Sunday, February 28
Second Sunday in Lent

Focus Theme
Strong and Tender

Weekly Prayer
Hope beyond all human hope, you promised descendants as numerous as the stars to old Abraham and barren Sarah. You promise light and salvation in the midst of darkness and despair, and promise redemption to a world that will not listen. Gather us to yourself in tenderness, open our ears to listen to your word, and teach us to live faithfully as people confident of the fulfillment of your promises. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Focus Scripture
Luke 13:31-35

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 outside of 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.'"

All Readings For This Sunday
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 with Psalm 27 and
Philippians 3:17–4:1 and
Luke 13:31-35

Reflection and Focus Questions
by Kate Huey

Focus Questions 1. To what is Jesus calling you in this season of Lent? 2. How does faith address anxiety and fear? What do you think kept Herod up at night? 3. Who or what are "the enemies" that pursue us, or pursue the members of our congregation, the members of our communities, our brothers and sisters around the world? 4. How would Walter Brueggemann's ideal of "neighborliness" transform our communities and the world? What would have to change? 5. How do you respond to Fredrick Holmgren's observations about ancient Israel? Text for Meditation Blessed is the one who comes / in the name of the Lord. For ideas on how to meditate with the Bible, read our article on Praying With the Bible

Our Gospel reading offers rich material for our Lenten reflection this week: after all, this is the season for uncomfortable questions and hard truth--just what's needed to open our eyes and our hearts, and set our feet on the path of faithfulness. If you thought giving up chocolate was difficult, try immersing yourself in this short but challenging text from Luke, one moment on the road to Jerusalem, one moment on our own Lenten journey toward the cross, facing obstacles both physical and spiritual. Inside and out: obstacles on our own spiritual path, obstacles on the road toward a whole new world of justice, wholeness and peace.

This short story is about an encounter, a warning on the road to Jerusalem from Galilee, where the petty tyrant Herod runs roughshod over the people. Herod Antipas, successor to the evil Herod of the nativity stories and equally ineffective at hindering God's plans, is motivated by fear and a deep hunger for power and security. His vision of how things should be obviously clashes with the things Jesus is saying and teaching as he travels around, right there, on Herod's home turf! Leslie Hoppe contrasts Herod's plans and the messianic mission of Jesus: "Jesus came to call the people to repentance and faith. He called them to renew their commitment to their ancestral religious traditions. Antipas and his supporters also wished to lead the people of the Galilee to a new world--a world whose center was Rome and whose values were opposed to the values of the gospel." 

Herod is curiously human

However, Herod is curiously human, too, in his own way, and Luke offers another glimpse into his psyche (and maybe ours as well) later in his Gospel. Stephen I. Wright directs our attention to the scene in Jerusalem, when Pilate has sent Jesus to Herod (who was also in the city at the time; remember, it was Passover): "When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time, because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign" (23:8). What Wright calls Herod's "ambivalence" toward Jesus in Luke's Gospel has a strikingly contemporary ring of familiarity: it's as if Jesus is some sort of wonder-working celebrity standing before him, rather than the Son of the Most High God, and it takes Herod another verse or two to remember what a threat to his pathetic little power this prophet actually represents. Here, on the road, however, Jesus brushes aside the warnings about Herod's evil scheming as only so many words (which they are, of course), futile efforts that are not significant in the big picture, the plan of God. God's word has power; Herod's words are empty and useless.

Still, the powers that be, whether it's Herod in Galilee, Pilate in Jerusalem, the religious leaders there and scattered throughout the land, the wealthy and prestigious, or the mighty Roman Empire itself, can cause havoc in the meantime, and Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem fully aware of the awful danger that lies ahead. These are all powers of one kind of another, some of them admittedly dependent on those more powerful than themselves, all of whom dislike Jesus' talk about the first being last, and the last being first. Indeed, that's what Jesus was talking about right before this scene opens, and none of it sounded like good news to those who thought they were comfortably (if tenuously) ensconced in the places of prestige and power. 

High standard of faithfulness

Of course, this is not the first time a prophet has stood up to the powers that be in Israel. The language and imagery in this short text recall not only ancient promises of God's tender care (our theme, after all, is "strong and tender"), but also God's holding Israel to a high standard of faithfulness to a covenant carved on their hearts. When Jesus speaks (and heals and drives out demons and feeds the masses), he is doing what God has done throughout the Old Testament, and his words here illustrate, Stephen Wright tells us, "Jesus' rootedness in Jewish ways of thought," even as it "echoes Old Testament language describing God's own tender care for [God's] people." Given the tragic misinterpretation and uses to which passages like this one have been put, it's important to remember once again that Jesus is a prophet in a long line of prophets in Israel who proclaimed both God's mercy and God's judgment. According to Leslie Hoppe, "Both Isaiah (60:4) and Zechariah (10:6-10) use the image of the scattered children of Jerusalem being gathered together to speak of God's unwavering love for Israel. Also the image of Israel finding shelter under God's 'wings' occurs frequently in the Old Testament (see Deut. 32:11; Ruth 2:12; Pss. 57:1; 61:4; 91:4)." Jesus' cry of anguish in this passage would have been wrenchingly familiar to the ears of those who could hear them.

If we turn our attention, then, from Herod's feeble little threats out in the outlying territory to the imposing sight of the city of Jerusalem, at the heart of all things religious and political, we'll focus on what is to come in the story of Jesus as well as its meaning for us today, gathered in our own centers of all things political, religious, and economic. What does it mean for Jesus to weep over the city that is, many scholars remind us, at the center of Luke's story, from Jesus' childhood visits (which presumably continued throughout his lifetime) to the great drama that is about to unfold? Jerusalem is of course important in the Old Testament, for better or worse, but it's also important to Luke, who mentions it, Fred Craddock writes, "ninety times; in the remainder of the New Testament, it is mentioned only forty-nine."

What was Jesus thinking?

This is no ordinary city but one that holds the presence of God in its temple, or at least it has long claimed to do so. However, Jesus echoes other prophets who warn Jerusalem that the presence of God has left its midst: Walter Brueggemann recalls Jeremiah, the "voice of prophetic, critical realism" who "looks the city square in the face and notices the cadences of its death march." And Daniel Deffenbaugh remembers Isaiah, who challenged "the predominant Jerusalem theology that interpreted the Davidic monarchy and the presence of God in the temple as the final fulfillment of God's promise to Abraham," and the way "God's will came to be reified in the political apparatus of the state." However, both scholars emphasize that those ancient prophets spoke words of hope and promise, too, because their vision, and their message, encompassed both judgment and mercy. Jeremiah, Brueggemann writes, "can imagine the new gift of YHWH that takes urban form so that neighborliness becomes the big urban agenda," and Deffenbaugh writes that "a hopeful vision of a just and righteous kingdom was never far from the consciousness of some among Jerusalem's faithful." Both writers consider what was going through Jesus' heart and mind as he gazed at the city before him and considered its future. Jesus, Brueggemann says, "is the lover of a city who grieves its death wish," a city that "refuses what makes for shalom." And so, Jesus "warns against the oppressive acquisitiveness of urban style that we call 'coveting' that in turn produces endless anxiety." Deffenbaugh suggests that the vision of God for Jerusalem, however frustrated, "must have been on Jesus' mind as he looked toward the city that would ultimately reject him."

We know that Luke knew that the city of Jerusalem would be destroyed a few decades after Jesus was put to death there. Margaret Aymer says that Luke held Jerusalem responsible for its own destruction, because it rejected Jesus (one wonders, however, about all those people who did not reject Jesus, as well as those who were faithful to the covenant with Israel), but, she writes, "Jesus' response is perhaps more compassionate. Jesus laments." That lament is the source of our theme, "strong and tender," as the image Jesus evokes is that of a mother hen who protects her chicks. Several writers dwell on this metaphor, drawing out meaning that might escape us at first: Jesus' firm resolve to face what lies ahead in Jerusalem is the same kind of fierce devotion that any mother feels: "He is going to take on the authorities, whether represented by Herod or the finicky spirit of Jerusalem, by moving toward the conflict rather than away," Timothy Shapiro writes. "He's the mother hen who will pursue her child through thick and thin, through good school days and bad, through stupid moves and violent outbursts; he's the mother hen who folds the covers down on the bed and puffs up the pillow, at the same time saying, 'Don't let me ever catch you doing that again.'" What a beautiful way to describe both judgment (accountability) and mercy! N.T. Wright draws on the image of a "farmyard fire" as the threat to the hen's babies, when "those cleaning up have found a dead hen, scorched and blackened, and live chicks sheltering under her wings. She has quite literally given her life to save them. It is a vivid and violent image of what Jesus declared he longed to do for Jerusalem and, by implication, for all Israel. But, at the moment, all he could see was chicks scurrying off in the opposite direction, taking no notice of the smoke and flames indicating the approach of danger, nor of the urgent warnings of the one who alone could give them safety."

Weeping for the most unexpected of people

Ironically, Rodney Clapp believes that these "surprising words" of Jesus help us to see even those who threaten him "in a new light": "Herod, these plotting Pharisees, the power players in Jerusalem, all the first who would be first, then and now--they want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering. Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of mother hen's wings. What these overlords want to be heard as a fearsome canine growl emerges as an almost comic cheeping." So the words are not surprising only because they present a feminine image for God but because of the poignancy of maternal tenderness that enables us, perhaps, to see that God loves all of us, and grieves even (or perhaps especially) those who most violently turn away. Margaret Aymer pushes us even further, if we consider how "remarkable" it is that Jesus laments the very ones who will reject him. How, she asks, would it affect our Lent if we took the opportunity to lament the most unlikely people? "What might Lent look like if one of our Lenten disciplines were a call to lament on behalf of the unjust? What might a lament look like for U.S.-based and global terrorists?...For those who deny resources to the poor and who oppress those with no advocate?" (As I write this, many states are considering making deep cuts in Medicaid.) And what about us--where would we put ourselves in this picture? What, Aymer asks, "if we were to lament our own silence and collusion with international crimes of poverty, hunger, and disease?"

Remember when we said that Lent presents uncomfortable questions and hard truths? What fate are our "city," our culture, our values and our rejection of what shalom requires, bringing down upon us? Richard Swanson observes that "Herod (in any century) has always found allies among people of faith," and we remember, for example, that "good" Christians owned slaves not so long ago, and today make decisions for the sake of things like "national security" (remember the fear of insecurity in Herod?) that would make Jesus weep over us in anguished lament. Swanson reminds us, then, that "Lent is a time to take seriously the ways we live as signs of death rather than of life, the ways we steal from the earth rather than sprout from it," a beautiful image in a church season named after "spring." In this story about Jesus' firm determination to face what lies ahead in Jerusalem--for our sake, not only for the sake of his people, in his own time--we hear a call to stand firm ourselves, no matter what, when faced with risk for the sake of the gospel. Jesus' firm resolve reminds us of great heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr., but also of unnamed "Freedom Riders" who were not deterred by ugly threats and violence when they integrated buses in the South during the Civil Rights era. Some were killed, many were beaten, and even more lost their homes, but they did not back down. Jesus doesn't back down or run away, either, not because he knows that he is "safe" from the cross (quite the opposite), but because he knows who God is, and what "the plan" is. This is the Jesus who accompanies us on our Lenten journey, and on every path of risk and faithfulness, no matter what we encounter along the way.

During Black History month, we recall Dr. King and the Freedom Riders and also the slaves of antebellum American who, Michael Curry writes, "by virtue of their servitude, were compelled to cast their ken beyond mere sight--to extend their vision beyond things as they were, to a deeper, broader, higher vision, and dream of things as they could be." This, Curry writes, is what Jesus did so well: "For Jesus, God's passionate dream, compassionate desire, and bold determination is to gather God's human children closer and closer in God's embrace and love." Even the most unlikely people, on the margins of society, are gathered in under this mother hen's care, for "the gospel transcends marginality and creates the context for the emergence of a new humanity, a new human community, born not of social custom but of the Spirit of God."

A "fluffed up, brooding hen"

Fortunately, Barbara Brown Taylor has preached on this difficult text, and her reflection is both earthy and moving, calling us together rather than scattering us like vulnerable chicks. We are the body of Christ together, she writes, not all alone, in our private spiritual lives. She evokes the tenderness of Jesus' efforts and the tragedy of his rejection: "At risk of his own life, Jesus has brought the precious kingdom of God within the reach of the beloved city of God, but the city of God is not interested. Jerusalem has better things to do than to hide under the shelter of this mother hen's wings." She then describes the meager resources of a mother hen attempting to protect her brood against a vicious and well-armed predator, with "nothing much in the way of a beak and nothing at all in the way of talons." Taylor's is perhaps the most heartbreaking sentence in all the commentaries (but I am, of course, reading as a mother and grandmother): "At the very least, she can hope that she satisfies his appetite so that he leaves her babies alone." Do these words give us a sense, even in a small way, of the tragedy of Jesus' impending death? But Taylor then goes on to resurrection, after the "cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother's love for her chicks. And God bet the farm on the hen." This is the most beautiful reflection on this text that I could find, and Taylor's description of the battle is elegantly matched by her remembrance of the victory: "Having loved her own who were in the world, she loved them to the end. She died a mother hen, and afterwards she came back to them with teeth marks on her body to make sure they got the point: that the power of foxes could not kill her love for them, nor could it steal them away from her. They might have to go through what she went through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on the other side, with love stronger than death." She then suggests the lovely image of the "church of Christ as a big fluffed up brooding hen, offering warmth and shelter to all kinds of chicks, including orphans, runts, and maybe even a couple of ducks. The church of Christ planting herself between the foxes of this world and the fragile-boned chicks, offering herself up to be eaten before she will sacrifice one of her brood." We often refer to "Mother Church," and perhaps that is apt: "It is where we come to be fed and sheltered, but it is also where we come to stand firm with those who need the same things from us." What a lovely image for the church: a big, fluffed up brooding hen!

In writing this reflection, I must confess that I struggled with interpretations that suggested a special guilt on the part of the Jewish people for "rejecting" Jesus. I was not alone in this concern over words and the suffering they have justified over the centuries, from pogroms and Inquisitions to Nazi horrors and anti-Semitic slurs. As Mary Gordon writes, "We must always read these words with a broken heart." I found Fredrick C. Holmgren's writing most helpful in this regard, for he reminds us of the incredible ethical concern of the people of Israel from earliest times, compared to the cultures around them, for "no people in the ancient world were more self-critical--more sensitive to the wrongs of their society--than the Israelites," who were "a community whose heart remained open to divine censure." How could the prophets have preached without "the presence of other faithful people who shared their views," and why weren't the many "accusatory passages" in the Bible "forgotten or destroyed but preserved by the Jewish community itself, who set them apart as Holy Scripture"? We are led to conclude, then, that "Such a people should not be accused of continuing rebellion against God," but rather that we ourselves stand just as much under the judgment of God, for "the sins attacked by ancient prophets and reformers are still present within the Christian community" today.

"I am Joseph, your brother"

Rather than judging on our ancestors in faith, we might look into our own hearts and history, and repent, as Jesus calls us to, in this season of Lenten discipline. And when we think of Jerusalem that day, under the strong and tender gaze of Jesus, we might picture ourselves, in our own way, as its children, too. Wallace M. Alston, Jr., tells the moving story of Pope John XXIII, the humble spiritual leader who welcomed a delegation of Jewish visitors early in his pontificate: "he walked over to them with open arms and said: 'I am Joseph, your brother' (Ex 45:4)." Alston, having wrestled with the way the New Testament has been interpreted to justify the persecution of the Jewish people, concludes that John XXIII provided an example to us of "where we need to be, it seems to me, if it is not where we are today in the relationship between Christians and Jews. Perhaps God will find some new way to use these two members of God's one covenant family to serve the human good and to bring glory to God's great name." Amen: so let it be.

A preaching version of this commentary can be found on http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/February-28-2010.html

For further reflection

Kahlil Gibran, 20th century
Tenderness and kindness are not signs of weakness and despair but manifestations of strength and resolution.

Victor Hugo, 19th century
A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them.

Corrie Ten Boom, 20th century
If God sends us on strong paths, we are provided strong shoes.
and
Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.

Henrik Ibsen, 19th century
The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.

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Weekly Seeds is a source for meditation and prayer based on the readings of the "Lectionary," a plan for weekly Bible readings used in Protestant, Anglican and Roman Catholic churches throughout the world. When we pray and study the Bible using the Lectionary, we are praying and studying with millions of others. We invite you to continue the conversation on our "Opening the Bible" forum at http://i.ucc.org.

Weekly Seeds is a service of the Congregational Vitality Initiative, Local Church Ministries, United Church of Christ. Bible texts are from the New Revised Standard Version, © 1989 Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The Revised Common Lectionary is © 1992 Consultation on Common Texts. Used by permission.