This Gospel seems to raise one of the Big Questions: If God is good, why do terrible things happen? There’s a fancy name for that question: Theodicy – from the Greek words for God’s justice. Theodicy asks: Can we understand tragedies as manifestations of God’s righteous judgment – and thus as making terrible sense? 

Some things can’t be explained and resolved in a 15 minute sermon. The question of suffering is one of them. But this year, I have found some new ways into this challenging Gospel text. One important step for me was translating it into our time. Listen. 

There were some present who told Jesus about the people from Missouri who were killed by tornados. He asked them, “Do you think that because these people suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Southerners? No, I tell you; but unless you change your heart, you will all perish as they did. Or the people who were killed at Abundant Life School – do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Madison? No, I tell you; but unless you change your heart, you will all perish just as they did.”

What do I get from this exercise? Well, first, it brings us into the conversation. I’ve read a lot of commentaries over the years that say, “Well, people back then had this ignorant belief that bad things only happen to people who deserve it.” 

Listen: WE THINK THAT TOO. We may be careful about when and where and to whom we say that stuff. But I have heard all kinds of folks of general goodwill and good conscience, INCLUDING myself, express schadenfreude in the face of situations where it seems like people are getting what they have coming to them. It’s more or less what FAFO stands for. (Ask someone under 30 if you’ve never heard the word FAFO.)  It’s more or less what “I never thought leopards would eat my face” is all about. And I think about those leopards a lot, y’all. 

We are in this picture even if we don’t like it. People who absolutely know better will say, They should have voted differently; or, Why did they choose to live there; or, You should have vaccinated your kids. We also tend to blame victims.

Notice the social and moral geographies of this little scene in our Gospel. Jesus is in Judea right now, not far from Jerusalem; this is the same scene as last week’s Gospel. Jesus is FROM Galilee, a region north of Judea. Judeans did not think much of Galileans! They were seen as poor, backwards, and not very good Jews. 

The bystanders, here – presumably Judean – ask Jesus about some kind of massacre of Galileans. Jesus responds sharply: Of course this tragedy doesn’t mean those were the worst Galileans. Then he offers them another example of random tragedy – this time featuring some people in Jerusalem, which as I mentioned last week was more or less the center of the world! Jesus hints that folks may be more ready to assume people deserve their misfortune when those people are stigmatized outsiders. 

That’s why, when I translated this story to our times, I started with tornadoes in Missouri. It could have been the Texas measles epidemic; it could have been the flooding after Hurricane Helene. As someone who lived in the South for over a decade, and came to deeply love and respect many amazing Southerners, I notice how ready Midwesterners can be to write off the South. Whatever happens down there – they probably brought it on themselves. But when flooding or disease or violence claim lives in our own city … it might feel a little harder to explain away. 

Presbyterian Bible scholar Mark Davis writes, “[In these verses] I see Jesus addressing not theodicy but hypocrisy.” 

Not theodicy but hypocrisy! 

Davis says that Jesus’ answer here is basically, “Do you suppose a causal relationship between morality and tragedy?”… and then, Don’t kid yourself; “you have more in common than different with those victims.” Who are we to place blame, or offer easy justifications? 

It’s complicated, right? Actions and choices do have consequences. But there’s not a straight line between the act or choice, and the consequence. 

Suffering is not a form of punishment. We can’t look at who is suffering to know who to blame. Jesus is very clear about that, here and elsewhere. 

So. Having, reluctantly, found myself in this text, what else do I find here? The second thing I find here is a call to enlarge my concept of repentance. Jesus says this hard, strange thing twice: “No, I tell you; but unless you change your hearts, you will all perish just as they did.” 

Our usual Bible translation says “unless you repent.” I swapped in another translation that’s closer to the Greek: “change your heart.” The Greek word there, as in most places where we usually see repent or repentance, is metanoia, meaning a transformative change of heart and mind. I think a lot about how different that is, how much bigger and more interesting, than the concept of repentance as the church usually offers it: think of a bad thing you did, tell God you’re sorry, don’t do it again. 

When I read this Gospel conversation into our modern context, it pushes me to think of repentance as more expansive, collective, and transformational. This is not about an individual making amends for their sin and doing better going forward. That might be good for that person and those they interact with, but it doesn’t change the bigger picture. Also: All the “you”s here in this passage are plural in Greek. Unless all y’all change y’all’s hearts…  

Biblical scholar David Lose writes, “Just because suffering is not punishment doesn’t mean that it is disconnected entirely from sin. Pilate’s murderous acts of terror – as well as those horrific actions of today’s tyrants that we read about in the news – are sinful… There are all kinds of bad behaviors that contribute too much of the misery in the world, and the more we can confront that sin the less suffering there will be.”

We need metanoia, y’all. Large scale, communal, transformative metanoia. The kind of collective change of hearts that leads to changing the world. 

The people of Jesus’ time needed to be saved from violent repression and poor civil engineering. The people of our time need to be saved from the human causes of increasingly dangerous weather, from the over-availability of guns, from poverty and isolation and fear and the corrosive lies that feed mistrust of systems built to help us and violence towards our neighbors. 

The great filmmaker David Lynch died in January. In the wake of his death I learned about a line from the 2017 reprise of his famous TV show Twin Peaks. Lynch himself, playing a fictional FBI official, tells Agent Denise Bryan, a transgender woman: “When you became Denise, I told all of your colleagues, those clown comics, to fix their hearts or die.”

Fix your hearts or die. It’s become almost a rallying cry for some in the transgender community and their allies, especially in a season when they’re under almost daily attack by the federal government and many state governments. 

I won’t venture to try to say what this line means for trans folks. To me it means something like: My loved ones are real, and they matter, and they belong, and they’re not going anywhere. So, fix your heart. Open your mind. Grow your idea of the world until it has room for them in it. 

Fix your hearts or die. 

Unless you change your hearts, you will all perish just as they did. 

The hard part is the “or die” part, right? The “or perish as they did” part? It’s pretty easy to be in favor of metanoia. But where does death come into this call to renewal of life? 

We can be clear that it’s not a threat. We have JUST covered the fact that suffering is not punishment. We can’t look at who’s suffering to find the bad people, or look at who’s comfortable to find the good people. That’s the “NO, I tell you” part of Jesus’ saying. 

But what does the “perish as they did” part mean, if it’s not a threat?

I don’t claim to understand it fully! But I think that for one thing, it’s kind of a statement of fact. In a world without some kind of collective metanoia, a lot of bad stuff is going to keep on happening. Somebody said, In the era of climate change, it’s all watching phone videos of disaster until you’re the one holding the phone. 

Not all deaths are preventable. But deaths due to political violence and bad infrastructure and hunger and diseases that we can vaccinate against… it doesn’t have to be this way. 

I think, though, that the “or die” part of Jesus’ and Lynch’s teaching here is not only or even primarily about actual death. 

I think it’s also about the seriousness and urgency of the call to change. The stakes may not be literal, physical death – Jesus is prone to hyperbole – but there are stakes. 

You will miss something, if you don’t change your heart. 

You will be left behind… while big, beautiful, important, holy things are happening. 

You won’t step into whatever world is becoming possible. 

A loss to you, and to those you could be standing beside. 

Which brings us to this little parable Jesus tells. “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ The gardener replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

There’s a tendency to assume that any authority figure in a parable – a king, a rich man, a landowner – is a stand-in for God. But that only sometimes seems to be true. I don’t think it’s true here. This parable builds on the conversation about whether sudden, tragic deaths tell us something about God and judgment. Jesus’ answer is, God does not strike people down. 

So let’s take it as a given that God doesn’t strike trees down, either. Luke’s Gospel is full of images of God as loving, yearning, and seeking. Next week we’ll hear the parable of the Prodigal Son, coming up soon in Luke’s Gospel. 

David Lose writes, “Given Luke’s [Jesus’s] consistent picture of God’s reaction to sin, then perhaps the landowner is representative of our own sense of how the world should work…. We want things to be “fair” and we define “fair” as receiving rewards for doing good and punishment for doing evil [especially for other people]… So perhaps the gardener is God, the one who consistently raises a contrary voice to suggest that the ultimate answer to sin isn’t punishment – not even in the name of justice – but rather mercy, reconciliation, and new life.” 

Lisle Garrity of Sanctified Art offers a beautiful description of the work of that holy gardener: “Where the landowner sees waste, the gardener perceives possibility that lies fallow. The gardener has learned from the land that life flows in cycles—budding, flourishing, pruning, death…. 

And so [she] requests one more year. Cutting the earth with a shovel, [she] loosens the clots that have settled like stone so that when water comes, the earth with receive it like a soft kiss. [She] blankets the roots with manure so that growth can be steadied by hope. And then [she] lets go.”

Our Old Testament text, the call of Moses, is actually kind of a good case study. If you’ve heard of Moses at all, you know he’s a great leader of God’s people in the time long before Jesus. One of the top Old Testament guys. But at this point in his story, he’s kind of hit bottom. He was born to an enslaved family, and grew up in foster care with a wealthy family, which gave him opportunities but also kind of messed him up. One day as a young man he sees one of his birth people being beaten by someone from his adoptive people. He kills the aggressor, and hides the body. Word gets out about what he did; he runs away to the wilderness to avoid arrest. All that potential: blown. 

It’s not so bad, though; he meets a young woman there and falls in love, and settles in to tend his father-in-law’s goats for the rest of his life. So be it.

But God has other plans. 

God says this fig tree isn’t finished yet. 

Jesus’ parables are teaching tools, meant to stay with us, puzzle us, push us to rethink and reframe. 

In our attitudes towards other people – the hypocrisy and judgmentalism Jesus addresses here, and that I recognize in myself at times, if I’m honest – I think Jesus wants us to hear that God is not in a hurry to chop anybody down, and neither should we be. Mark Davis writes, “Jesus offers a parable that invites digging, cultivating, [fertilizing], and doing everything one can to give a fig tree a chance to bloom. It is a plan of action to assist the one who is failing, not a passive hope that they get what’s coming to them.”

And I think there’s something to take on board here not just for how we think about others, but how we think about ourselves, on our own journeys of becoming. Alongside last week’s image of Jesus Christ the loving mother hen, plant the image of Christ the patient gardener. 

Lisle Garrity writes, “What happens to the fig tree? Does it live? Does it die? Does it bear any fruit? We don’t know. And so, if we can’t read the end of this story, then we must write it with our own lives. Because we know what it feels like to be the fig tree, to be deemed worthless, to be weary enough to believe that we don’t deserve to be well. And perhaps we also know what it’s like to see the world through the eyes of the landowner—calculating worth based on what we produce, what we accomplish, what we provide. Can we cultivate the vision of the Great Gardener, the One who sees you for what you are becoming? The one who tends and prunes, nourishes and lets go?” 

SOURCES

Mark Davis, at Left Behind & Loving It: https://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/02/theodicy-or-hypocrisy.html

Lisle Garrity for Sanctified Art, purchased here: 

https://sanctifiedart.org/videos/the-wisdom-of-the-fig-tree-worship-film

David Lose’s commentary: https://www.davidlose.net/2016/02/lent-3-c-suffering-the-cross-and-the-promise-of-love/

This is the shortest Gospel in the season of Lent. Yet in just five verses, it contains quite a cast of characters.  Let’s start with King Herod – who wants to kill Jesus. 

This was Herod Antipas, the son of the King Herod of the Christmas Gospel.  At this time Judea and this whole region were part of the Roman Empire, under a system of indirect rule – meaning that there was a local ruler, but he was hand-picked and closely overseen by the Roman Empire. Herod Antipas had close ties to Rome; he was educated there; he traveled to Rome to be appointed to his role by the Emperor Augustus; and later named his new capital city after Emperor Tiberius. 

Herod’s path to power was not straightforward. His father had two older sons whom he had favored… but then had them strangled after yet another brother convinced him they were plotting against him. Then that brother was executed, on the same suspicion.  Augustus once remarked, “It is better to be [King] Herod’s pig than his son.”

There’s a good deal more to the story but suffice it to say that Herod Antipas probably never felt safe on his throne, adding to the pressure of governing a region made unstable by poverty and political and religious extremism. Insecure leaders are often reactive, cruel leaders. 

For example, when John the Baptist, an itinerant rabbi who gathered crowds with his teachings, starts criticizing Herod’s marriage, Herod has him arrested – and eventually John’s head ends up on a platter. 

So that’s King Herod… whom Jesus immediately calls a fox. That’s our second character. What does Jesus mean by calling Herod a fox? For a long time I assumed it meant that Herod was clever, sneaky, and lethal. Those are the meanings attached to foxes in Western folklore. 

A few years ago, I found an article that explores what “fox” would have meant to Jesus, based on other texts from roughly that time and place. Sneaky and lethal were part of it, but the author, Randall Buth, says there’s another layer: Foxes and lions were often used as a way to contrast not-so-great men with great men. There’s n ancient saying, “Be a tail to lions rather than a head to foxes.” – meaning, Better to be a lesser person among great people, than a leader among good-for-nothings.

So when Jesus calls Herod a fox, there’s a lot wrapped up in that word: Sly and cruel, yes. But also: inept. Unworthy. A small man who only thinks he’s a great man. A poser, a pretender. Jesus is being even more insulting than we realized – and speaking publicly against a fox who has already shown that he’s willing to murder inconvenient rabbis. 

Our next character is Jerusalem – a city whom Jesus refers to here as if she were a person: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” 

Richard Swanson’s commentary on this Gospel for WorkingPreacher begins, “The first thing to understand is that Jerusalem was the center of the world.” Jerusalem was the heart of political and religious power in Judea – a place of kings, high priests, and generals. The Temple was the place where God’s finger touched the earth. According to Luke, Jesus grew up in a family of observant Jews who visited Jerusalem and the Great Temple regularly. 

Swanson writes, “Remember that Jesus is not like you. He is a Jew of the first century, and Jerusalem is, for him, the center of the world… [Here] he is grieving for a city that he loves. [And Luke as the Gospel writer] is grieving for the city that was destroyed in 70 CE when Rome crushed the First Jewish Revolt.” There is real love, real anguish, real grief, here, for the great city, holy and violent. 

Who are these prophets whom Jesus mentions, the ones that Jerusalem kills? (By the way: Stoning was a means of public, mob execution – everybody just throws stones at somebody until they’re dead.) The Old Testament records two prophets who were killed in Jerusalem by kings who did not appreciate their messages. In addition, Queen Jezebel is said to have killed a large number of prophets, because they were speaking out against King Ahab’s worship of other gods and cruel acts. 

By Jesus’ time, it seems there were also some non-canonical stories circulating that more famous prophets had also been killed in Jerusalem. For example, Isaiah is said to have been sawn in half by a king possessed by a demon.

For Jews, including Jesus and his first followers, these tales of the murder of prophets in Jerusalem were part of the story of their people – a story which includes many kings who were charged with keeping God’s ways of holiness, righteousness, and mercy, but who found God’s demands – spoken by the prophets – to be inconvenient. 

Jesus’ arrest and execution will fit that pattern. 

It is important for us as Christian readers to understand that what Jesus says here is not a prophecy against the Jewish people, but a chilling and timeless reminder that humans often react harshly to calls to give up privilege and affluence for the sake of justice and mercy. 

Kings, foxes, a personified city, murdered prophets… and a chicken. 

A hen, specifically.  

Here she is, the Holy Chicken, in a photo of a mosaic on the altar of a tiny church on a hillside near Jerusalem, which commemorates the spot where Jesus is said to have spoken these words. The church is called “Domine Flevit,” or “The Lord Wept.”

In a sermon on this text, Tim Fleck says, “The lowly hen doesn’t have much of a biblical pedigree… God and the prophets are compared to eagles, to leopards, to lions: to tough, macho animals. But this scripture and its parallel in the Gospel of Matthew are the only places in the canonical scriptures that even mention the chicken.”

Chickens are not strong, or fierce, or beautiful. They’re neither clever nor wise. They’re close to the bottom of the food chain. They can’t even really fly. When a fox meets a chicken, we know who’s going to walk away from the encounter – with feathers on his snout. 

The smart money is always on the fox. 

But in this text, Jesus sides with the chicken: “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” 

All the chicken has going for her is what you see, right here: her protective love. A love so strong that she will put her own body between her chicks and the teeth or claws of a predator. If someone wants to get to her children, they’re going to have to go through her, literally. That won’t deter most predators much;  her beak and claws are no match for a fox, hawk, or raccoon. 

But given the choice between abandoning her chicks as tasty snacks and making a getaway, or sacrificing herself in the hope of saving them, she chooses the latter. In an essay on this text, Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them.”

I should say, here, that I know very little about the nobility and self-sacrificial tendencies of actual chickens. Jesus is alluding to what chickens are said to do – just as the images of pelicans, found in many churches, including ours, show a mother pelican feeding her young with her own blood, nourishing them at the cost of her own life. It’s a symbolic image that has nothing to do with actual pelican behavior.

Jesus identifies with this allegorical chicken. He sees the danger that surrounds Jerusalem, that stalks God’s children: Grinding poverty; the oppression of greedy and ruthless rulers; disease, division, and instability; the kill-or-be-killed mentality that develops when nobody has enough and nobody trusts their neighbors. 

Forty years from this moment, Jerusalem will lie in smoking ruins, the great Temple torn down, not one stone left upon another. Jesus sees this future; he sees present suffering and struggle; and his heart aches for God’s people Israel, who have lost so much, and have yet more to lose. But like the hen, all he has to offer is his stubborn, risky love.  

Pause and hold this image of Jesus in your mind: Christ the mother hen, wings outstretched over her helpless fluffy babies. 

Let’s turn from one strange image in today’s Scripture to another, a flaming fire-bowl moving on its own among cut-up animals. We find God’s self-giving love here too. This action, cutting up the animals, is strange and disturbing to us, but would have made sense to Abraham. This was how you sealed (or cut) a covenant, in those times, using the sacred power of blood. 

But usually, a covenant is mutual; both sides have to make reciprocal commitments. Both parties walk between the dead animals, as a symbol of those mutual commitments. But here, only God, symbolized by the firebowl, moves among the sacrifices, while Abraham looks on. A one-sided covenant! – it’s almost nonsense. 

There will be a human side to the covenant. Abram’s descendants will be called to live in distinctive and demanding ways, as the holy people of a holy God. But here, at the beginning, the relationship between God and humanity is fundamentally asymmetrical. 

God always loves us more than we love back. 

God always gives us more than we give back. 

God always begins the conversation. 

When I’ve preached on this text before, I’ve landed there – with what Jesus’ words here tell us about the heart of God. Jesus’ tenderness, anger and anguish here touch me deeply; they are part of how I understand the Divine, made known to us in Jesus Christ. 

But this year Richard Swanson’s commentary helped me notice something new. Let’s talk about the last group in the cast of characters of this Gospel passage – the first mentioned in the text: these Pharisees with a warning for Jesus: “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you!”

Jesus has been wandering around villages in Judea, teaching and healing, and working his way towards Jerusalem, where he knows the next chapter of this story must unfold. So the Pharisees say, Go back to Galilee. Go to Samaria. Anywhere. You are too close to the center of power to get away with saying the kinds of things you’ve been saying.

Why are these Pharisees helping Jesus? Aren’t they his enemies? Well, yes and no. Out of all the Gospels, Luke may do the best job of showing the ambiguity of Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees. Besides this passage, Luke mentions three times when Jesus eats in the home of a Pharisee. He may end up arguing with his hosts, but arguing over Scripture is a sign of engagement, not enmity. 

The Pharisees were a reform movement in first-century Judaism. They were concerned that the Jewish people had lapsed in both belief and practice, and wanted to encourage re-engagement and renewal. 

They wanted people to have their own relationships with God, and not feel dependent on the elite religious leadership of the Temple. They wanted synagogues in every village, as local centers of religious study. 

So Jesus and the Pharisees had a lot in common. Some scholars even see Jesus as a kind of rogue Pharisee. 

In the Gospels I think we see the Pharisees trying to figure out if Jesus’ message and movement can advance their goals, or if it’s just too different. Their biggest division seems to be that the Pharisees put a lot of weight on keeping the many ritual practices of Old Testament Judaism, as a way to orient daily life towards God; while Jesus can be pretty dismissive of those practices. 

Christians tend to understand Pharisees as practicing a hypocritical, superficial piety. But we need to be careful. Our New Testament texts are often negative about Jewish groups because they were written in a time when relations between Jews and Christians were bad. But Jesus WAS a Jew, and arguing with other Jews about how to be Jews is one of the most Jewish things he does. 

Swanson points out that even though Jesus has a core group of followers, there are also sympathizers, supporters, seekers, and allies who crop up all through the story – even Roman soldiers, tax collectors, and Temple leaders. These Pharisees pass on a warning for Jesus because they feel some kinship with his movement and message. 

And it’s not that they’re in on Herod’s plotting. Pharisees were not in the halls of power at this time. It was likely just the word on the street that Herod was getting fed up with the obnoxious prophet from Nazareth. I’m sure it wasn’t really news to Jesus, either. 

Swanson writes that the Pharisees’ warning was an “act of allyship.” What does it mean to be an ally? 

We hear the word a lot with reference to the LGBTQ+ community – meaning someone who is straight and cisgender, whose inner sense of gender is aligned with their biological sex assigned at birth, but who chooses to support, stand with, and advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. The term shows up in conversation about anti-racism work, too, and in other contexts.  

Often when we talk about allies, we’re talking about a member of a dominant group who chooses to speak and act in solidarity with members of a marginalized group. But alliances among marginalized groups have also often been powerful and important. 

Have you ever heard the expression “divide and conquer”? It’s said to go all the way back to the father of Alexander the Great of Greece, who created one of the largest empires in human history, 300 years before Jesus. “Divide and conquer,” or “divide and rule,” means that if you can sow discord and suspicion, and keep the groups you’re trying to control fighting with each other, then it’s much easier for you to stay in power. When members of different groups are able to work through their differences and help each other, it starts to get harder for the Herods and Alexanders of the world to pursue their agendas unhindered. There are so many situations in which Who am I willing to stand with? and Who is willing to stand with me? might be important questions – even holy questions.

Turn back for a moment to Chicken Jesus. I learned recently that some hens steal eggs – then sit on them, hatch and raise them. I saw a video of one hen who had spread her fluffy body over twenty or more eggs, from at least three different kinds of chickens; there were several big greenish duck eggs under there too.

Imagine Christ the Mother Hen surrounded by a gaggle of mismatched babies – chicks of all different shapes and sizes, and that one is DEFINITELY a duckling. Standing together, under those loving outstretched wings. 

Swanson writes, “The Messiah has more allies than you might imagine. So do you. Recognizing that is how you prepare to welcome the one coming in the Name of the God Whose Name Is Mercy.” 

 

 

This sermon owes much to a sermon on the Holy Chicken by the Rev. Tim Fleck. 

Richard Swanson’s commentary: 

https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-3/commentary-on-luke-1331-35-6

Barbara Brown Taylor, “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood,” (March 11, 2001), accessed at www.textweek.com March 3, 2007; quoted in Tim’s sermon. 

Randall Buth, That Small-fry Herod Antipas, or When a Fox Is Not a Fox, https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/2667/

Gabriel Said Reynolds, “ON THE QUR’ĀN AND THE THEME OF JEWS AS “KILLERS OF THE PROPHETS,”

https://www3.nd.edu/~reynolds/index_files/jews%20as%20killers%20of%20the%20prophets%20final.pdf

It’s the last Sunday in Epiphany, the last Sunday before we begin a new church season – the season of Lent, when we prepare for the mystery of Easter. And our Sunday calendar of readings, the lectionary, always gives us this story on this Sunday – the gospel of the Transfiguration, the church’s word for this moment when some of Jesus’ disciples catch a glimpse of divine glory shining forth from their friend. They also see him having a friendly chat with Moses and Elijah – which impresses them because Moses, the great leader and liberator of God’s people, lived 1300 years or so before Jesus, and Elijah, the great prophet, whom we met in our Scripture drama last week, lived about 800 years before Jesus. A Voice says, This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him! And then… suddenly the sun is shining and they’re just standing there on a rocky hillside with their friend Jesus, whose face and clothes are once again ordinary, familiar. 

And then… they walk down the mountain, straight into a bit of a situation. Our Gospel today is Luke’s version of the story. Luke used the Gospel of Mark, the earliest-written of the four Gospels, as one of his sources. Mark is famously the shortest Gospel, and is quite spare in its prose much of the time. But there are a couple of healing stories where Mark offers a lot of beautiful detail… too much detail, in Luke’s opinion! [On the back of your Sunday Supplement you can compare their two versions and see that Luke cut down Mark’s prose a LOT.] The Sunday lectionary never gives us Mark’s version, but we’re going to talk about it today. 

In Luke’s Gospel, the Transfiguration and the healing story aren’t particularly connected. One thing happens, and then another thing happens. But as Mark tells it, this is all one story. Jesus, James, Peter, and John head down the mountain to rejoin the rest of their group. As they go, they talk a little about what happened. The disciples have a question about Elijah that I’d be happy to explain at coffee hour. 

And then they find the rest of the disciples – who are in the middle of a big kerfuffle. While Jesus and the other three were away, someone has come to the disciples looking for help, and that situation has kind of spun out of control. A big crowd has gathered; some religious leaders have shown up to argue with the disciples; it’s chaos. And when Jesus shows up, all the chaos immediately gathers around HIM.

So he asks, What are y’all arguing about? And someone in the crowd answers: “Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.”

I’m sure some of you have seen a person or a pet have a seizure. Our dog Kip has seizures sometimes. It sure sounds like that’s what this father is talking about. Many readers of Scripture over the centuries have read this description and thought: This child has epilepsy. It’s a brain disorder that causes people to have seizures. 50 million people have it, and it’s been around for a very long time. Today we can treat it and help most people have few or no seizures, but that wasn’t true in Jesus’ time. 

Then Jesus says something strange: “You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you?” Who is he talking to, and why does he sound so mad? I think we can be clear that he’s not talking to this dad. When he says “you,” here, as in “put up with you,” that’s a PLURAL “you” – he’s talking to a group, the “faithless generation.” So, he’s not mad at the dad. He’s mad at the crowd, and the situation. I wonder if that moment on the mountaintop was actually pretty significant for Jesus himself, and he was hoping for a little time to reflect on it, instead of finding himself in the middle of a worked-up crowd.

And I think he’s angry that that this child’s illness has become the pretext for this whole hullabaloo. That this mob has gathered, half of them hungry for the spectacle of a miraculous healing and half of them watching him like hawks to see if he does anything that they can use against him. I think Jesus would like very much to have a private moment with this father and child, to talk with them and help them, and he’s frustrated that that’s not possible. 

But he does his best. He tells the father, “Bring him to me.” And they bring the boy to him. And under the stress of the moment, the child has a seizure. Mark’s text says, “When the spirit saw [Jesus], immediately it threw the boy into convulsions, and he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth.” 

Mark assumes that this is the work of an evil spirit. The Gospel writers saw a distinction between physical illnesses or injuries, and difficulties caused by evil spirits, which tend afflict the mind and spirit – things that today we might identify as epilepsy, or a mental illness, things like that. During his earthly ministry as told in the Gospels, Jesus both heals physical illnesses, and casts out evil spirits. I wonder whether Jesus – who is both a human being and also God – looks at this child and knows what’s really going on. That this is no demon, but an electrical storm in the brain. He treats it an an exorcism, not a healing, but that might be for the sake of the crowd. I wonder! 

Jesus asks the father, ‘How long has this been happening to him?’ And he answers, ‘From childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.’ Jesus replies, ‘If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes.’ And immediately – Mark uses that word a lot! – immediately, the father of the child cries out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!’ 

Other translations say, “I have faith; help my lack of faith!” 

This cry is a prayer, a heartfelt, spontaneous, simple prayer, and I love it. I pray it now and then; I commend it to you. I appreciate the acknowledgement that faith, belief, is not an all or nothing deal. I’m pretty sure most of us are somewhere on a continuum. Some part of us is able to believe that there’s a Love that enfolds the universe, works for good even in the most difficult circumstances that humanity creates for ourselves, and knows our names and deepest longings…. We’re able to believe that up to a point. And maybe there’s some other part of us that finds all that completely implausible. And there might be a big part of us that very much wants to have faith, to be able to trust in that Love and live accordingly. “I have faith; help my lack of faith!” is a beautifully concise and honest prayer for those moments when we yearn to trust that God’s goodness is at work in our lives and our world, nevertheless; and yet can’t, quite. 

That little conversation – that true, important moment of prayer – might be the real heart of this story. (And Luke edits it out…!) 

The crowd is growing, more people are running to see what’s happening, and Jesus decides to move things along. He commands the “spirit” to leave the boy. The boy’s seizure ends, and he lies as if lifeless. People start to holler, “He’s dead!” But Jesus takes him by the hand and helps him stand up. 

Mark, our storyteller, believes the demon has been driven out. I want to believe that Jesus has healed this child’s brain – that in the absence of modern medicine, Jesus has freed him from the ongoing distress, danger, and stigma of his illness. 

Afterwards the disciples ask: Why couldn’t we cast out that demon, Jesus? And Jesus can’t tell them, It wasn’t a demon, it was a chronic brain disorder, so he tells them, This kind of demon comes out only through prayer. 

I know that the healing stories and other miracles in the Gospels can be a stretch for some folks who want to believe. I understand. They don’t bother me terribly, but I think that’s more of a personality thing than a faith thing. I majored in anthropology, you know? I can believe six impossible things before breakfast. 

In his book on faith Unapologetic, Francis Spufford offers a beautiful account of why, perhaps, Jesus could heal, during his earthly life: “Impossibilities occur. Blind eyes suddenly see. Severed nerve cells re-connect. Legs straighten, infections recede, pain fades, horrified minds quieten… Perhaps this momentary suspension of the laws of the universe can happen because the maker of all things is now no longer outside them, impartially sustaining them, holding everything but touching nothing in particular. Now, instead, the maker is within as well, and he has hands that can reach, he has a local address in space and time from which to act.” 

Why don’t miraculous cures and healings happen now? Well, sometimes they do, for no apparent reason – certainly not because somebody had the most or best people praying for them. Sometimes – often! – genuinely miraculous cures happen through the holy gift of medical science. Which is why slashing funding to medical research is a sin. 

And sometimes healing doesn’t happen. Sometimes stuff doesn’t get better. Bodies, minds, lives, are changed for good. 

I know people who are gracefully and wisely wrestling with the diminishments of age. I know people who can tell me with clear eyes and a steady gaze that they don’t fear death. But human infirmity often does not follow the track of gentle and gradual decline. Even Scripture acknowledges that aging peacefully towards death is a blessing and privilege. 

There are many struggles of body, mind, and spirit that are harder to accept as part of the order of things. The anguish of this father in our Gospel story! – it hurts when someone you love is ill, in ways that diminish their access to life’s ordinary opportunities and joys; in ways that cause them pain or grief, that make us fear we’ll lose them entirely. It hurts to be that someone: grieving possibilities, managing pain; preoccupied by needs and costs; waiting for the next flare-up or follow-up; watching life pass by. 

Today epilepsy is categorized as a disability. I heard someone say recently that the disabled are the largest minority in the world, and the only minority that anyone can join at any time. When we consider the disabilities folks were living with in Jesus’ time and the intervening two thousand years, there are some we can simply prevent now, and some that we can cure. There are many we can manage, to reduce their impact on someone’s daily life. 

But it is still commonplace for disability or chronic illness to change the shape and course of people’s lives. 

In the Gospels we see Jesus healing the blind, the lame, the epileptic, the troubled of mind. Do those healing acts commit us to the conviction that “perfect” physical and mental health is the necessary fulfillment of God’s intentions for us? It’s complicated!

We have learned to appreciate the gifts of human difference in many ways – the body doesn’t function very well if it’s all ears, right? But we still tend to treat disability and chronic illness as a falling-short, a failure. A departure from what ought to be. 

That mindset gets pushback, sometimes, from folks living with disabilities and differences. For example, many in the Deaf community are concerned that new technologies that make hearing possible for many with congenital deafness threaten to eradicate a vital and beautiful Deaf culture. 

A longtime member here, Jerry Bever, once told me, I don’t regret my blindness. I met my wife because I’m blind. I loved my job helping other blind people. A friend living with bipolar disorder told me, years ago: This is part of who I am, not something that could be peeled off of my “real” self. Disability activists refuse the idea that to be disabled is inherently to be some lessened version of your proper self. They say, The issue isn’t us; it’s that the world isn’t configured for us to be easily able to participate and thrive. 

At the same time: being disabled in a not very accommodating world is hard! And there are plenty of people who would be glad of a cure, glad to renounce their membership in that minority group. This is nuanced, tender, difficult, deeply personal and ambiguous stuff, and I know there’s a lot that I don’t understand. That’s why, this Lent, I’m committing to read the book My body is not a prayer request: Disability justice and the church –  and inviting you to read along with me. 

Just as our culture struggles with the idea that disability is more than a problem to be solved, so does the church. Churches struggle to accommodate and support members with disability or chronic illness – physical or mental. Churches balk at the costs of accessibility upgrades, or the ongoing work of online worship. People mutter about the names that stay on the prayer list indefinitely. We can organize ourselves to offer extra support to a person or household for a few weeks… but forever? I’m talking about churches in general here; I think St. Dunstan’s does a little better than average – but there’s room for growth here too. 

The prayers in our prayer book betray this failure. There’s a whole section of ‘prayers for the sick’… and they all either point towards complete cure in the foreseeable future, or death. So many times, I’ve paged through the book desperate for a prayer that speaks to the real, lived situation of the person I’m praying with. 

Instead they say things like, “that his sickness may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy,” or “that her weakness may be banished and her strength restored,” or, “grant that he may be restored to that perfect health which it is yours alone to give,”  or “restored to usefulness in your world with a thankful heart.” All of these prayers, to my ears, reflect a deep discomfort with the reality of human suffering and an unseemly eagerness to move on. Perfect health! Restored strength! Usefulness! Let’s go!!

We can pray for whatever we want, of course; God is wise and kind enough to hear our imperfect prayers. But I think praying words like these in situations where short-term, complete cure is not on the table is damaging in a couple of different ways. First: it bears false witness to the fulness of our humanity by measuring people against some arbitrary yardstick, some predetermined vision of health and completeness. Second: it bears false witness to God by implying that God’s presence and care is only expressed when we see a person fully restored to some semblance of that ideal of wellness. 

And this is not a just a semantic matter in an era when Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security are at risk, and people will say out loud in public that maybe some kinds of people are just too much of a drain on our shared resources and should be allowed to die. 

My desire for wiser, kinder, more apt ways to pray in and for and through disability, chronic illness, and long-term serious illness, is why, this Lent, I’m committing to read the book “Irreverent Prayers: Talking to God when you’re seriously sick,” and inviting you to read along with me. 

What if we believed that someone could be whole and worthy and beloved even as they live with multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy or bipolar disorder or disabling long Covid or addiction? What if we prayed and acted and lived and loved and churched as if that were true? Because it is. It’s true. It’s true. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus burns with God’s glory on a mountaintop, then comes down to find himself faced by a crowd hungry for spectacle, and a father hungry for healing. What I have heard, dwelling with this text this week, is a call to respond to God’s glory and Christ’s compassion by committing to deepen my understanding of and my empathy for those beloved ones living with disability and chronic illness – because, to borrow some wording from a recent statement by leaders in the Episcopal Church in Europe, “we welcome [the marginalized] not just in the room but at the very center of our discerning God’s purpose, because we take with joyful seriousness Christ’s teaching us that from such siblings we will learn the designs of the kingdom of heaven.”

I hope our Lenten reading group will share out what we learn from our reading and conversation. I hope we’ll wonder and wrestle together, as a church, with bigger and bolder concepts of human wholeness and human worth, as held in God’s all-encompassing love. I hope we’ll keep developing our words and practices of prayer and mutual care. May the Holy Spirit bless and guide our work and our wondering. Amen. 

I wrote a little about those Prayer Book prayers a while ago… https://earthandaltarmag.com/posts/the-comfortable-we-of-prayer-book-liturgy