Luke 13:31-35

Today, in churches across the land, Christians will hear what the editors of my Bible call “The Lament over Jerusalem.” It is a highly charged, enigmatic, and intensely political passage that can leave us scratching our heads. In just five verses we are asked to contemplate the Pharisees and their motives, Jesus’s ministry of exorcism and healing, the legitimacy of Herod’s tinpot regime, a rare mention of the divine feminine (“a hen gathering her brood,”) and at least two references to Jesus’s coming Passion.

In his lament, Jesus decries Jerusalem as “the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it.” Is Jesus implying that every resident of Jerusalem is a murderous brute? I do not think so.

Cities, like nations, are complicated affairs. Cities, like nations, encompass communities with vastly different values and opinions. How often have we read a headline that says something like “The U.S. supports X, Y, or Z,” only to say, “Hey, wait a minute! This resident of the U.S. supports no such thing!” The rhetorical device in use here is called synecdoche, a word pronounced like the Upstate New York city of Schenectady. Synecdoche is where a part is made to represent the whole, or where the whole represents just a part. Examples include “Downing Street” for the U.K. government, or “Philadelphia just won the Super Bowl,” when, in fact, it was the Eagles. In lamenting over “Jerusalem,” it is entirely possible that Jesus is being rhetorical, referring not to the city as a whole, but to the aforementioned Herod and his Jerusalem-based sham government.

Herod is on Jesus’s mind and perhaps he should be on our minds, too. Herod is, in fact, singularly guilty in the death of our faith’s greatest prophet, John the Baptist. Only a few chapters before, Herod refuses to stand up to the schemes of his stepdaughter Salome, who—at her mother’s prompting—demanded the prophet’s head on a platter. In this, Herod is exposed not only as odious and perverted, but as a coward. (There are few people more dangerous than cowards.) Obsessed with power and the public’s perception of his legitimacy, Herod brutally suppresses any opposition or threat to his “kingdom.” In truth, Herod’s administration was a Potemkin Village, a thinly-veiled façade meant only to obscure the extent to which the Roman occupation ruled unhindered. Every resident of Jerusalem would have known this. For all Herod’s concerns about his legitimacy, it is hard to believe anyone—other than his sycophants and stooges—reckoned him as anything other than a traitor to his nation.

And thus, Jesus warns his followers: the “fox” is in the henhouse; those who speak the truth will be disappeared; worse, still, is coming. How are his followers to stay true? We, too, can join Jesus and lament over our Jerusalems and pray for their sanctification. We can keep our eyes fixed on the Three-Day Man, the One who, in the words of our beloved prayer, stretched out his arms of love upon the hard wood of the cross that everyone might come within the reach of his saving embrace. In this passage—as in so many others—the message of Jesus is clear: keep alert.

Meditation by the Reverend Clarke French
Interim, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, Basking Ridge
Diocese of New Jersey