We often receive the frustration of Jesus like a child. Thinking it “mean” that he wants something different than we do.
For Sunday
The Second Sunday of Lent
Collect
O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy: Be gracious to all who have gone astray from your ways, and bring them again with penitent hearts and steadfast faith to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your Word, Jesus Christ your Son; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
From Luke 13:31-35
“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Reflection
How do we interpret the gospel text when Jesus challenges the Pharisees? What are the assumptions we’re making when we read this?
One of the common ones are that the Pharisees are “the bad guys”. Or the moralists. The leaders or the rules-lawyers. We treat them like the antagonists and Jesus is the protagonist. He is definitely “the good guy.”
Sometimes we read it like Jesus is the Perfect Man so the Pharisees must be wrong. Whether we understand exactly why is less important. We’re confident that they must be.
Sometimes we like to see Jesus get mad, frustrated, or irritable. Perhaps because it humanizes him or makes him more relatable. Or it justifies our own anger.
There are other assumptions we bring with us into the text, of course. About how we’re supposed to read it and why. Who these people are. Even whether or not we’re supposed to like them.
Let us choose to be conscious of those assumptions.
Precisely because these assumptions act like shortcuts that skip over the important work of reflecting on the gospel. So then, how do we hear these hard words for the Pharisees? For the church?
As we approach the two-year anniversary of our Pandemic time, I’m hearing Jesus’s voice differently. Not with scorn or anger, but with compassion and a generous heart. “How often have I desired…” he says. Desired to mother them, protect them. But couldn’t. Because they weren’t willing to be mothered. So are they choosing to be “grown up”?
He has healed the sick and cast out countless demons; teaching his followers to walk in his way of love. And he desires to nurture and protect them all.
Jesus is telling them that the question is not about Jesus at all. He desires it. And he is responsible for doing that very thing for others right now. The choice, then, is theirs.
I’m reminded of all the excuses I’ve made to not do what Jesus wants. How unwilling I’ve been to be nurtured by Jesus because I’d rather be right. It is way easier to trust in our own egos. Certainty. Ideas about what is right. Much easier than trusting Jesus.
And yet, sometimes I am willing. So perhaps there’s hope for us yet.