March 17, 2019 “Unwilling” – Luke 13:31-35

Luke 13:31-35
“Unwilling”
March 17, 2019 – Second Sunday in Lent

Last week at a zoo in Arizona, a woman was attacked by a jaguar. In complete defiance of common sense, she crossed over, or at least leaned over, a barrier around the jaguar’s cage in order to take a picture, maybe a selfie. The jaguar put its paw through the cage and latched on to her arm. A passerby pulled her away while his mother distracted the big cat with a water bottle. She needed medical attention and stitches.

Stay away from dangerous wild animals! As I suggested, it’s common sense. Don’t get too close. Don’t put yourself in harm’s way. It’s what the Pharisees tried to tell Jesus in verse 31 at the beginning our text this morning, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.”

There’s some debate about whether the Pharisees’ warning was friendly or not. At least a few of these religious leaders were sympathetic to Jesus. In Luke 7, one of them invited Jesus to dinner. John tells us some secretly believed in Him. They may have come to Him out of sincere concern for His safety. It’s more likely, though, that they simply wished to get rid of Jesus. Threatening Him with Herod’s persecution was a tactic designed to get a Galilean troublemaker to leave their territory.

Most likely Jesus was then on the east side of the Jordan River in Perea, an area ruled by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great. Antipas also inherited the rule of Galilee from his father. Antipas was the Herod who chopped off the head of John the Baptist at the behest of his wife Herodias and her daughter. That wife was also his niece and the wife of his brother, but Herod married her anyway. Herod made himself out to be a pious Jew. He avoided idolatry by putting no images on the coins he minted. But as John the Baptist learned, he was a conniving, dangerous, wild beast. And Jesus knew it. So in verse 32, He said, “Go and tell that fox…”

To Jesus, Herod was a small, cunning, vicious animal. Whether or not the Pharisees were truly interested in Jesus’ welfare, their warning made sense, as much sense as signs around a jaguar cage telling visitors to stay back. Get too close and you’ll get bit. The king was a sly creature preying on the weak. But Jesus was there to help the weak. He says, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.” Jesus had works of mercy to do and He wasn’t willing to stop those in order to protect Himself. He was going to keep on His course of delivering people from demons and healing their bodies, “today and tomorrow” and finish on the third day.

Jesus didn’t mean He literally had just another two or three days before His work of healing was done. He meant it the way we might say, “I’ll get back to you in a day or two,” really meaning some indefinite period of time that could and probably would be longer. But when He spoke about finishing his work “on the third day,” that meant something more. Though the time frame was a bit vague, Jesus was planning to finish His work in a very specific way in a very specific place, “on the third day.”

So in verse 33, Jesus speaks again about three days, “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way…” Jesus felt compelled to do His acts of mercy, but at the same time He was on a journey. He was going somewhere. That journey is exactly the journey we are remembering during Lent. Jesus was headed for the Cross. He had to be on His way because that Cross had to happen in only one place, as He says in the rest of verse 33, “Because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”

The time frame here is not literal. Jesus did not stay in Perea for just “today and tomorrow,” and then on the third day arrive in Jerusalem. “I must be on my way,” He says but he would not literally arrive in three days. It would be quite a bit longer before Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey with a crowd praising Him. But He always knew that was where He was going.

This repeated three-day time frame is an intimation of the truth that there is an ultimate “third day” which is Jesus’ true goal. It’s on the third day He will rise from the dead. What is in immediate focus here is that in order to rise, Jesus must die. But “it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem!”

It’s a kind of grisly necessity for prophets to die in Israel’s most holy place. In Jeremiah chapter 26, a prophet named Uriah fled for his life to Egypt, but the king sent men to drag him back to Jerusalem and kill him there. The holiest people of God die in Jerusalem. Jesus knew He needed to die in order to rise again, and He knew He needed to die in Jerusalem. So Jesus wasn’t too worried about what Herod might do to Him outside of that city.

Beth and I are hooked on the television show Marvel’s Agents of Shield, a crazy comic book science fiction story. In one season two of the characters went to the future and met a man they learned was the son they would one day have together in their own time. So they began to get reckless. They “knew” they would live until that baby was born, so they couldn’t be killed until that happened. Jesus had that kind of knowledge for real. He knew He was going to die in Jerusalem, so He didn’t need to worry about Herod until He got there. In fact, He had to go there. He said, “I must be on my way.”

Jesus knew early on that His journey to Jerusalem was necessary. In Luke’s Gospel, it begins back in chapter 9, verse 51, right after the Transfiguration we recalled two weeks ago. “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.” From that point on, there was only one place Jesus was going to land. Wherever He went from then on, He was always headed for Jerusalem. Nothing could stand in His way.

Even if the Pharisee’s warning about Herod was sincere, Jesus was unwilling to listen. His will was turned in a different direction. He did not have a death wish. He was not suicidal. He was pulled toward Jerusalem by the same deep emotion which kept Him at the work of saving and healing the people around Him. The necessity which drove Jesus toward the city on a hill was love. Jesus planned to die in Jerusalem because He loved Jerusalem.

We hear Jesus express His love for Jerusalem by saying its name twice at the beginning of verse 34. In some English versions we hear the power of His emotion with the addition of the little word “O.” “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” He says, just like you or I might tenderly say the name of a spouse or a child whom we see in pain or in trouble. His words echo down the ages and make us think of all those who have loved that city and all the pain they experienced and, like Jesus points out, all the pain they caused.

Our Lord said here that Jerusalem was “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” It was also the city the Babylonians destroyed in 587 B.C. and the Romans pulled down again in 70 A.D. It’s a city where both innocent and guilty blood has been spilled through the centuries by Arab followers of Mohammed and by European followers of Christ, by Christians and Muslims and Jews. It’s a city where violence still constantly flares up and people pray guarded by soldiers with rifles. No wonder Jesus mourned for that city. It’s the holiest and the saddest place on earth. And He loved it.

In John Grisham’s novel, The Last Juror, set in the small southern town of Clanton, Mississippi, a teenage boy named Sam has to flee his home. Working in a shoe store, he was seduced by a customer, the bored, lonely wife of a hotheaded state trooper. They began a stupid, doomed affair. She would come in to buy yet another pair of shoes and they would wind up together in the storeroom. When her husband finally noticed all the new shoes in her closet, he became suspicious and learned what was going on. Sam ran for his life and the trooper vowed to shoot him down if he ever set foot in Ford County again.

Sam stays on the run for many pages of the novel, but his heart is constantly being drawn back to Clanton. It’s where his mother lives. The youngest son of a large, tight-knit family in the rural South, he loves his mama. He just cannot go on living without ever seeing her again. So after ranging as far away as Canada, Sam is drawn back to the vicinity of home, first to nearby Memphis, and then finally, risking his life, to his mama’s house once again. His mother love won’t let him stay away.

In the rest of verse 34 it is mother love which Jesus used to express His feelings for Jerusalem, for why He was headed back there despite the danger. Jesus loved that city and its people like a mother hen loves her chicks. That image appears for God’s love in several places in the Old Testament. Boaz spoke to Ruth of taking refuge under the wings of God.[1] Psalm 17:8 is just one of several which tells of hiding beneath the shadow of the Lord’s wings. Malachi foretells that the “sun of righteousness will rise with healing it its wings.”[2] Last week we said together Psalm 91 verse 4, “he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge.” In a subtle hint at His divinity, His being throughout time, Jesus identifies with that same God, “How often have I desired to gather you children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…” It’s an incredible expression of tenderness for the people Jesus knows will soon hang Him on the Cross.

In direct contrast to the picture of Herod as a fox, Jesus imagined Himself as a hen, just the sort of prey foxes love to get their teeth into. He didn’t care what Herod thought. It didn’t matter to Him that the people He loved so much would nail Him to a cross. That love irresistibly carried Him forward to His ultimate goal. He would die in the city He loved and He would do so willingly.

It is not dying, though, which was the greatest pain Jesus suffered. It was not all the cruelty experienced on the way to the Cross which hurt Jesus the most. His deepest and most awful agony is expressed at the end of verse 34. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

It’s just two words in Greek, that phrase “you were not willing.” The King James or old Revised Standard version may capture the feeling better in the shorter, more active expression, “but you would not.” You would not. You would not. That’s the pain which stabs at the heart of Jesus more than any whip flailing away His skin, more than any spear piercing His side. It’s the anguish of rejection by those you love. It’s the terrible hurt a mother knows when she has loved her children with all her being, only to find them walking away from her without a backward look.

“You would not.” Some of you know a little of what it feels like just from the experience of watching your offspring turn from sweet cuddly little children into prickly, unapproachable teenagers. It’s almost like turning a switch somewhere around age thirteen. There is that precious person whom you have gathered into your arms and kissed and hugged for over a decade. She sat on your lap. He let you kiss his “owies.” Now one sudden morning you move to wrap your arms around that sweet child and he shrugs you off. She rolls her eyes at your unwanted display of affection. With words and body language and closed doors they scream out how they don’t want it anymore. You love them and seek to show it just as much as ever. But they will not. You know how much it hurts.

That pain of teenage rejection is a tiny glimpse into the pain of rejection Jesus felt. As the second person of God He expressed the divine frustration of reaching out in tender love to that city over the course of centuries, only to be spurned and ignored by His people. Incarnate as a human being, Jesus had also walked the streets of Jerusalem enough to experience their rejection of His love in person. How often He had tried to gather them in and they kept turning away, shrugging Him off, closing their doors. They were unwilling. They would not. That was the ultimate agony for Jesus.

As you and I watch Jesus on the way to the Cross, whether it’s in words of Scripture or in images or poetry we share during Lent, we have the potential for causing Him the same sort of pain. All His suffering, all His passion was for us. With His blood, His tender love poured out to gather us into the safe place of His peace and joy. But if we will not, if we ignore what He has done, if we turn away and keep going our own directions, then He suffers even more. He suffers the supreme pain of being forsaken by His children.

Let us ask ourselves how Jesus is rejected by us. When do we shrug off His embrace? When do we duck out from beneath those protective wings, and head off on paths of our own choosing? Is it in some habitual sin we refuse to even try to give up? Is it in the way we speak to the people with whom we work? Is it in lack of time for prayer and Bible reading? How do you and I say, “I will not,” to Jesus?

Once you’ve thought about your unwillingness toward Jesus, confess it and remember His love. He loves you like a mother hen, in spite of all your running off, in spite of the hurt you’ve done to Him and to others. He loves you anyway. Turn and be willing to accept that.

Jesus never quits loving, but He cannot help those who are unwilling to be helped. In the last verse of the text, number 35, He tells Jerusalem the consequences of rejecting Him. “See, your house is left to you.” In other words, because they haven’t accepted the protection of God’s wings, that city was left defenseless. Forty years later the Romans showed it was true, destroying the city, tearing down the temple. It broke Jesus’ heart to think about it, but He promised they would see Him again.

“And I tell you,” He said, “you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” In one sense, that was a day not too far off, Palm Sunday, when He rode into Jerusalem and people hailed Him with those words from Psalm 118. But in Matthew, Jesus says the same thing after Palm Sunday.

Jesus promised that His people would bless His coming at a date still not known. He foresaw the great day He would return and spread His wings of love and protection over the whole world. Everyone will have the opportunity to willingly bow their knees and accept His love, recognizing Him as the One who comes in the name of the Lord.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day. In the fifth century barbarian raiders out of the west came and captured a sixteen year-old Roman boy named Patricius. They took the unwilling young man to be a slave on the island we call Ireland. He began to pray. After six years he heard God speaking, telling him to run. He escaped and boarded a ship back to Roman territory.

At home Patricius studied. He became a priest, then a bishop. Then God spoke to him again, told him to go back to Ireland. This time he went willingly and brought the good news about Jesus to the Irish people. And all the while he felt the loving protection of Jesus Christ surrounding him. So we are going to say the most famous of Patrick’s prayers together now, about receiving Jesus’ protection, about being willing, like our Lord was, like Patrick was, to go wherever God sends us, trusting in Him. I hope that you will be willing to both say it now and live it in days to come.

Amen.

[1] Ruth 2:12

[2] Malachi 4:2