Forgetful Us
Text: Luke 13:31-35
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
From time to time the relationship between God and people has been tumultuous and troubled. I can’t speak for how God views it, but people seem to have mixed feelings. We are often of two minds. The first mind welcomes—calls for—God’s involvement in our lives. We are grateful to God, and we bring to our relationship reverence, thanksgiving, and praise. The second mind finds God to be at best irrelevant and at worst demanding, interfering, and difficult to live with. In the Bible, which is the story of God and us, this on-again off-again relationship starts in the Garden of Eden and carries right on through. And up to the present.
The complaint Jesus makes about Jerusalem—and its habit of killing the prophets who are sent to it—is just one more episode in this conflicted story.
In one sense the passage is not about Jesus at all. It is about God’s role in history and the prophets who try to speak for God to an uninterested or antagonistic audience. When Jesus quotes psalm 117—blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord—the question is not so much whether the blessed one is Jesus. That is, we know that someone is blessed, but is Jesus the one? The question is whether this man, this prophet, is blessed or otherwise. That is, we see this man, but is he really blessed or not? If the people answer Yes, then they are acknowledging that God is speaking to them through Jesus. And Christians would say that God is even appearing to them. But the track record is not good; Jerusalem is not often willing to grant God’s voice. If ever.
This is not too shocking. The role of any prophet is to be in conflict with the powers and principalities. The whole point of a prophet—including and especially Jesus—is to preach and act against the prevailing systems of power that have forgotten God. It is not surprising the Jerusalem kills prophets sent its way. Jerusalem in its day was like a combination of New York City and Washington DC. A city of commerce and government. Why would they welcome someone who told them that God was on their case and had a few things to tell them?
What Jerusalem had forgotten was that the city owed its entire existence to God. The whole of Israel, the nation, came as a gift from God. Starting with God’s promise to Abraham, who is called Abram when we first meet him in Genesis, God makes covenants, or agreements, with Israel. “I am the Lord who brought you out of [your birthplace] to give you this land to possess.” You are my people, says God repeatedly. This is your land that I give to you and that I bless for your use. Over and over in this passage the word is repeated: give, gift. “On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying ‘to your descendant I give this land.’” And the land God is talking about is the land in which Jerusalem, by the time of Jesus a thriving metropolis, sits.
But Jerusalem has forgotten. It has taken the land, the city, the gift of life, for granted. It goes its own way. And when God reminds them, it puts God’s voices to death.
So in another sense this passage is all about Jesus. What can be more personal than a contract out on you, a price on your head? One can speak in general of prophets and their troubles, but the prophet in this case is someone particular. It is Jesus. Herod wants to kill you, claim the Pharisees. You, Jesus, in particular, is the one they are talking about. Jesus has just told the people in power that they won’t be there for long. The last will be first and the first last, they have heard him say. Not pleasing words to those who are now first. And he has a bad attitude. Jesus in Luke has a confident arrogant swagger that we today might admire, but that I’m sure the officials of his day did not. I must, he rebuts the Pharisees, I must go to Jerusalem, who kills the prophets like me. But not right this minute. I am busy. Casting out demons and healing people. I’m busy today, and I’m busy tomorrow, and pretty much the day after. But then I’ll go.
Jesus preaches an astounding gospel. Especially in Luke. The good news is that the poor and the outcast will no longer be so. The rich and the powerful will not longer be so, but will be cast down from their thrones. He preaches that the vertical will become horizontal. That the relationships of power than go up and down will become level, a plain. In his sermon on the plain (its a plain in Luke, a mount in Matthew), he tells us not to judge, not to charge interest on loans, to give whenever and for whatever we are asked, to not try to recover what is taken from us. We do not, evidenced by our actions, take these words of Jesus seriously. We therefore should not condemn the people of Jerusalem too harshly, who like us simply equivocated and hedged when it came to the hard parts.
How I wished I could gather you, you people of Jerusalem, gather you to me as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. Jesus mourns. You were not willing. The chicks say no. They will not be embraced by mother Jesus. Why not? Why would they not accept their mama’s embrace?
There is a time when an embrace is all we need. Our parents’ arms around us to comfort us and make us feel protected. Little children, like chicks under the wing. But later we push away our parent’s embrace. It is embarrassing. We want to forget our mama. We are grown up and independent. And we have learned that our parents cannot save us. So thinks Jerusalem.
Yet after this adolescence, we again see the embrace to be the gift it can be. An expression of comfort, affection, condolence, hopefulness. A quiet and undemanding presence. Part of an eternal relationship. Is that what Jesus longs for in deadly Jerusalem?
Gratitude is the foundation of religion. Maybe it is possible to be spiritual without gratitude, but I’m not sure about that. Christians attach gratitude to an agent, to God. Gratitude is a first connection to God, and serves among other things to remind us who God is and what God has given us.
But we, like Jerusalem, forget God. Then our relationship with God gets into trouble. Then it is easy to think that there is nothing to be grateful for and no one to be grateful to. It is easy to think we owe God nothing. Rather than life, existence, everything.
I said at the beginning that I couldn’t speak to how God views our relationship, but that is not true. The story of the Bible, the story of us and God together, is a story of loyalty. On God’s part. Even when not on ours. You can hear this in the other readings for today and the psalm. God remains loyal to God’s people. God keeps the covenant. God constantly tries to make contact. God weeps for us and longs for us. God comes to be with us. With open wings.
