Jerusalem, Jerusalem!

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

It's easy to miss the chapel as you make you way down the Mount of Olives toward Gethsemane. The road is steep and winding, and if the sun is shining brilliantly, as it was when I was there, the breathtaking view of the old city of Jerusalem commands most of your attention. But if you see the chapel, and if you can persuade the tour guide to stop at it and not at any of the others that are more historically significant, you'll find a mosaic on the floor near the altar, depicting a hen gathering her chicks under her wings. It's all there -- the lament that Jesus utters in today's gospel passage: "Jerusalem, Jerusalem! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"  (You can see photos of the chapel and mosaic here.)

We’re in the 13th chapter of Luke, and Jesus has turned his face steadfastly to Jerusalem. Luke does not tell us, but it’s hard to imagine that Jesus has any illusions about what he will find when he gets there. Surely the sharp prophecies uttered centuries earlier by the likes of Jeremiah, and Isaiah must have echoed in his head. Jerusalem, the City of God, the shining city set upon a hill, the site of Solomon’s glorious temple – the temple that had been utterly destroyed by the invading Babylonian army in the 6th century B.C. and rebuilt two generations later. The sacred history of the Jewish people taught that the destruction of that first temple was the consequence of their own willful violation of the Covenant with God. The rulers and the people had played fast and loose with the weightier demands of the Torah then, convinced by the religious authorities of the day that God would never deliver the chosen people into the hands of their enemies. Five centuries had passed between the rebuilding of the temple by those who returned from Exile, and Jesus’s prophetic words. Five centuries had passed and while many things had changed, many more had stayed the same. The city was prosperous. Herod the Great had renovated the second temple and business there was brisk. So what if the Herodian kings had all the moral scruples of a fox in a henhouse? So what if the Romans really ran the show? The local citizenry could worship Yahweh as they saw fit, so long as they kept quiet and paid their taxes to Caesar. So long as the Sanhedrin and the Roman government maintained an alliance, however tenuous it might be, life in Jerusalem was generally pretty good.

And so long as the people of Jerusalem had their comforts, their bread and circuses, they could ignore any inconvenient prophet that came their way. They had a long history of doing just exactly that.  Maybe that was the chief difference perhaps between the people in Galilee and the people in Jerusalem. Those in Galilee knew they were poor. They knew they were suffering under the ruinous political climate. They knew what it was to hunger and thirst for righteousness. The beginning of conversion, after all, is the dawning awareness that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. Frankly, the more distractions we have at our disposal, the slower that awareness comes.

To be sure, the people of Jerusalem will sit up and take notice when Jesus enters Jerusalem on the day we commemorate as the Sunday of the Passion – Palm Sunday. Jesus  seemingly will fulfill the words of Zechariah -- one of the prophets their ancestors, ironically enough, had stoned. Zechariah prophesied about the Prince of Peace entering the great city in humility, mounted on a donkey. Jerusalem wasn’t interested in one more prophet. What they were interested in was a Messiah. And not just any Messiah, but one who had their own political and economic interests in heart. They wanted a warrior king who would unite the peoples, and drive out from their borders the hated presence of the Gentile nations, the way that King David had done centuries earlier. If the Eagle of Rome were to be defeated, surely it would have to come through a king who personified the Lion of Judah.

All too soon, Jesus will tip his hand. He will reveal to the people of Jerusalem the kind of Messiah he is and will be to the end. And the people will respond with outraged disappointment. He will, indeed, stretch out his arms of love on the hard wood of the cross so that everyone might be drawn within the reach of his saving embrace. His image, in today’s reading, of a hen gathering her chicks under the protection of her wings foreshadows with nearly unbearable pathos his posture on the cross.

A protective mother hen is an image that remains as counterintuitive as it is homely. Everyone knows, after all, that in a showdown between predatory fox or eagle and a mother hen, the hen will come out the loser. The chicks will be scattered, running blindly for cover, while the lifeless bloody body of the hen who laid down her life for her children will be consumed.

What kind of messiah is that?

As it turns out, the only kind that is effective against violence, injustice, exploitation, victimage of any kind. It is a messiah that refuses to counter violence with violence. It is a messiah who will save the people not by inflicting death upon his enemies, but by meeting death with arms outstretched, loving his own who were in the world, loving them to the end.