Sermon: Jesus Grieving Over Jerusalem

Date Preached: Sunday 28th February 2010

Bible Reference: Luke Chapter 13 verses 31-35

Well here we are, heavily into Lent now – how’s it going?  Lenten lunches have begun after Communion and Douglas’ question-and answer-study on Wednesday mornings. This coming Tuesday evening why not come and have a cuppa and have your mind and heart enriched with the unique ministry of Rob Bell – you won’t be disappointed. Our Enquirers Group starts on Wednesday evenings – so lots to consider – and, of course, please do borrow one of the books at the back to accompany your own quiet time with God these next few weeks.

But what does it all mean? – especially in terms of the Bible readings we have set for us this morning? Well (thankfully) there’s some help around and a couple of sources I tend to go to for help as a start are Jane Willams’ romp through lectionary Year C – and Tom Wright’s ‘For Everyone’ series of commentaries.

“Conversations between God and Abraham are always worth listening to” (says Jane Williams). You can’t help noticing that God likes Abraham, and talks to him, person to person, and that Abraham talks freely, even cheekily, to God. That is not to say that Abraham forgets his place – so when God seems to ask for the sacrifice of his son, his only son, Isaac – with all the fulfilment of his promises hanging on this, Abraham dutifully builds the altar. “But the ability to whinge at God, or even to question God is one that Christian piety has rather bred out of us.”

So here we have Abram (just a ‘noble father’ at this he has yet to become Abraham – ‘the Father of many nations’) – he’s being devastatingly honest with God about what he really wants – which is a son and heir. And God doesn’t try and fob him off with anything else – even if this would mean he’d get to know God more intimately. The enormous compassion of God is that he takes us exactly where we are – and Abraham matches this with his trust that God is able to deliver on his promise. God sees his trust and ‘reckoned it to him as righteousness’. Apparently this willingness on the part of God to accept our trust in him as equivalent to actual goodness is an abiding part of his character. We see it over and over again, not least in the way Jesus responds to the penitent thief on the cross.

“We then get one of those extraordinary Old Testament ceremonies that would make your hair stand on end with a mixture of horror and fear” (that is if you ever had any hair!). “Abram watches over and defends the corpses of the animals he’s cut up (for sacrifice) until the symbols of God pass between the bodies, binding God to his promises to Abram” You can read in Jeremiah 34 that this was one of those literal ‘cross my heart and hope to die’ rituals where the one who breaks the promises must submit to being butchered just like the animals. Yuk! What’s that all about? Well what is amazing in this passage from Genesis is that it is God who binds himself with the promise, passing between the animal pieces as a smoking fire-pot and a flaming torch. Can you see it’s all a very graphic picture of what it is going to cost God not only to keep the letter of these ancient promises to Israel, but their spirit – and we see this spelled out in this morning’s reading from Luke’s gospel where it’s Jesus who allows himself to be slaughtered (like Abram’s animals) to fulfil the promise of God’s rescue.

Years (and years) ago, when I was a mere teenager (gosh it must be almost 20 years ago now!) and I was planning to go into full time Christian music with a couple of friends from Cardiff (it didn’t happen by the way), we did a year studying up at Capernwray Bible School in north Lancashire. And there was a fusty old Biblical Scholar on the staff there called van Dooren who everyone was a bit afraid of – but who had some notable one-liners. Here’s one that’s always stuck with me: concerning the Old and New Testaments he would always say, “the New is in the old concealed; the Old is in the New revealed”.

We’ve had a pretty gruesome picture of animals cut up and ready for sacrifice in our Genesis reading, haven’t we. And it gets us thinking about the whole process of sacrifice and burnt offerings.

Tom Wright points out that fire is as terrifying to trapped animals as it is to people, if not more so. When a farmyard catches fire, the animals stampede, trying to escape, but if they can’t, some species have developed ways of protecting their young. “There are stories of exactly this; after a farmyard fire, those cleaning up have found a dead hen, scorched and blackened, with 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 – the world – and that includes you and me. But at the moment all Jesus can see is chicks scurrying off in the opposite direction, taking no notice of the smoke and flames indicating that danger is approaching – and ignoring the pleas of the only one who could possibly give them safety.

I remember doing an essay on those passages in the gospels when Jesus is so full of heartbreaking grief at Israel’s hard-heartedness. There was the healing of the Roman Centurion’s servant if you remember, when he found that this Gentile soldier’s faith far surpassed anything he’d found amongst his own people. And then we get this poignant picture of the hen and her chicks – the passion the Son of God has to see us safe and under his care. We get the Old Testament connections repeatedly in the gospels when the writers assert that ‘all this took place to fulfil what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet...’

So don’t be frightened by the Old Testament. No it isn’t easy, but if you see the whole of the Old Testament anticipating the coming of the Messiah and being really all about Jesus’ mission, then it’ll be worth the struggle when we do have to get our heads around it.

What matters is that Jesus has a destiny to fulfil, as he’s said right from the outset – don’t you know that I must be about my Father’s business? I wonder what his folks thought of that explanation from their young boy after they’d been searching for him, probably at their wits end? Here in Luke we have Jesus saying this in picture language, of two days’ work and one day’s completion. Two days to cast out demons and cure illness; ‘and on the third day I finish my work.’ No careful reader of Luke’s gospel could miss the echoes, backwards and forwards: to the boy Jesus found on the third day in the Temple; to the risen Jesus, alive again on the third day.

Jesus’ destiny, then (as Tom Wright sums it up) is “to go to Jerusalem and die, risking the threats of the fox (it’s good name for Herod), and adopting the role of the mother hen to the chickens faced with sudden danger.

But will Jerusalem benefit from his offer? Will we? Jerusalem has a long history of rebelling against God, refusing his way of peace (and that sentence, alas, seems to be as true in the modern as in the ancient world –it’s certainly been true of me down through my own years of wasted time)…

And yet this is the only way of avoiding the disaster that will otherwise follow. Jesus’ intention now, in obedience to his vocation, is to go to Jerusalem and, like the hen with the chickens, to take upon himself the full force of that disaster which he was predicting for the nation and the Temple. This One will give himself on behalf of the many. And he so longs for us to know the closeness of his protection, the joy of his forgiveness, the love that can change us from inside and draw us into God’s purposes to make his world a fairer, more compassionate place through people whose lives have been transformed. This is our God, the Servant King, who calls us now to follow him. To give our lives as a daily offering of worship to the Servant King.