Second Sunday in Lent (C), February 24, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God whose glory is mercy, 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 choice of a Gospel text for the second Sunday in Lent strikes me as a little strange. It’s strange to be catapulted from the first week of Lent, from Luke’s account of Jesus before his ministry began, resisting all sorts of temptations in the wilderness, 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 at the beginning of chapter 13.) The slow, almost leisurely pace of Jesus’ ministry in Luke which includes magnificent story-telling, prayer and Sabbath meals gets completely eclipsed in our Lenten readings from Luke’s Gospel. Our lectionary saves all that for the summer.

So in addition to the jarring disregard for the arc of the narrative in Luke, these five verses are peculiar and difficult to translate and interpret. The language is awkward both in English and in Greek. It seems to me that so much gets lost in translation across language and culture. What we can understand 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. (Note that in Luke’s narrative there’s no mention of Herod’s father, Herod the Great’s desire to kill the infant Jesus – that’s the Gospel of Matthew’s story.) But the name Herod, father or son, would have been enough to make Luke’s audience hiss. Both Herods were long gone by the time the Gospel of Luke was written.

I want you to notice that it’s some Pharisees who brought this warning to Jesus. We Christians are conditioned by centuries of libelous teaching 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 had 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 long after Jesus had died. In Luke’s account, Jesus spent 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 wanted to kill him, and just after this passage they invited him to a Shabbat meal. They were looking out for 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 our resident Rabbi Howard Berman suspects) or a friend of Pharisees, we should understand that we have a lot in common with them and we should absolutely 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. Either way, 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. Jesus calling Herod “that fox” is funny and dismissive. Herod called himself a lion – the Lion of the Galilee. Lions are majestic and courageous. 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 government’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 often 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.

Perhaps you know that on the Mount of Olives, there is a chapel built by the Franciscans in the 1950’s 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 claim to be or even desire to be the roaring Lion of Judah. He does not claim to be or desire to be the soaring Eagle of the Torah. He explicitly desires to be the mother hen of Jerusalem – Jesus as a mother hen. You know, hens are kind of clumsy and messy and argumentative. They are not majestic. They are not predators of any kind. 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 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 – many of the streets of our city are not safe and there are people who are not well-cared for because of people whose end is destruction, whose god is the belly, and whose glory is in their shame, as the apostle Paul writes to the church in Phillipi. Our people are in danger 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. That is the posture we do assume – with our Safe Haven shelter for women who are homeless because of mental illness, with BostonWarm and common art. That is the posture we assume for thirteen – soon to be fourteen12-step groups that meet here each week. That is the posture we assume for Café Emmanuel – the weekly gathering of GLBT seniors. That is the posture we assume for music makers and artists of all kinds. That is the posture we assume for people of many faiths and people of no faith. It’s the posture that lets people say, “Surely the Holy One is in this place.” That is also the posture we are to assume in and across our city so that people will say, “surely the Holy One is in this city.”

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 concern in the name of Love. We are to show again and again what Love looks like.

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