Day 6: On Jesus' Lament over Jerusalem

Last night, I visited a small group meeting with friends from a previous church. I used to attend this group more regularly before I started working at Oakhurst and became involved in a fellowship group there. Thankful to be among good friends, I was also reminded of the importance of the lectionary cycle. We discussed together the story from Luke 13 in which Jesus laments over Jerusalem. At first read, this is a fairly strange text. It’s not one that is particularly memorable, nor is it easily understood. I struggled with it initially, and at first rather resisted pulling for myself something meaningful from it. Herein lies the value of reading (and preaching) based on the lectionary—a text that I would have otherwise passed over became the focal point of a group discussion and proved to be quite a fruitful passage. I was thus reminded also of the value of conversing over the biblical texts—multiple perspectives add much value and insight to challenging and straightforward texts alike.

The text: (NRSV)

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from 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! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” 

We have here an odd little exchange between the religious leaders and Jesus. The Pharisees prod Jesus with a veiled threat of death, and Jesus responds rather snappily. It’s somewhat startling to find the insult of “fox” in Jesus’ speech; here we have the righteously indignant Jesus who liked to flip tables and curse unsuspecting fig trees. To Herod the fox, and more pointedly to his Pharisaic messengers, Jesus offers another foretelling of his death. He speaks strangely of his ministry that will happen for the next two days, which on the third day will be finished, or, as rendered in the Greek, will be perfected. Again, he (or, more properly, Luke) repeats the three day motif, this time referring more directly to the propensity of Jerusalem, the holy city, for killing prophets.

He weeps for the city, as so many of his prophetic forebears did, and for the people it represents. Then we have this beautiful image of the mother hen, the second animal metaphor in the passage. Jesus as hen contrasts sharply with Herod as fox. And despite the warm, feathery pleasantness of this image Jesus offers, the truth behind it is that chickens (read—us! The Pharisees, the people of Jerusalem) resist the comfort and protection of the hen’s wings. As Ashley (last night’s discussion leader) described, chickens tend to scatter when mama tries to shelter them from the rain. And though their downy feathers absorb water while a hen’s feathers repel it, they know nothing better than to scamper about freely, soaking wet and alone.

As Ashley described these poor chicks who just don’t know what is best for them, I was reminded of my Ash Wednesday discussion with my fifth grade students last week. I asked them if they knew from where Ash Wednesday ashes typically come—and most of them did: from Palm Sunday’s palms. But fewer of them could articulate why this is a traditional practice (and fairly so, it’s a difficult concept). My best description of it was this: that using these celebratory palms in is a reminder of the cycles of life—birth and death, joy and sorrow, forgiveness and penitence. The Palm Sunday ashes also allude to the capacity that lies within each of us to love and to hate, to worship and to crucify. My students understood, of course, that we can make both good and bad decisions, that we are people who are neither perfectly good nor perfectly bad. Burning the triumphant palms into penitent ashes reminds us of our humanness, our imperfections, our hypocrisies. We at once can see the merit of drawing under the wings of Jesus, our mother hen, while also desiring the freedom of running free in the rain, no matter what discomfort or harm it will bring to ourselves.

And isn’t it something that Jesus weeps for the very city—the very people—that will soon take his life. He mourns their rejection, their blindness to the greater truth that his resurrection will reveal. The persecuted one laments the persecutors. I believe he weeps for us still. We are too stubborn to see the one God has sent, still. The good news, of course, is that we will get to see Jesus with fresh eyes on Easter morning, once again given the same chance, like the people of Jerusalem so long ago, to see what it is we are foolishly missing as squawk about in the rain.