Some folks really enjoy stirring the pot. There was this time in 8th grade when a fellow student came to me and told me about one of our classmates who was angry with me and wanted to have a fight after school. I didn’t know it at the time, but this same classmate went to the other student and said the same thing to him about me. There wasn’t any conflict between the two of us. Some folks just enjoy stirring the pot and seeing what kind of stink rises from the disturbance.
I don’t know, and neither do many scholars, why exactly the Pharisees came to Jesus with this warning about Herod. The inclination may be to say they’re just stirring the pot because the Church has a tendency to villainize the Pharisees, but the reality is that we just don’t know why they came with the warning about Herod. Some Pharisees were supportive of Jesus’ ministry, even if others were out to get him, like Herod was out to get him.
It is possible that the Pharisees were thinking that if Jesus knew his life was on the line, if he knew that Herod was out to kill him for the ministry he was completing, that Jesus would back off, settle down, lie low and find something else to do. That is how we are inclined to operate most of the time. We get fired up about a cause, we get momentum going around a project, we get moving in the right direction of a call we have and then resistance happens, or someone tries to shut us down because they don’t agree with our cause or like our project or they think our work will cause too much conflict, and so we quit or we decide to wait until a “better time” -- which never comes, by the way -- action on behalf of a Christ-like love will always be seen as “unwise and untimely” by those who would protect the perceived peace that is offered by the status quo. It is entirely possible that the Pharisees were warning Jesus in an attempt to dissuade him from continuing his ministry.
But Jesus (there’s my favorite phrase again… “But Jesus”) … Jesus is focused on the work that is before him, no matter the cost.
He says tells the Pharisees to tell Herod that his work isn’t finished. There are still demons to be cast out and healings that need to occur and that on the third day his work will be complete (which is a clear pointer to the final triumph of the Resurrection). He says quite clearly that Jerusalem is his destination, even though, like so many prophets before him, it means his death.
This is where it gets good, though. You might think that Jesus would have nothing good to say about Jerusalem; that maybe he’d go in there looking a bit like Django Unchained, or Rambo; that maybe he’d just bypass the city altogether because they aren’t deserving of his goodness. But he doesn’t. Jesus doesn’t go Django or Rambo; he doesn’t cold shoulder Jerusalem. He laments over Jerusalem. He says, “How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”
One pastor tells the story of a barn fire in a parish he served; the loss of property was terrible, but during the fire animals were also trapped in the barn, so livestock was lost as well. After the blaze was put out a mother hen’s body was found wings outstretched, protecting her brood from the flame. She gave herself to protect her children.
This is Jesus. In the flailing of life, where we have the tendency to spend so much time running around in panicked circles seeking ways to survive, sometimes, many times, to the detriment of others, he is there willing to stretch out his wings, his arms, to sacrifice himself for us. This is what he offers to Jerusalem; this is what he offers to the Pharisees, and probable even to the fox-like Herods, as they stir the up the pot; this is what he offers to us.
There is a phrase in one of the Prayers of confession: “Most merciful God, we confess that…we have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” And then a litany of failures follows. They are hard words to pray some days. Because they force us to think about all the ways we do not love God with everything we are; and they force us to be confronted by our failure to take care of one another, to love one another as Christ loves us. Like it or not prayers like these align us with foxes like Herod and with cities that kill prophets and stone those who are sent to us.
But Jesus, Jesus looks at us as tells us that we are welcome under the protection of his wing. That our not-so-sly scheming, that our political maneuvering in the social realm, in the professional realm, even in the religious realm, our scheming and our maneuvering can be forgiven, will be forgiven, has been forgiven, if we will just turn to him and learn what it means to love as we have been loved.
There is a saying that all roads lead to Rome. In the gospels, all roads lead to Jerusalem: the city that kills prophets and stones those who are sent to it. But it isn’t Jerusalem that gets the last word, as final as that word may have seemed to those who stood on the hill on Friday, and even to those who hid from the hill on that Friday. Jerusalem doesn’t get the last word. The Pharisees don’t get the last word. Herod doesn’t get the last word.
Jesus gets the last word. And that word is grace. And grace invites us to come, broken as we are, to be made whole.
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