This Week: Lent 2C
Gospel: Luke 13:31-35
This week’s gospel text is rich with emotion and challenging to reflect upon. I suspect we have a sense of how we ought to feel about it perhaps and also kinda don’t wanna. Like, we don’t actually want to face it head on.
The subject is pretty clear. Jesus is being warned about Herod by some Pharisees and Jesus calls him a fox, sends a message back to him, and directly refers to the murderous institutional response to prophets who dare stand up it. So, you know, no big deal, right?
More comforting for the reader (or preacher), perhaps, is reflecting on Jesus’s desire to comfort, comparing himself to a mother hen, taking the people under her wing. This, too, is an important reflection, once again, of a feminine image of God (there are many!) and for some, this might not be so comforting after all…
As a I wrote earlier in the week, the context may color our sense of how to even take this passage, for he was just teaching about the narrow door — the suggestion that the Way we are to follow (what we might call the Way of Love) is not merely do whatever (and, to be fair, also probably not whatever ______ says it is). Because we’re supposed to do better. So what happens immediately after he talks about this? Some hypocrites warn him about the evil machinations of the jealous king who plans to have him killed. Doesn’t such a situation give “none of you is doing it right” vibes?
Jesus further riffs on the state’s role in murder — saying prophets don’t die in the middle of nowhere — they die in Jerusalem because Jerusalem wants them dead.
How does this idea feel to you? Be honest with yourself.
For many people, the idea that the state targets prophets and silences them, even seeking to kill them is just a historical fact. From the murder of Fred Hampton to the attempt to convince Martin Luther King, Jr. to kill himself, the U.S. have tried and succeeded to kill its own prophets. Others find the invocation of such specters deeply troubling to contend with, to even consider as something “we” do.
This tension is not only natural, but probably one people have felt in every age. But it is a tension we need to contend with, if for no other reason than Jesus brings it to our attention.
Jerusalem kills prophets because its king is a murderer. The fact that these Pharisees know that to be true and walk up to Jesus and tell him so — that is no mere warning of a threat (one with which he is clearly familiar) but one they are clearly communicating to him that they have no intention of preventing, stopping, or saying anything more about.
In short, it’s up to Jesus to prevent his own murder, when countless others will step out of the way.