’s coming – anyone can see how this story will end, and so there is foreshadowing here – of Jesus’ eventual entry into Jerusalem in time for the Passover (Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord is Psalm 118, recited during festivals) There’s foreshadowing of what the city’s management response to Jesus’ prophetic witness will be when he stirs up the people. Notice that sensing this, Jesus’ reaction is not condemnation or judgment or predictive retribution, but lament.

Jesus lamented – Jesus wept about Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. Now the story doesn’t explicitly say here that Jesus wept. But since lamenting means grieving or weeping, and this is a lament about the urban center of his world and its dehumanizing structures that kept it from receiving the help that it needed to heal, I imagine Jesus crying out with tears. I talk a lot about my view that tears are the third sacrament instituted by Jesus – a sacrament being an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace (according to our catechism). Weeping opens us up to the Holy – in fact, I don’t know a surer sign of the presence of the divine than tears. Perhaps it is because when we are moved to tears, our guard is down. Physically and spiritually, tears are cleansing and transformative.

On the Mount of Olives, there is a chapel named Dominus Flevit – the Lord wept. Its dome is built in the shape of a tear and it overlooks the City of Jerusalem. When you face the altar, you can see Jerusalem through the clear glass picture window behind the altar. According to Luke, Jesus cried out about Jerusalem long before he went there for the last time.

I think that Jesus experienced a kind of cleansing and transformation by the sacrament of tears because according to Luke, he then named his desire to shield and protect the children of Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. At the foot of the altar in Dominus Flevit is a 7^th century mosaic of a mother hen with her wings spread over a flock of chicks. Here, Jesus does not desire to be the roaring Lion of Judah. He does not desire to be the soaring Eagle of the Torah. He explicitly desires to be the mother hen of Jerusalem. You know, hens are kind of clumsy and messy and argumentative. They don’t roar or soar. They pluck. They’re plucky backyard birds. But they will put themselves between their chicks and danger every time.

In Luke’s narrative, rather than seeking distance, Jesus desires to move forward. The next place Jesus went was the house of a leader of the Pharisees to share a meal on the Sabbath, where he healed a man and did some important teaching about humility and radical hospitality and discipleship, in other words, about what Love looks like in action. It was as if Jesus’ weeping gave him a renewed sense of resolve and energy to go on with his work.

You know, for us, Boston is Jerusalem. Jerusalem is Boston — our urban center. Another way to translate the phrase, “See, your house is left to you,”¹ is “See, your economy is divorced – desolate. Behold your economy is estranged from the Holy One.” Our economy is divorced – desolate – estranged from the Holy One, because some people continue to have more than they need and many have far less than they need. Our people are in danger – the streets of our city are not safe and there are people who are not well-cared for. And we are the Body of Christ. That means we are to open our wings wide and invite those who are vulnerable to take cover under our protective shield, to find refuge and shelter. Take a moment right now and spread your arms out. That is the posture to assume.

Meister Eckhart famously said, “Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion.” We are to enact that compassion as the Body of Christ. We are to put our selves, our body between those who are vulnerable and those who would devour them, and to weep, not judge when folks are scurrying around, unwilling to be gathered. We are to move toward rather than away from risking tender compassion and persistent love in the name of Love. We are to show again and again what Love looks like.

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1. If you read Greek, you might be interested in “Luke, the Temple and Jesus’ saying about Jerusalem’s Abandoned House (Luke 13:34-35)” by Francis D. Weinert in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44 no 1 Ja 1982, p. 68-76.

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