Lent 2
Sermon preached by Hannah Swithinbank
“At that very hour, some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you…”
Imagine that you’re Jesus. You’ve been going about your business in Galilee — preaching and teaching, healing people, casting out demons, trying to explain the kingdom of God. And then some of the local authorities come to you and say, “Hi, the king wants to kill you, and you should flee.”
How would you respond?
Jesus has been ministering in Galilee for a while, and despite the teaching, the healing, the casting out of demons, he’s met quite a lot of resistance — including being asked to leave towns and kicked out of at least one synagogue. He’s done a lot of walking, some of it in some hilly terrain — and is now on the way to Jerusalem, when this message reaches him.
I don’t know about you — but I suspect that my reaction would be some variation of: “I’m done with this, I’m going home.” I don’t think it would be: “Tell Herod I still have work to do, and I’m going to do it.” Herod’s desire to kill him is, for Jesus, just one more reminder of the stubbornness of the world to the message he has come to bring. He wants to gather the children of Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but he is met time and again with resistance. And yet he is determined: he must be on his way to Jerusalem – and to his death.
Throughout Lent, we go on this journey with Jesus towards Jerusalem and the great story of Holy Week. Our readings begin to anticipate what is to come, and we’re invited to meditate upon what they say to us, in our time and place.
Today I want to meditate upon this moment of Jesus’ journey; his determination in the face of resistance and threat, even knowing what was coming; with the help of Paul’s letter to the Philippians. As we heard, Paul reminds us that Jesus’ suffering and death are not the end of the story – that Jesus is raised from the dead, our Saviour, who will transform our own humble bodies to be like his own glorious body, and who welcomes us into his Kingdom. He also tells us that this promise and this future come with a ‘therefore…’ – not a but - a therefore. Therefore, knowing this, stand firm in the Lord.
So what does it mean to stand firm in the Lord? Paul starts by suggesting we imitate him, to watch how he walks, and how those who follow his example walk. OK, great – but what does it mean to imitate Paul? Paul, who after his encounter with Christ on the Damascus road completely upends his life: he doesn’t return to Jerusalem, it seems, for three years; he travels around Asia Minor and through Greece; before being imprisoned and executed, in Rome. He writes this letter to the Philippians during one of his periods in prison.
There is a parallel of sorts here, isn’t there? Jesus’ journey takes him through a ministry that draws people to him, as well as drawing resistance, and ends up at the cross. Paul’s journey takes him through a ministry that draws people to him — and to Christ — while also drawing resistance, and he was also executed. What might it look like, to extend this parallel to us?
I don’t think it necessarily looks like doing exactly the same things as either Paul or Jesus: our vocations, and our contexts are different, and we do not carry Jesus’ very particular purpose. Nor should we think we are all called to martyrdom. But I wonder if it looks like embracing what we might call an attitude or approach, and also the nature of what Jesus is doing.
Paul follows Jesus with determination, and courage,and with love. It is a love of those who resist him as well as those who are drawn to him. He speaks with tears of those who he describes as living as enemies of the cross of Christ — tears that echo the lament of Jesus in the gospel, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem… ” The rejection both experience causes pain, but it does not cause either of them to turn away from the work that they are called to do.
The nature of this work is to gather and to heal. In our gospel reading Jesus speaks of casting out demons and performing cures; he desires to gather together all Jerusalem’s children around him, as a mother hen gathers her chicks. It is work, as Luke’s gospel makes clear throughout, that restores people in ways that are fundamentally about their relationships to their families and communities, the wider world, and to God. The African-American womanist theologian Delores Williams describes this as Jesus’ ministerial vision for life.[1] In her reading, the cross occurs because of the resistance of evil—human and cosmic—to this life. She regards it as vital that we don’t see suffering as Jesus suffered as necessary for earning salvation, but a response that comes from the world to our living as Jesus lived: offering healing and bringing life. To say that God can and does work in and through the suffering is not the same thing as implying that it is good, or even necessary. Salvation is in the resurrection: death cannot hold Jesus, and because of Jesus, it will not, ultimately, hold us.
We are not in a story that says, “‘Jesus promises to transform us to be like him, in his resurrection but we have to suffer like him to earn it.” We are in one that says, “Jesus promises to transform us to be like him, in his resurrection, and so – therefore – we are able to bear the resistance and the suffering when it comes.” We are called to stand, like Paul, rooted in the knowledge of his resurrection and therefore able to face the challenges that following Christ will bring.
And so, we come to ask ourselves, what might it look like to follow Jesus in this kind of work and attitude today – risking rejection and suffering as we do?
I’m sure that you, like me, can think of images and stories that you have seen or heard this week, in the news coming from the war in Ukraine, in which people have been seeking to sustain the lives of others, sometimes at the expense of their own comfort, sometimes at risk of their lives.
I think particularly of the images and stories I’ve seen of priests holding worship in Ukrainian metro stations; people carefully seeking to preserve the historical treasures that are a part of their worship as a church, knowing they will be important for healing later. Of churches and congregations in Poland and other neighbouring countries welcoming refugees and supporting them, so often at their own expense.
I’ve been struck words of the Ukrainian Patriarchs—so often divided—lamenting the war and division while naming it as sinful; their continuing to recognise the Russian Patriarch as a brother even as they challenge him and call upon him to appeal to Putin to end the war. I was perhaps even more strongly touched by the news that nearly 300 Russian Orthodox Priests and deacons had signed an open letter denouncing the ‘fratricidal’ war: to stand in such solidarity is to expose themselves to rejection from family, friends, community, church — and for many of them to risk even more. These are people who have made themselves vulnerable because of a call to heal, to gather — to seek life.
And for us, here in Cambridge, or around the UK? What does it look like to follow Christ with determination and courage and love, to stand and act in the hope of the resurrection? It generally seems far less dramatic than the life of someone like Paul, and right now far removed from the lives of those in Ukraine. But there will be challenges and resistance, some of which will come in forms we might not expect as we try and navigate the world, following Jesus in his work.
Let’s continue thinking about this with regard to the war in Ukraine, which demands our attention, and our care. It is hard to pray for people involved on both sides in a war, to remember that God loves all, and wants to forgive and welcome all, to love generously and to acknowledge the huge complexity that lies behind this war: it stretches our hearts and minds in ways that are often uncomfortable. Being willing to remind others of this reality as media narratives and political statements form around us can make for difficult conversations with people we live alongside, people we love. This is not something trivial: it can make life more difficult in numerous ways that we often instinctively avoid, and it is a resistance to the work of healing and gathering.
In the longer term: working out how to advocate for life and peace is going to be difficult. The world is facing any number of challenges at the moment and finding ways to deal with them that emphasise the healing and make better relationships possible feels really hard. In a conversation last week, one of my friends said that it feels like our imaginations are being stretched and challenged, and he’s not sure how ready we really are to imagine new ways of life. This kind of thinking, imagining, deciding, in ways that are courageous and loving — determinedly orientated towards the Kingdom—is following Jesus, and the things that make it harder for us to do that are the powers resisting this, even if they don’t always look like a local king trying to kill us.
But I believe that as people who follow Jesus, we’re called to try and make choices and decisions that heal, that sustain relationships, seek the life that Jesus offers to all for all. We may not, in this season, know what this journey will look like; we might be tired, saddened, confused, along the way; but we know that Jesus walked his road to Jerusalem before us, and that we stand in the knowledge of his resurrection life.
[1] Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness (1993)