Lent 2
March 16,2025
William G. Carter
At that very hour, some Pharisees came and said
to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to
them, “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. Yet
today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible
for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ 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.”
We are two weeks into Lent. Since the fourth century, the church has set aside these forty days to prepare us for Easter. Prayer, meditation, and generosity are encouraged as spiritual disciplines. Lent calls us to withdraw from any form of excess, whether it’s overeating or overspending. As an alternative, we focus on the self-giving love of Jesus Christ. That points us to the end of the forty days, where there is a cross. A cross.
As we heard today, Jesus receives a death threat. The word comes, “King Herod wants to kill you.” This is not the same King Herod who attempted to kill the infant Jesus after a visit from the three wise men. This is Herod Antipas, the son of old King Herod.
Like his father, he is a piece of work. This is the guy who arrested John the Baptist who had denounced him for marrying his half-brother’s wife – who was also his niece. This is the one who had a reputation for hosting well-lubricated parties. At one of them, he promised a dancing girl anything she wanted. She wanted the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter. Rather than embarrass himself further, Herod granted her wish. Now, we hear Herod is coming after Jesus.
The death threat comes from a group of Pharisees. That’s curious. The Gospel of Luke usually portrays the Pharisees as moustache-twisting villains. They attack Jesus for healing on the wrong day of the week.[1] They accuse him of being soft on sin.[2] They jump all over him for forgiving sins.[3] They criticize Jesus for eating with the wrong kind of people.[4] When one of them invites Jesus to his table, he pounces on him for not washing his hands before he eats.[5] It’s constant nit-picking, criticism, and complaint with the Pharisees.
Yet here, the Pharisees track him down to say, “Watch out, Jesus! Herod wants to kill you.” Is this for real? Is this a joke? Is this a trap? What’s going on here? We really don’t know.
What we know is something about Herod. He is curious about Jesus. Back in chapter nine, he hears about all the healings and the teachings. He says out loud, “Who is this guy? I beheaded John the Baptist. Has he come back from the dead?”[6] He wants to meet Jesus, have him do some miracles on demand. His curiosity will continue all the way to the end, when he wraps the Christ in a purple curtain and puts a crown of thorns on his head.[7] For Herod, Jesus becomes a big joke. There’s never any mention of a murder plot. Not from him.
As for the Pharisees, they want Jesus to go away. Far away. “Get away from here,” they said. Then they add, “Herod wants to kill you” – which we know is not true. It should be said they have put the subject of death into the air.
Well, first thing’s first. Jesus backtalks the king. He is surprisingly indifferent to the king's authority. “You go tell that fox that I have work to do. I’m casting out demons. I’m curing illnesses. I’m going to work until the third day.”
Then he turns to the Pharisees to say, “I have to go to Jerusalem. I must go. Jerusalem is where the prophets are murdered.” Ouch. There it is. They warned him of death; he knows he will die. Yet he has no death wish. Rather, he knows who he is and what he has come to do. Jesus is the prophet of God. And nobody wants a prophet.
That became clear in his hometown. Jesus climbed the hill to Nazareth. He went into the hometown synagogue. Everybody was excited. The boy was back in his hometown. “Open the scriptures for us,” they said, and handed him a scroll from their own Bible. Jesus opened the scroll of Isaiah, found the place where it says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…to preach good news to the poor…to proclaim the day of God’s grace.” Then he sat down like a teacher to say, “Today the scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Everybody smiled. They said, “Listen to how well-spoken he is!”
Then Jesus told them two stories out of their own Bible, stories of outsiders unlike them who received the grace of God. They grabbed him, grinding their teeth. They tried to throw him back off that hill. They wanted to get rid of him – in his hometown![8] Because he was a prophet. Nobody wants a prophet.
Here is what prophets do. They tell the truth. They critique from within. They reach back into their own tradition to remind the others of what they have tried to forget. These are the prophets that God raised up in Israel. When the king was corrupted by power and abuse, God raised up the prophet Elijah to call him out. When the nation grew so wealthy that they ignored their own poor, God raised up the prophet Amos to speak to the economic imbalance. When the nation was invaded and robbed by Babylon, God raised Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and others to say, “It’s our own idolatry, injustice, and greed. We did it to ourselves.” And nobody wanted to hear what the prophets had to say.
It goes with the territory. Remember the prophet Isaiah? He had a vision of God and said, “Here I am, Lord. Is it I, Lord? I have heard you calling in the night.” (We love that song!) Well, here is what God then says, in response: “Isaiah, I am going to send to speak to people who will not listen to a word you have to say. Keep speaking. They will keep ignoring you.”[9] That’s the rest of the story. It’s in our Bible.
According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus understood those words so deeply that he applied them to himself.[10] As he said to his disciples one day, “To you, I give the secrets of the kingdom, and others just won’t understand.” That is, there is a division of the house. Some will understand the truth. Others will resist the truth. The One whom God raises up to speak the truth is the prophet, and he usually pays for it.
Have you ever thought of Jesus this way? He is Savior, Lord, and Son of God. Luke says he is also the Prophet. “I must go to Jerusalem,” he says, “for it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” This is one of the deepest insights into the mission of Jesus. God sends him to his own people. They reject him. And God still doesn’t give up on them.
When I was a lot younger, I was in a Sunday School class with kids my age. One day, our teacher handed out books for our entire class. It was an impressive volume, a hardcover chapter-book published by the Westminster Press of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The book was full of Bible stories, all of them Jesus stories. There were pictures too. What I remember most about the book was its title, The King Nobody Wanted. Imagine a book about Jesus written for kids with a title like that! And we were reading it for our class.
Even at that early age, I had been
raised to believe everybody wanted Jesus. He was so kind, so loving, so
gracious, so peaceful, so perfect. How could anybody not want a king like that?
Then we read the Bible stories.
King Herod the Great was put off when the three wise men said, “Where’s the other king? The real king?” And the people in Jesus’ hometown blew a gasket when he opened the Bible for them. The most religious people of his time, the Pharisees – good, holy followers of God – they wanted to get rid of him. And finally, Jesus rides a peaceful donkey into Jerusalem. His enemies arrest him after dark and put him on a cross.
Maybe it’s the first time I wondered, “What’s wrong with us?” God sends us Jesus, so kind, loving, gracious, peaceful, and perfect – and we feel the need to eliminate him. In his place, we keep bowing down before those who are anything but kind, loving, gracious, peaceful, or perfect. If somebody points that error to us, we want to get rid of them too.
In the thick of our turmoil we hear Jesus say, “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!”
He was speaking to his own people as one of those people. He does not stand far off and point at others, but stands under the same canopy, and laments that something has gone terribly wrong. It’s a matter of willfulness, he says. “You were not willing.” Willing for what? I wonder if the heart of what he saying is that we are just not willing for God to get that close.
Because if God got close,
we’d have to admit who we are,
confess what we’ve
done,
declare what we’ve left undone,
fix what we’ve
broken,
correct what we’ve said,
stand up for what we’ve
neglected,
speak up when we shouldn’t have been silent,
gather what we have scattered,
expose what we have hidden,
and return after we’ve
wandered away.
And we’re not willing.
The status quo may be awkward. It may be messy. But it’s a whole lot easier to stay fixed in place than it ever is to change. That’s why God commissions the prophet to speak the uncomfortable truth. The Jewish Jesus goes to Jerusalem. The city will kill him because he speaks God into the midst of his own conflicted people. And he’s there because God has sent him to speak.
Now, this is the most remarkable thing. What other religion has a self-critical component? If you’re a Scientologist and speak up, they sue you. If you’re a Mormon and speak up, they put a chalk X on your sidewalk and shun you. If you a Hindu prophet, they demote you. If you are a Buddhist, they blissfully ignore you. But if you are a Jew named Jesus, or Elijah, or Amos, or Jeremiah, or Ezekiel, or Isaiah, your own people give you nothing but trouble. Because they know you have come with the truth. And they can’t handle the truth.
And yet, in the great irony of the Gospel, if you are a prophet, all your relevant writings, sayings, and deeds will be recorded in your religion’s Bible even after you’ve gone. That’s what you and I have, a self-critical religion. For this is the mind of God: to expose the lies, to correct the distortions, to rebuild the fractured community, all in preparation for the Messiah to call us together and begin again with a clean slate.
And are we willing? Willing to stand with nothing in our hands? Willing to be honest? Willing to be gathered? Willing to be forgiven and free? It’s hard to say.
Yet Jesus sees us as we are. And he tells us the day will come when we see him. In the words of one more of the ancient prophets, the prophet Zechariah, “They shall look upon the one whom they have pierced.”[11] They shall look upon him, they shall see his wounds. Then they shall hear him speak, “I have wanted to gather you as a mother hen gathers her chicks. Are you willing? Are you finally willing?”
How about you? Are you willing to be loved so deeply that you are challenged? Corrected? Forgiven and free?
If so, “Blessed is the one who
comes in the name of the Lord!”
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