Killing the Messenger

Scriptures:       Genesis 15:1-18, Psalm 27

Philippians 3:17-4:1,  Luke 13:31-35

For the parents among us, I’d like to ask if you’ve ever had the experience of seeing a child – yours, somebody else’s – ignore what their parents are saying.  And I don’t mean that they’re so engrossed in coloring in their coloring books that they didn’t hear their parents call them for dinner. I’m talking full-on ignore mode, as in putting their hands over their ears and going “lalalalala I can’t hear you lalalalal”.  Frustrating, isn’t it.  It might be over something simple – like “no dessert until you eat your peas” – or something more onerous, like “you need to get started on your homework” or something really catastrophic like “we have to take you to the doctor so you can get your vaccinations for school” – but in any case, unwelcome news.  We adults do the same thing, by the way, but we’re less obvious.  We don’t stop ignoring things we don’t want to hear as we become adults, we just learn more subtle ways of doing so.  And there is good and bad in this; some marriages have been saved by a bit of selective deafness on the part of one or both partners, while others have been destroyed by the same cause. 

At least that’s how things go when those involved are on even footing in terms of power.  Things change when the party receiving the bad news is much more powerful than the messenger delivering the bad news.  In days gone by, when a king received bad news from the battlefront, it was entirely possible that the king might have the messenger executed.  It would have been more rational, of course, for the king to adjust his own battle tactics so that his army would fare better – but then, kings aren’t always known for being rational.  There are even versions of this in the Bible – for example, King David killed the messenger who brought him news of the death of Saul and Jonathan.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem.  On his way, he’s been teaching in the various towns along the way, and his message has not been easy to hear – someone asked Jesus, “Lord, will only a few be saved?” and Jesus tells them to strive to enter by the narrow gate, for many will be left standing outside.

At this very hour, Luke tells us, some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, “Get away from here, because Herod wants to kill you.”  Then as now, political imprisonments and assassinations are hardly unheard of;  they took place in the time of Jesus in Judea and they take place to this very moment in Judea and any number of other places around the globe.  Jesus had no particular intention of becoming a political threat to Herod – it wasn’t as if Jesus was a political rival competing for Herod’s throne – but Jesus’ talk about the Kingdom of God inevitably sounded like a threat to the Kingdom of Herod.   The role of the Pharisees in this story is hard to read:  were they trying to intimidate Jesus into taking his traveling road show elsewhere, or were they genuinely concerned for his welfare?  The text really doesn’t give us a clear answer.

What the text is clear about, though, is that Jesus stood his ground.  He wasn’t intimidated.  He had a clear sense of what God was calling him to do and when God was calling him to do it, and he wasn’t going to let Herod’s threats change his plans in the least.  In fact, his response to the Pharisees was a little edgy, even obnoxious – “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.’”   In effect Jesus tells the Pharisees, who were acting as messengers for Herod, to go back to Herod and tell him that Jesus wasn’t afraid of him.   Jesus was going to do what God had called Jesus to do.  Herod could pretend to be the big bad wolf and threaten to huff and to puff and blow Jesus’ house in, but the message Jesus gave the Pharisees was a version of “not by the hair of your chinny chin chin,” that Herod wasn’t a big bad wolf, but just a scrawny, pathetic little fox.  Or maybe even a weasel.

But then Jesus goes on, “Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem.”  This is a bitterly ironic statement on the part of Jesus.  Jerusalem, the holy city, the place where God’s temple stood and the Ark of the Covenant rested, was also the city that killed the prophets – the city that killed the messengers that God sent to it.   You would think that some of the holiness of the city would have rubbed off on the political and religious leaders there, but these elites were interested in promoting their own agendas and preserving their own power – just as political elites do in every country, including our own.   The word for peace, salem or salaam, is part of Jerusalem’s very name, but the city’s history has rarely been peaceful, then or now, and those prophets sent by God to shake up the establishment did so at the risk of their lives.  And so it was ironic but true that the holiest city for those of the Jewish faith was the most dangerous city for those sent by God to call people back to faith.  If for some reason a prophet, a man of God, wanted to get himself killed, where else would he go except the holy city, Jerusalem.

And Jesus goes on to lament over the city, “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.’”

So Jesus gives us a striking image of himself – a hen trying to gather her chicks, and the chicks are running off in other directions.  It’s striking how a hen protects her chicks – she puffs up her feathers, and gathers the chicks under her wings, sometimes to the point where you can’t see the chicks, only the mother hen.  And of course the hen has a beak and claws.  But it’s not as if the hen is that powerful; when threatened, it doesn’t suddenly morph into a tyrannosaurus rex or something.  Mostly, the hen puts itself between its chicks and any threats.  If the chicks will let her – and generally, by instinct, the chicks will gather to the hen.  In the same way, throughout his earthly ministry, and especially on the cross, Jesus put himself between us and danger.

In our reading from Luke’s gospel, we have two animals, a fox and a hen.    Foxes eat chickens.  Chicks gather to their mother hend for protection.  I’d like to add two other animals to Luke’s menagerie.  One is a cat, which is very independent – cats aren’t group animals at all.   Famously, cats can’t be gathered or herded – for someone to say that that leading a group is like herding cats is to admit that they have no control over the group and that the group has no sense of itself as a group and  doesn’t function like a group at all.  The other animal in the menagerie is more exotic, the ostrich.  Ostriches have yet another way of responding to danger – they hide their head in the sand, thinking that if they can’t see the danger, the danger will go away.  Of course, the rest of their body is hanging out in plain view to the attacker.  In human terms, this is a bit like a young child putting his hands over his ears and ignoring his parents warnings.

It’s striking that the point of this story turns on what the various characters are afraid of, how the estimated the various threats around them.  The Pharisees were afraid of the wrath of Herod, and thought that Jesus should be too.  From their point of view, Jesus’ insistence on completing his work on his own schedule, despite Herod’s threats, looked foolish – as if Jesus was ignoring Herod’s threats by acting like an ostrich, burying his head in the sand.  Or maybe putting his hands over his ears and saying “La la la I can’t hear you…..”   From their point of view, defying an angry king is not a way to live a long life.   As the saying goes, discretion is the better part of valor.  Better to pick one’s battles, to move on and live to fight another day.

It’s not that Jesus was unaware of the potential danger Herod represented.  But Jesus chose to face the danger.  He was not acting like an ostrich, hiding his head in the sand.  Nor would he act like a cat, abandoning his followers and running off on his own when danger threatened.  Rather, he acted like a hen, going from town to town to gather and guard his brood, even at the risk of his own life.

So where do we find ourselves in the story?  Which animal do we identify with?  We probably have no reason to ourselves as the fox.   Are we like chicks who will allow ourselves to be protected by our mother hen?  Or like cats, that can’t be gathered or herded, but function on the basis of “every cat for himself”.  Or like an ostrich, hiding our heads in the sand.

We live in dangerous times.  Economic threats, military threats, environmental threats all surround us – all around us are messengers telling us that our current way of life is not sustainable in the long run, and at times it seems we only have a choice of whether the greatest threat is that the global economy will crash, as nearly happened in 2008, or whether we’ll find ourselves drawn into World War III, or whether climate change will render the planet uninhabitable.  Or maybe we’ll hit the trifecta and all three will happen at once.  Closer to home, our families all face threats – illness, unemployment, addiction, despair.  And certainly as a congregation, we’re a small, fragile ark, and the waves are rough, and sometimes it seems that the little boat called Emanuel Church could spring a leak at any moment.  How will we respond?  Which threats will we ignore?  Which threats will motivate us to change course?

Faced by so many threats, it’s tempting to feel paralyzed, to freeze up, to get stuck.  In such times, we should pray for God to guide us, for God to give us wisdom and discernment.  In the light of God’s wisdom, we’ll see that some threats are just empty threats, all huff and puff with nothing behind them.  We can ignore them.  But some threats are real – and to try to save our own skin and not care about our neighbor isn’t faithful to the Gospel.  Rather, God calls us to gather under God’s wings for protection, and stand and face the threat together. This sounds like only a theological statement, but it can be practical as well – like, for example, the folks in Flint, Michigan telling the state, “No, you can’t poison our drinking water and get away with it.”   Or closer to home, here in Philadelphia, telling the city and state, “No, you can’t let our public schools go to rack and ruin.  Our kids need an education.”  Supporting one another, standing in solidarity with one another in the shelter of God’s care, is a theological statement with practical consequences. Individually, we’re weak.   Individually, a major illness or a long stretch of unemployment can send us under.  Sheltering together under God’s care, looking out for one another, we can help one another survive the predators and ride out the storms that surround us.

Jesus said, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings”.  May we be willing to accept God’s loving care, and through our words and actions extend that care to others.  Amen.