Sermon St John Baptist 28.2.10
Luke 13.31-end

In our travels th rough Luke’s gospel this year, we have reached a passage that one of my commentaries describes as ‘about the most interesting and difficult passage in Luke’s gospel’. So I am indebted to Fr Leonard for asking me to preach on it!
Quite enigmatic, isn’t it: ‘Today and tomorrow and the next day’ Jesus says. This isn’t a familiar idiom for us. And yet we can learn quite a lot about Jesus from this short passage.
I am going to suggest that it presents 3 aspects of Jesus.
The first is an unusually blunt reminder of his humanity. He calls Herod, that fox. This was Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, who had had John the Baptist beheaded, and who was perhaps sending a warning to Jesus to clear off before there was further trouble. The Pharisees who warned Jesus may have been sympathetic to him, or simply carrying out Herod’s wishes in passing the message. This is the only record we have of Jesus speaking with contempt of an individual. Go and tell that fox for me… Calling someone a fox then as now meant they were sly or cunning, but it also had the connotation of insignificant, worthless. That seems to be the point here. Herod thinks he can influence Jesus, control him even. Jesus rejects that idea with contempt. He neednt think he has anything to do with my decisions. He just doesn’t feature at all. Remember that when Jesus came before Herod to be tried for his life, Jesus refused to speak at all. Another indication of regarding him as of no value, no significance. The very human Jesus uses a derogatory word of the ruler for whom probably no Jew in Galilee had respect.

But then alongside that, the next side of Jesus that we see is his obedience to God’s will, his sense of walking in a way that was chosen by God, following his destiny if you like. When he speaks of ‘today, tomorrow, and the third day I finish my work…it cannot be that a prophet will perish away from Jerusalem’; this is his consciousness of being caught up in a movement, a progress, towards the final purpose of his life. It is part of Luke’s theme of a journey towards Jerusalem, a device he uses in his gospel. The journey is about God’s will for our salvation being worked out, as well as Jesus’ physical movement towards Jerusalem and death. It takes up 10 chapters of the gospel, from just after the Transfiguration to the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. So here, Jesus declares his intention of following a timetable dictated not by Herod, nor any human influence, but by God. It is God who is in control, and Jesus must through listening and obedience, fulfil the will of God. I must be on my way, it is necessary, it is required.
However we then get rather a contrast. As he speaks of moving towards Jerusalem, the city which stands for the identity of his people, for the covenant, going back to Abraham, renewed through David who built the city and Solomon who built the first temple, he speaks those lovely words, ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have gathered you as a hen gathers her brood under her wings’ (notice the female imagery there). ‘But you were not willing’. Hold on a minute – just now we were talking about God being in control, of God’s will that matters not some king; of what must be…because it is god’s purpose, and now suddenly Jerusalem is calling the shots, the will of the people is in control, God laments but in a vulnerable way, God waits and calls and doesn’t override his people.
Now when Jesus says, ‘how often would I have gathered you’, there are actually two ways of interpreting this. Perhaps Jesus is expressing the feelings of God through the centuries, issuing appeals through the prophets to return to God, and being rejected. ‘How often’ then refers to all the prophetic calls to repentance over centuries. The other way of interpreting it is that Jesus of Nazareth was in Jerusalem several times, often, and tried to call them back to God, but was rejected. According to Luke, Jesus whole ministry was a movement towards Jerusalem, in his adult life he only got there once, and was crucified. It is different in the other gospels. That is an important reminder to us that the gospel writers were theologians, not recording events in an objective, neutral way (well that’s not possible anyway however hard you try) but presenting the gospel story with their own insights and their own particular slant. So it may be that Jesus was often in Jerusalem, but Luke still presents one journey to Jerusalem  through his ministry because its not primarily a geographical journey, it’s a spiritual one, or a theological one.
Either way, we still have an interesting contrast here. First Jesus talks as one who is caught up in the sweep of God’s will, all is planned out, Gods will is coming to fruition; next he grieves at the way people have resisted and rejected that will of God, his own will, which is loving compassion reached out and was rejected.
He is saying both ‘this is the way God wants it to be’ and also ‘on the other hand, it didn’t have to be like this, if only it hadn’t come to this’.
It’s a paradox. The image which comes to my mind here is an illustration from C.S. Lewis’s book ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’. It’s the point where the fate of Edmund must be worked out. His life is owed to the Witch as he betrayed Aslan. That was never meant to happen. But Aslan intends to find a way of saving him. So the picture shows the two, Aslan and the witch, walking and talking, from the back view. The lion is on his hind legs, with his front paws clasped behind, head lowered, pondering. They stroll, negotiate. The price of Edmund’s life is decided, agreed. And we know what the price was. The witch was to kill Aslan, on the Stone Table, in return for Edmunds life. This disaster is woven into the story as if seamlessly. As if intended from the beginning. Or was it intended from the beginning?
Whenever I wrestle with the mysteries of divine will and foreknowledge, and human freedom, I come back to this. That God takes the clumsy, chaotic and often disastrous mess of our human decisions and actions, and endlessly, infinitely, adapts and diverts and flexes his will, over and over again, to pick up all those stitches and weave them in somehow. So that there is no compromise about our freedom; nor about his purpose.

So in this short passage, Jesus is revealed to us in his humanity; as following the pre-ordained purposes of God in his ministry; and as the vulnerable compassionate heart of God, yearning for our love yet refusing to compel it.
The last verse of the gospel is the one we use at the Eucharist – ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’. It is quoted from Psalm 118, where it refers to pilgrims arriving in Jerusalem to worship, the crowds adapt this in greeting Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem – Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord’. When we use it in the Eucharist we are probably thinking of his presence with us through the sacrament, and in the church, the body of Christ. Not far off, not in the future, but here, among us, within us, and not only us but out there in the world around.
As we journey through life, our journey towards death; our journey of faith; his Spirit, his presence, is working with us every step of the way, working to weave his purposes into our lives. ‘For we know that in all things God works together for good with those who love God’. Our job is to listen; to be ready; to see his presence; to notice it; to work and cooperate with him.