Second Sunday in Lent, Year C. For the Gospel: Luke 13.30-35. “Jesus and the Fox”

13 Mar Second Sunday in Lent, Year C. For the Gospel: Luke 13.30-35. “Jesus and the Fox”

31. At that very hour some Pharisees came, and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” 32. And he said to them, “Go and tell that fox, See, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I reach my goal.  33.  Nevertheless I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following; for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.’  34.  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!  35.  Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, `Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!'”

 “Get away from here!  Leave this place!  Herod wants to kill you!”  Scholars disagree as to whether the Pharisees’ warning was meant sincerely or not, or whether they were even telling the truth.  But in any case it doesn’t matter.  It’s obvious that neither they nor their warnings were going to turn Jesus aside from what he was doing.  Why should they?  As the evangelists again and again make plain, Jesus was going to Jerusalem to die.  Why then should Herod’s puny threats make a difference?  “Go and tell that fox[1], Behold, … I must go on my way… It cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.”  So he ignored Herod, and so he set his face towards Jerusalem and death.

But why should he have to die?

And why should his death – his death in particular – matter to me?

There are those who will tell you that the entire Christian belief that Jesus died for us is a curious and not particularly edifying relic of antiquity, a barbarous idea, best abandoned by shrewd, critical intelligences of the twenty-first century. There are even (I am embarrassed to admit) some who are called biblical scholars who suggest that the whole notion of Jesus having gone to Jerusalem to die must be a fabrication, because if it were not it would mean that Jesus was “weird.”

Although these people generally seek to impress us with the modernity – and hence, presumably, the wisdom and relevance of their views (blessed word, “relevance”!  I sometimes think that nobody will care much whether what I say is true or not, just so long as it is relevant) – anyway, as I say, although these people generally seek to impress us with their modernity, the fact is that there have always been such people around, from the very beginnings of Christianity.  Saint Paul himself said that his proclaiming “Christ crucified” was for some mere foolishness, for others a stumbling block and a scandal.[2]

But the problem is older than Paul.  The problem is, in one form or another, as old as the incarnation itself.

Jesus came to a people who indeed expected God to send them a Messiah, but did not at all expect the Messiah to die for their sins. Nor should you think that this was mere superficiality on their part, or because they thought sin did not matter, or that it could be put right without pain. On the contrary!  They had the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah in front of them just as we have, and what is more they read it, which is perhaps more than most of us do.

There they read of the Lord’s servant who was wounded for others’ transgressions, and by whose stripes they were healed.  There they read of one who poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet bore the sins of many and made intercession for transgressors.

How, then, did they understand all this?[3]

This servant of the Lord, they said, is none other than the true Israel, faithful to God.  We are the ones who have been esteemed as smitten, wounded before the Lord, and afflicted.  We are the ones who have been scattered. The gentiles and the unfaithful of our own nation are the sinners who will be handed over to Gehenna, but we are those who, though we suffer now, will see the evil vanquished and have our sins forgiven.

And when will that be? It will be on that day when our sufferings are complete and God, returning in mercy, sets us on high by sending to us the Son of David, the King Messiah. He will be strong and he will make us great.  The Lord our God will forgive our sins for his sake. The King Messiah will pray for us, and he will again purify Jerusalem and build us a sanctuary.  The sufferings in the present time are Israel’s, but the glory will be the King Messiah’s and Israel will share it.

So the rabbis taught.  It was, I think, a noble vision and a noble hope.  Jesus doubtless heard it.  Paul, until he became a Christian, doubtless believed it.

But Jesus, it seems, was not satisfied with it.  He could not agree that his teachers were right to divide the sufferings from the glory, giving the sufferings to Israel and to sinners alone, and only glory to the Messiah. Who was the Messiah, and what was he to do?   Was not the Messiah the true human being, who would restore to humankind wholeness and health, and the dignity for which we were created?  Was not the Messiah “the proper man,” as it says in our translation of Martin Luther’s hymn: “But for us fights the proper man, whom God himself has bidden”?  And as such must he not then be involved in humankind’s whole destiny: the whole work that must be done if evil is to be put right?  Must he not therefore share in the sufferings as well as the glory? The Messiah, the proper man, or, in Jesus’ phrase, the Son of Man, must suffer, and be rejected, and killed, and so come to that death from which he will be raised in glory. So Jesus said to his disciples.  Again and again he said it, if our gospels are to be trusted, and, as you will know if you have read them, again and again his disciples did not understand him.[4]

Jesus not only said it.  It seems that he also did it.  He fought love’s battle, and in a world that crucifies love he died love’s death, giving into his Father’s hands the proper gift, a humanity that was unstained, the incarnation of love. So he reached proper fulfillment.  It was just as he said, “See, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I reach my goal.”  No wonder then that neither Herod’s threats nor the Pharisees’ warnings disturbed him from his purpose.  No wonder he went on his way!

So much we may accept – yet we still have another step to take.  “The Son of Man will give his life a ransom for many,” Jesus says as he approaches Jerusalem.[5]  Again at the Last Supper, “What I do is for you,” he says to those who follow him.  “This is my body given, my blood poured out, for you.”[6]  “For you.”  “For many.”  How are we to understand this?  We may grant that Jesus died a noble death, but how does that help us?

If Christ’s death had just been a human story – perhaps the story of the noblest human being who ever lived – then it would have been a pattern for our imitation, but no more.

But the coming of the Messiah was in fact God’s act, not ours.  The Messiah’s presence in our midst, as Christ’s followers have known from the very beginning, was not merely the presence of a man, nor even of a great hero, but of God.  The New Testament writers ransack language to find ways of saying this.  “God,” says Paul, “was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.”  Christ’s coming, as Saint Matthew puts it, was the fulfillment of Israel’s hope for the presence of God in her midst – Immanuel, God-with-us.  In Saint John’s phrase, in Jesus we are met not simply by humanity, not simply by flesh and blood, but by something more – “the Word” – God’s own Word! – “made flesh” ( 2 Cor. 5.19; Matt. 1.23  ; John 1.14.).[7]

So then, in this one who sets his face like flint to go up to Jerusalem even though Jerusalem will destroy him, we are to see not merely human strength or human commitment, but rather God’s strength and God’s commitment: God tying God’s self to the sins and sorrows of the world.  We are to see here not merely love, but Almighty Love, Love divine, willing to be bound to a world that crucifies love, bound to that world in its pain and in its mortality, so that that world in its turn is now bound to Almighty Love in Almighty Love’s eternity and glory.  That is what we are to see and that is why Jesus’ willingness to go up to Jerusalem and to die on a gallows outside the city avails for me and for you.  If death on a cross is the price that Almighty Love must pay in order to be with us, then love will pay it.

And why did Almighty Love do this?  Simply, for Love’s sake!  From the creation of the world through Abraham, Moses, and the prophets – how greatly we have been loved!  As Jesus prepares to come to us he weeps over us: “Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! Behold, your house is forsaken! And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”  He weeps over us, yet he comes to us anyway, and dies the death that we prepare for him.

How then shall we respond to this?  How then shall we receive this sacrifice, and how shall we come truly to see Jesus and to know him as he is?

As always, by repentance, by turning back to God, by acknowledging our sinfulness, by amending our lives as best we may.  By opening our hearts to God and asking that God’s Spirit may fill our hearts, so that we may be changed into his likeness, painful and long though that process may be.  All this is much of what Lent is about.

First though, and as the only true basis of all, we must simply acknowledge what God in Christ has done for us.  Christ came to us and comes to us, even though we crucify him and our house is desolate.  We have sinned, but it is Christ who dies. The way back from sin to freedom is through suffering and death – but it through his suffering and death, not ours.  “This is my body, this is my blood, given for you,” he says: and so we must accept them.

When, then, shall we come to see him and to know him?  Already we begin to see him and know him when we come to his table and confess the miracle of his coming and the gift that he gives us.  Indeed, just as he promised, we begin to see him and to know him in that very moment when we confess with all the saints, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

LSD

[1]  The “fox” metaphor seems to have a double implication: it suggests, on the one hand, that Herod was not to be trusted, a creature of cunning wiles and ruses; and on the other, that he had little real power or importance—the fox was frequently contrasted in antiquity with the lion. In other words, the man who would later in the story presume to “set him [Jesus] at naught” (ἐξουθενήσας δὲ αὐτὸν: Luke 23.11) was himself a mere nothing.

[2] 1 Cor. 1.23

[3]  For the interpretation of Isaiah 53 offered here, see Bruce D. Chilton, The Isaiah Targum: Introduction, Translation, Apparatus and Notes (Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier, 1987), 103–5; compare also the messianic hope in the Psalms of Solomon 17.21–46, in H. F. D. Sparks,  The Apocryphal Old Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 678–80.

[4] See, for example, Mark 8.31–33, 9.31–32, 10.32–45.

[5] Mark 10. 45.

[6] Mark 14.22–24; 1 Cor. 11.24–25.

[7] 2 Cor. 5.19; Matt. 1.23; John 1.14. Thus, at the Council of Ephesus (431) and subsequently the Council of Chalcedon (451), the title “Θεοτόκος”—“God Bearer” or “Mother of God”—was affirmed of Jesus’ mother Mary, not as a teaching about Mary herself, but as an element of Christology—indeed, an essential element: see further my Mary of Nazareth (New York: Seabury 2025) 138.