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“Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work…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 chicks under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you desolate. 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.’”
Luke 13:31-35
Part 1: Lament
One of the classes I am taking this term is an evening class and the instructor offered to provide meals for us before class every week. Not just salad and sandwiches but proper, full meals. Every week. Initially was reluctant to take part; it just seemed too much to accept. But I realized that it would in fact be very convenient for me and was being offered freely, with open hands. So, I wrote an email to the professor asking to be included…but asking if I could bring a dessert. This made it okay for me – I could accept the gift if I took a dessert. I had great difficulty being willing to accept the free gift.
This resistance that I felt is at the heart of Jesus’ lament in the passage from Luke that we heard today: Jesus says: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing” (v34).
Several things in this passage make it hard for us to grasp today: first of all, we don’t really go in for lamenting much in our ordered western society. We grieve, yes, but we do not often hear the passionate wail of lament, the intensity of feeling and pain that leads to a lament. This (image) is a lament.
Mask image by Claire Goodfellow, from the series Faces of Grief, used with permission
Secondly, we don't go in for stoning people. And thirdly, we may be at best agnostic about demons and driving them out. So this text can seem extreme, foreign, and distanced from us.
This text represents the beginning of Jesus’ journey to the cross. We see Jesus’ determination to finish the work, to reach his goal. But Jesus is also deeply frustrated here: he is lamenting for Jerusalem and their response to prophets in killing them and stoning them, causing desolation in their city. He wants to care for them, embrace them and protect them but they are not willing. They feel too threatened by this impossible, offensive grace. Jesus declares that Jerusalem will not see him again until they speak in praise of him saying ‘blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’.
We should remember that in this passage Jesus is addressing a community, a city. If we replace the name with the name of our city, or of our church, what would cause Jesus to lament for us? What are the ways that we reject the embrace of God’s love? We need to face the ways that within our community we have stoned, rejected or withdrawn from God’s love and other people; we need to confess the ways we have not placed a trust in God’s abundant love at the centre of everything we do.
So what does this mean for us? In our time we may not lament, but we understand the pain of loving grief. And we may not stone people with rocks when we feel threatened by them but we might stone them with our words - as humans we all have that knee-jerk reaction to those who challenge us; we all have a capacity for violence.
And whatever understanding of demons we might have, I think we would all acknowledge that we have them; we do each have our demons that we struggle with. We know they can only be driven out by Jesus; we all need his healing.
In our unwillingness to recognize our need for God’s love, and our satisfaction with our comfortable lives, we often try to put God in a box. We say ‘God, you can have most Sunday mornings and if I happen to be sick or need anything, I’ll be calling on you. The rest of the time, sit quietly over there. My life is quite ordered so don’t mess anything up, don’t come any closer. I have stones.’
God is infinitely patient and merciful but also persistent. God’s love is not threatening (although it might ‘mess a few things up’). God respects and loves us. If we ask for it, God grants us the ability to turn, to ‘repent’, to trust, to speak in praise of the Holy God, to be embraced.
Lent is a time for us to turn, to repent, to acknowledge the ways we sit unwilling to let God embrace us, the ways we cause Jesus to lament. Before we can really understand God’s love and how we dwell under the protection of God’s wing, we need to acknowledge the things we do, or leave undone, that cause God to lament.
God is not our accuser: God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world but to save it. Jesus laments for Jerusalem and for us out of deep, sacrificial love. He yearns to embrace us and waits for us to turn towards him.
We have an opportunity here and now to acknowledge these sins, these ways we have been unwilling to accept and trust God’s love, the things we have done and continue to do that distance us from God and which need God’s mercy and forgiveness.
Take your small piece of paper and pencil. I invite you to write on this piece of paper the thing that makes you unwilling to be embraced by God. It may be pride, it may be shame. It may be something you have done or something you have left undone. It may be your cynicism or plain disinterest. Only you know intuitively and by the voice of the Holy Spirit, what is foremost for you. Take a moment to write a word or two as you listen to the song and watch the video below.
Let us first pray: Show us Loving God where we hide those places of longing that have turned us away from you and away from our neighbours. Give us insight and courage to name our demons so that you may drive them far away and heal us from our woundedness, so that we might take up our mats and walk. Grant us the trust to be vulnerable under your gaze and hand over to you those things that cause you to lament for us, so that we might be reconciled to you anew. Amen.
with thanks to David Ediger, Ian and Larry for producing this for the service.
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In Deuteronomy we read this: I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live, and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).
Jesus’ journey to the cross, beginning in this text, is inexorable, as is God’s pursuit of his people in Jerusalem. Jesus says ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow’. God’s healing cannot be limited or constrained by rules or earthly authorities. God’s grace overflows religious boundaries and the stubbornness of fear.
In the lament, Jesus contrasts the great violence of killing and stoning, with the great peace and comfort of being under a loving mother hen’s wings. Jesus laments the killing of prophets in Jerusalem and yet he knows that it is only through his own death as a prophet, Messiah and Son of God in Jerusalem that this pattern can change, that hope for reconciliation with God becomes possible by God’s grace. It is an act of violence that will overcome death and our violent responses to scandalous grace.
The Persian poet Hafiz writes: ‘ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you’. God’s pursuit of us and our healing is unstoppable, relentless: God stands at the door and knocks, and if there’s no reply, God goes round the side and starts tapping on the window.
Jesus stands ready to gather us in as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings: willingness is all that stands between us and the love of God. As we replace our need for control and order with trust in God’s love, as we have confessed those things that make us unwilling, we can be reassured that perfect love casts out fear (John 4:18).
George Macdonald writes of this embrace of God: God is nearer to you than any thoughts or feelings of yours...Do not be afraid. If all the evil things in the universe were around us, they could not come inside the ring that He makes about us. He always keeps a place for Himself and His child, into which no other being can enter.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Jesus drives out our demons and heals. God heals us here and now of our demons, of our pain, of our sins, bringing reconciliation and unity to us as individuals and with each other.
For our part we just have to be willing to turn and trust, to turn and praise, to turn and say ‘blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’. As we read in Nehemiah, ‘this day is holy to our Lord – do not be grieved for the joy of the Lord is our strength.’
We know how this story ends. We know that Jesus does get to Jerusalem, does take our sin upon himself and does die for our sakes. In his death and resurrection, Jesus opens the door to healing, reconciliation, and joy.
Be assured, then, that as God promises, the sins that we have confessed have been forgiven by God. God’s holy fire burns them away, because of Jesus. In confessing the things that cause God to lament we show our willingness to be comforted and loved by God, with no distance.
Our task now is to be persistent, to be inexorable, to be unstoppable, in taking God’s joyful, peaceful love and healing to others, today and tomorrow, until the work is done.
Let us pray: We thank you Loving God, that you enter in and free us, where the resistance of shame, the logic of thoughts, and the captivity of fear have ensnared us. May the wings of Your divine love sweep it all away and enfold us, lead us to your light and let us breathe. You silently carry off our burdens in your beautiful hands (Hafiz). We gather up our brokenness, the splinters that we carry, and bring them to you for healing of the body, the mind, the spirit and the heart, in order that we might be your hands and feet in bringing this embracing love to others.
While listening to this song take the piece of paper you wrote on…and burn it.
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