Lent 2 March 16 2025

 

Scripture:         Luke 13:31-35

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” ³² He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me,^[c] ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. ³³ Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ ³⁴ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! ³⁵ See, your house is left to you.^[d] And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when^[e] you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ”

 

Meditation:     Elizabeth Bryce

 

A couple of weeks ago, I was preaching at another congregation’s Sunday morning worship. It was an emergency thing, when they called on Friday morning and asked me to fill in, the bulletin was already prepared, hymns already chosen. So I just wrote a sermon to fit with the theme and the gospel reading – and I have to confess I didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the finer details in the service. 

 

During the worship service, a lay reader stood up to read the two scripture readings. The first one was from Paul’s second epistle to the Corinthians, it was a passage written by the apostle to address some conflict that was happening. 

 

So Paul was trying to connect that conflict with something from their history. He made a reference to Moses which assumed that everyone knew who Moses was, and he made another vague reference to a specific story that took place in the book of Exodus. 

 

Then Paul continued to make his point with one of the most anti-semitic rants that you can find in the New Testament. Boy, did I wish I had paid more attention to the details that I thought were not very important. 

 

I say this in the full knowledge that Paul of Tarsus was a Jewish man himself. He could demonstrate his lineage in the Jewish faith tradition, he was a scholar of Hebrew literature, in his past he had even defended Judaism against the upstart Christian movement, he had done so so passionately that it even led to the death of the Christian convert, Stephen. How could Paul be anti-semitic?

 

But when the epistles and the gospels were being written, these were difficult times for the followers of Jesus, and particularly for those who were rooted in a Jewish heritage. 

 

They probably still considered themselves Jewish, more than Christian, as Paul did, but the Jewish authorities considered their commitment to Jesus to be a blasphemy.  The synagogues didn’t appreciate Paul’s re-envisioning of their tradition, where he believed the Jewish tradition was ultimately leading to fulfilment in the life and ministry of Jesus. The real Messiah. The son of God.

 

The passage from Corinthians that was red that Sunday it was one of those passages where Paul was pushing back against their rejection.  It was a passage where Paul claimed that Jesus had fulfilled the promise that Moses could not fulfil. When I was studying ministry forty years ago, that was what I was taught, that was how I was taught to preach.

 

Today’s passage from the gospel of Luke is another one of those passages which tells the story of Jesus in such a way that you could interpret it with an anti-semitic bias too. Certainly we have centuries of Christian preaching and teaching that has taken this story in that direction. Telling us that Jerusalem is corrupt, that Jewish leaders are un-redeemable, and that the Jews are the Christ killers. Shaping us tin the belief that God sent Jesus to ancient Palestine to “fix” the people of God, to start a new church and to make everyone Christians. 

 

But I don’t believe that is what God or Jesus or the gospel intended for us. Like Paul, Jesus was a Jew. And even though he found himself in conflict with certain groups, or with authority figures in general, in this passage he approached Jerusalem and her people with such a deep reverence, such profound love and even hope.

 

From the very outset of the reading, a group of Pharisees came to Jesus and warned him about the persecution he would face from King Herod. You see, because the Pharisees were PROTECTING Jesus. 

 

Even though they often argued and debated the finer points of faithful living and theology, this shows us that Jesus was still dear to them, that he was one of their own. The Pharisees didn’t want Herod to get his hands on him.

 

Then Jesus began his lament over Jerusalem.  

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

 

Can’t you hear the love in that lament? This is the same Jesus who went to Jerusalem at the age of 12 and ran away from his parents so he could spend a few days talking to the temple teachers and hang with the temple servants.  This is the same Jesus who probably, like most good Jews, made at least one holy pilgrimage a year from Galilee to the temple, to re-commit again to God and his Jewish faith.  This is Jesus who had friends in the city, and outside the city, friends who would give him a place to stay and feed him and care for him.

 

As a parent I especially identify with Jesus’ image of the mother hen who broods over her children and tries – tries – to gather them under her wings, but they will not. It doesn’t mean I stop loving them. It doesn’t mean I have rejected them or moved on to another child who is more receptive. 

 

For Jesus, Jerusalem and her temple was the Holy of Holies. It was the centre of the universe. This was a strong and deep bond that all the debates and arguments and nit-picking could not destroy.  Even when the authorities were persecuting Jesus and setting him up for his arrest, Jesus recognized that Jerusalem was the spiritual home where he needed to be. It was the place of the prophets, it was a place of celebration AND a place of mourning. 

 

It was the place of despair and lament. It was a place of hope.

 

Jesus knew that Jerusalem was a place where opposites collide.  According to the Jewish historian Shaye Cohen the Jerusalem temple was (and I quote): the place where God’s finger touched the wild, chaotic world and held it still.

 

That sounds like a place Jesus would choose to be. The place where God’s finger touches our wild, chaotic world and holds it still. Or she gathered it under her wings. 

 

It was a place where all the crazy daily realities met the infinite and undeniable love of God. It was the place where God welcomed the prophets and the persecuted as if they were beloved children.

 

It was the place where the corruption and disrespect (all of human distortion) met the essential truth of God’s compassion for all creation. 

 

Jerusalem was never NOT a part of God’s kindom, though Jesus realized they would express it their own way.  “See your house is left to you” he concluded. But he did not stop caring.

 

Instead he offered his heartfelt Lament, and that lament has something to teach us in the season of Lent.  

 

Jesus, like the prophets before him, believed in the power of offering a lament for the things that are breaking our hearts. Not a prayer of intercession, or a miracle to bypass the pain. Not an intervention or a criticism. He offered that lament to keep Jerusalem and us in that moment and hold it still for us.

 

When times are tough the culture around us pushes us into 2 polarities. Parker Palmer describes them this way:

One the one hand, we have corrosive cynicism – we give up on faith and optimism entirely – we don’t even care.  On the other opposite, we have irrelevant idealism, the falsely positive hope that glosses over all the negativity and makes light of real suffering. 

 

Parker Palmer suggests that instead of falling into one of those extremes, we hang in there with our feelings of discomfort, of fear, of despair and we offer our own lament. We hang in there expressing that lament, so that God can find us in that deep dark place and lead us through the suffering to hope.  

 

This is why Lent is 6 weeks long. I always felt like the season of Advent goes by in a flash. Christmas is only 12 days long, and Easter is over in a weekend. But Lent gives us time, time to enter into the depth of our lamentation, to name our frustrations and insecurity, to encounter the silence of God, and to look even deeper for God already at work in our life.

 

Parker Palmer reflected on the brokenness of our time, the terrible disconnect between great wealth and great poverty in our world, the reality of so much communication, but with so little meaning. And then he says: who is better to face the reality of this than those whose hearts have been broken, and who have still survived? Who better than Jesus, who was broken only to rise again?

 

We may lose hope, but hope will never lose us.  We may try to avoid the lamentation, but God will hold us still.  We may have broken hearts, but broken hearts are hearts that are open, and hearts that will love again.

Thanks be to God for this spiritual journey through Lent, and for all that Jesus teaches us along the way, Amen.