“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s the first sentence of the blurb on the back of this book – one of the books some of us read together in Lent: My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice and the Church, by Amy Kenney. I talked about it a little on Maundy Thursday; I’m going to say a little more right now. 

One core question Kenney raises in this book is whether people see her body and other disabled bodies as marring the image of God, or as enlarging our image of God. Is a disabled body something that needs saving and redeeming, or needs care, respect, and deep understanding? She explores the mindset of ableism, and the many obvious and subtle ways it manifests in churches. Here’s a definition of ableism, which Kenney quotes from Talila Lewis: Ableism is “a system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, intelligence, excellence, and productivity.” 

Kenney asks us, “What if everything we think about bodies – every idea that some bodies are better than others – is wrong?” (149) She challenges the “deficit lens” that sees disabled bodies primarily through what they cannot do, and suggests a very different framing: “We are a parade of extraordinary experiences that can teach the world about what it means to be embodied.” (110, 113) She distinguishes between the physical experience of disability, and the social experience of disability – and argues that the social experience is often more difficult than the physical aspect. 

People and institutions are resistant to learning, supporting, accommodating, and including – so disabled people are devalued and shut out in all kinds of ways that have nothing to do with their actual physical state of being. Kenney writes, “The hardest part of being disabled isn’t the pain, it’s the people. It’s trying to explain.” (116) 

Late in the book she sums up her mission: “I am just one disabled girl, sitting in front of the church, asking them to love us. We need to learn from the embodied experiences of people with different types of disabilities to deepen our understanding of God, Scripture, and an embodied life of faith.” (158) 

“Much of the church has forgotten that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection.” That’s our Gospel story this morning – the risen Jesus, still bearing the wounds of his crucifixion. Kenney talks, briefly, about Thomas. He reminds her of the many people she’s met who respond to her disability by trying to make sense of it, to fit it into a theology where every story has a happy ending, or a concept of health where every malady has a cure. She writes, “Thomas seeks to understand what can’t be fully explained… Perhaps instead of [trying to make sense of disability], we should welcome its disruption to our limited understanding of how bodies function.” (51) 

But more than Thomas, the wounded Jesus is important for Kenney. She writes, “The disabled God, on the cross, is the one I most relate to. I’d probably still follow that Jesus even without the resurrection.” (166) A few pages later, she proclaims: “I refuse to be ashamed of my disabled body because it displays the crucified Christ. It is twisted and twitchy and tired, but it is triumphant.” (169) 

You may have heard people draw a distinction between curing and healing, with curing defined as a more biomedical process focused on eliminating disease, and healing as a more holistic, sociocultural process of becoming whole – a process that may or may not include a cure. In our book group, we had a fascinating and inconclusive conversation about a related issue: the words wellness and wholeness. I wondered out loud about the words I use when I’m praying for folks. 

We found that some of us felt resistance to the world wholeness because it implied measuring someone against some standard of right or complete. But others of us likewise had a resistance to the word wellness because of the company it keeps – the baggage of the wellness industry and fads like celery juice and beef tallow, and the ways “wellness” has been used as a euphemism to privilege bodies that look a certain way. To use either word in prayer – in church – it feels like we need an expansive, holistic, joyful understanding of what we mean by it, and it’s hard to pack all that into a prayer! I still don’t have good answers here, but I’m grateful for the way the conversation stretched my awareness and curiosity. 

What does it mean to be well? What does it mean to be whole? What does God desire for us? What if God’s desire for us is not to conform our bodies or minds to some norm, but for us to be free from pain and to be welcomed and loved by community? 

The challenge of the book, of our conversation about it, and of today’s Gospel, of Jesus’ risen, redeemed, imperfect body: There isn’t a way people should be. There’s just us, together. And the holy joyful obligation of that is to listen and learn and become a community where we can each be our whole selves. 

These women, headed to the tomb at early dawn: what are they thinking? What are they feeling? 

They know where they’re going because they watched Jesus die. They watched his body taken down from the cross, and hastily wrapped in a linen cloth, because it was almost the Sabbath, when work had to cease. They followed those carrying the body to a tomb carved from the rock, and saw him laid there. Then they hurried home, and prepared spices and ointments to tend his body once the Sabbath was over. 

They are grieving, deeply. These women have been with Jesus on the whole journey, traveling with him just like the twelve disciples – or perhaps I should say the twelve men disciples? We know some of their names – Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, Joanna, Susanna, Salome – but there were others whose names the Gospel writers did not bother to record. 

These women have lost a beloved friend and leader. Someone who helped them imagine that God’s dream of a world ordered by justice and mercy might someday, somehow, come to pass. But also: someone who saw them. Who knew their names. Who made them feel like they mattered. Jesus’ friendships with women are notable, not to be taken for granted. They have lost someone who made them feel real. 

But it’s not just personal grief. Jesus didn’t die of old age or cancer. He was crushed by the state, because some of his own people turned against him, named him as a criminal, handed him over to the imperial government; and the imperial government said, Sure. We’ll get rid of him for you. 

These women are feeling grief layered with rage and fear and helplessness and despair. Their friend is dead and the bad guys won. Power won. Control won. Hatred won. 

Every good or hopeful possibility – gone. 

Things are forked at a systemic, societal level. 

There’s no point to anything, and nothing left to do – except this: Care for his body. Wash it. Anoint it with oil. Wrap it more carefully. Lay him to rest with dignity. With love. 

All of this is speculation; Magdala and Joanna and Susanna aren’t here to tell us what they were feeling. But we can see hints of their emotions in their fierce commitment to caring for Jesus’ body, the only way left to them to show their love. As soon as sabbath is over, at early dawn, they go to the tomb. John’s Gospel says they set out “while it was still dark.” I looked it up: Sunrise in Jerusalem at this time of year is around 6AM, with darkness starting to ease around 5:15.  A few of you are natural early risers, but for the rest of us, if we’re up and out by 5AM, there’s a reason. A plane to catch. A loved one’s illness. Something necessary that needs dealing with before the normal work of the day begins. Something you couldn’t do the night before, but that you are driven to do as soon as humanly possible today. 

That drivenness is what we see, here, as these women hurry through quiet streets and out of the city in the murky gray light before sunrise. 

To find… a shock, and a puzzle. The stone that sealed the tomb has been rolled away, and Jesus’ body is gone. Before they’ve even had time to move on from perplexity to fear or anger – who took him, and why? – two strangers are there, dressed in dazzling white, saying: Why look for the living in the place of the dead? He’s not here. He has been raised. 

Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, way back before any of this, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

Remember. 

The Gospels record Jesus telling his friends again and again to expect his death, and to know – when it happens – that that’s not the end of the story.

But grief and shock and anger and fear and confusion and overwhelm have a way of shaking us out of ourselves, don’t they? Of scattering or shattering our sense of self, our sense of direction. We forget, or just lose track of, things that make us who we are and tell us what to do next. 

We feel unmoored, adrift, cut loose from what anchored us. 

Maybe you have felt – are feeling – something like what these women are feeling. Maybe you know all too well what it feels like when the people or institutions or values we thought we could trust in and build our lives around – things we thought were stable and reliable – are suddenly in danger, or gone, overnight. Maybe you’ve been grieving and raging too.

The strangers at the tomb – Matthew uses the word angel – tell the women: Remember. It’s an ordinary word but also an evocative, important word. Your friend might tell you: Remember to bring fruit for the potluck! Your therapist might ask you to remember formative experiences. Your spiritual director might urge you to remember the truths that ground and orient you. 

In my own – still new! – contemplative practice, remembering has an important role. I have to gather my scattered self before I can come to center and open my heart to God. My personal Rule of Life includes the sentence, “Remember snow falling on the prairie.” But in fact my whole Rule is a practice of remembering. I read a chunk of it every day, to remind myself of what God and my own deep self have taught me about how best to be in the world and do what’s mine to do. 

Remember. What do these women – Mary and the other Mary, Salome, and the rest – need to remember? 

First, I think they need to remember how they got into all this in the first place. What made them up and follow Jesus, walking away from lives and roles and responsibilities – a big deal, especially for women in this time and place. What stirred their hearts about Jesus’ words and actions; the hope and sense of possibility he gave them, the feeling that they belonged and they mattered and they could offer their skills and resources and hearts to something good and important. 

They need to remember why they are here: in Jerusalem, far from home, in this cold stone tomb in the gray dawn, jars of scented oil in their hands. What mattered so much that it brought them here? And where will it lead them next? 

I find that it’s easy to be lost in my own head, my own fears or overwhelm. Good news, hints of hope or possibility, really can feel like an idle tale soemetimes. 

When you feel shattered, shaken, adrift: What do you need to remember? What shaped you; what grounds you? What experiences and relationships and have made you the person who is feeling these feelings? What loves and values and commitments are at the heart of your anger, your fear, your frustration and grief? What mattered so much that it brought you here? And where does it lead you next? 

The second thing these women need to remember is that they’re part of something bigger. They’re not alone – even in grief, overwhelm and despair.  In the other three Gospels, the messengers at the tomb tell the women: Go tell the others! And even though they don’t say that in Luke’s account, that’s what the women do: rush back into the city to tell the other disciples what they have seen and heard. 

Go tell the others! Get the band back together! Spread the word. Expand the movement. Start building what comes next, because the story is not over. Not at all. 

We, too, are part of something bigger, even when we feel overwhelmed or helpless. We’re not alone – whether with personal griefs or struggles, or with feeling the weight of large scale turmoil, danger and loss.

In this season at St. Dunstan’s I see us doing some important and fruitful work exploring how to show up for each other and look out for each other. I hope we’ll keep leaning into that. And showing up for, looking out for, our neighbors is just a half-step further. Let’s keep seeking opportunities to connect, to build community, to ask for help and offer help, to practice mutual care and mutual aid. To build what comes next, because the story is still unfolding.

The third thing the strangers challenge these women to remember is that God is still at work in all this. Remember how he told you, way back in Galilee, that these things were going to happen. Even when everything seems hopeless, all is held in love. God is working in ways we can’t perceive or even imagine. More can be mended than we know.  

Maybe this was easy for these women to believe, because the evidence of God’s power was right in front of them: Jesus had been raised from the dead! But actually, there were many more plausible explanations for the absence of his body than miraculous resurrection. They had to take a big leap of faith, to accept that God had reached in and tweaked the rules of the universe in this way. Like Paul says in today’s Epistle: It better be true; we’ve staked everything on it.  

The worst had happened, yet – the strangers remind them – it has not derailed God’s deep redemptive work of justice and love. It’s all part of the plan. Remember? 

I don’t believe that the things that weigh on our hearts and spirits today are God’s plan for us and for the world. Nevertheless: I do believe that God’s redemptive love is still at work – not least through all of us, in the holy work of caring for ourselves and each other and our human and non-human communities. 

Mary and Mary and Susanna and Salome and Joanna and the others had to stretch their minds and hearts and imaginations to accept that God and goodness and love were not defeated – that this man and this message to which they’d given their hearts had not simply been snuffed out. 

But they do it. They dare to believe. They dare to hope. 

Easter is a complicated happy ending.  Yes, death is defeated. Yes, love wins. But, but, but. 

Things don’t suddenly become some rosy, hunky-dory new reality. And they don’t just go back to the way it was before, either. Jesus isn’t dead anymore, but he’s not back, either. The community, the movement, of Jesus’ friends and followers is sadder and wiser, now. 

But they’re also bolder and braver – as we see in the sequel to Luke’s Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles. 

What do we need to remember, beloveds? 

Remember what made you who you are, your foundation stones. What mattered so much that it brought you here? And where does it lead you next? 

Remember that you’re not alone. We’re in this together – for many definitions of “this.” 

Remember that God is still up to something, and always invites us to be collaborators, co-conspirators, in the holy work of justice and love. 

Remember that the story isn’t over. Not at all. 

Take care of each other. Tend your communities. Keep telling people who are weighed down by rage and grief and despair that it’s worth keeping on. There will be an After. Hold onto each other and keep doing what matters. Spread the good news that fearful, repressive power does not have the last word.

Christ is risen. Then and now and always. Remember.  Alleluia, alleluia. Amen. 

I’m going to sneak in a tiny sermon here, before we continue with more holy stories. In the story we just heard, Moses is an adult, and a leader of his people. But let’s remember how the story began. God’s people, the Hebrews, were enslaved in Egypt. They were forced to make bricks for the Egyptians’ many building projects. But God helped them thrive anyway. And Pharaoh, the King of Egypt, got nervous. He was afraid the Hebrews might become so numerous that they would rise up against the Egyptians. So he told the midwives who helped the Hebrew women give birth that they should kill all the baby boys. But the midwives were not on board with that plan; they made excuses to Pharaoh: “Oh, the Hebrew women are so hearty and rough, they just drop their babies before we can even get there.” 

One woman, Jochebed, gives birth to a son – and decides to hide him. She’s able to keep the baby hidden for a few months, but when he starts to get too big and too loud, she and her daughter Miriam take a basket, use tar to make it waterproof, put the baby in it, and put it in the reeds at the riverbank of the Great River, the Nile. Miriam stands by to keep an eye on the situation, and pretty soon Pharaoh’s own daughter, a princess of Egypt, comes down to the river to bathe. She finds the baby and decides to adopt him. Miriam immediately pops up and asks if the princess would like her go to find a woman who’d be willing to nurse the baby for her… then fetches her mother. You have to think this was all planned!… 

So, Moses grows up a man of two worlds, Egyptian and Hebrew, which is hard and complicated and also perhaps exactly what God needed in a leader to confront Pharaoh and lead the people to freedom. 

A few weeks ago I saw a video of the Reverend Sheleta Fomby preaching about Moses at a church in Maryland. She points out Pharaoh’s error in thinking the males were the greatest threat, by saying, “Kill the boys.”

He thought those baby boys would grow up to become warriors and take up weapons and fight back against their oppressors. 

“In his misogynistic short-sightedness,” she says, “he messed around and he let the girls live.” He never saw women as the true threat, or as worthy opponents. But the courageous, subversive women and girls of this story “used their God-given intuition and strategic innovation to set the stage for the deliverance of a people.” The midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who “quietly but defiantly disrupted Pharaoh’s plan;”Jochebed and Miriam; and Pharaoh’s own daughter! (The Vivian Wilson of her time?) 

Reverend Fomby says, “When we read Exodus, we go straight to Moses, but the only reason Moses could be a deliverer was because Moses had been delivered.” She concludes, “They never saw the women coming!” 

The Bible is complicated and conflicted and argues with itself. But there are overarching themes – or maybe deep, underlying themes – and those are what I try to seek out, the things I think God is really trying to get through to us across the millennia. 

And one of those deep themes is the significance of the insignificant. The power of the powerless. 

Not just women and girls, but also folks like the three young men in the story we’ll hear soon: immigrants targeted because they were seen as outsiders, strange, dangerous, vulnerable. 

Folks like God’s people at the time of Ezekiel’s vision – burdened, burned out, fearful, crushed to the point where it felt like there was no more life in them. 

Can these bones live? Oh God, you know!

People like Jesus, disruptive teacher and enemy of the state, crushed under Empire’s heel. Made an example of, to show others that they should keep their heads down and cooperate. 

But it didn’t work. 

It didn’t work. 

The marginal, the insignificant, the powerless, survive. Revive. 

Persist. Adapt. Endure. 

Fight and evade and feed each other and raise children and weep and sing and shout and tell stories and laugh and make art and love and live. 

That’s the story of tonight. 

That’s the story of Easter.

That’s the story of now. 

Let me name one more thing – a resistance, a friction with this story: the joy of the Biblical text at the drowning of the Egyptian army. Yes, those soldiers were following cruel orders. But does that mean we dance and sing in response to their deaths? And what about the poor horses? 

Triumph at the destruction of one’s enemies is certainly a familiar human emotion. But it’s not one we may choose to endorse, or to hallow, to treat as holy and good. 

Aurora Levins Morales is a poet and scholar of Puerto Rican and Ukrainian Jewish background. Here’s part of her poem called “Red Sea.” She envisions us standing once more on the shore of the Red Sea, yearning to cross over to something better, and she insists that for the waters to open this time, the path to freedom has to be for everyone, friend, stranger, enemy, together. 

Read the poem here. 

In a few minutes we’ll read the Gospel of the Passion of Jesus Christ – meaning, his trial, crucifixion, and death – according to Saint John. We’ll read about Jesus’ enemies bringing him before the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, to seek the death penalty. Pilate will ask: What charges do you bring against this man? And they will reply: “If this man were not an evildoer, we would not have handed him over to you.” 

If this man were not an evildoer – some translations say, If this man were not a criminal – we would not have handed him over to you. 

Every year, that sentence makes my skin crawl. 

It does so much in a mere sixteen words.

It dehumanizes Jesus by labeling him: an evildoer, a criminal. A malefactor, in the grand old language of the King James Bible. 

By definition – then and now – a kind of person about whom we don’t have to care. A kind of person who deserves whatever terrible things may happen to them. 

And it does this work with horrifying simple and effective circular logic: If he weren’t a criminal, he wouldn’t have been arrested. If he weren’t a bad person, he wouldn’t be in custody right now. If he weren’t an evildoer, we wouldn’t be demanding his execution. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. 

There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. 

There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

At times the church’s language makes a big deal about Jesus Christ being an innocent victim. I like to point out that, in fact, Jesus had done at least some of the stuff they say he did. 

For example, in Luke’s Gospel, the charges against him are, “He stirs up the people by teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee where he began even to this place.”

Yeah. He did that. He taught people. And they got stirred up. 

Jesus’ innocence or guilt is really not the central question here. The question should be the use of state violence. The question should be whether we think teaching should be a capital offense. Whether things we’d name today as free speech and free assembly should be met with crushing, repressive force. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. This line makes my skin crawl because it’s not just then and there. It’s also here and now. John’s Gospel names something here that remains a dynamic of state violence all over the world – and here, in America. 

Brian Stephenson’s work with the Equal Justice Initiative has begun to show us how many especially black and brown people are wrongly accused and unfairly tried, incarcerated for decades, even executed, because nobody with the power to do something about it cared enough to give their case a second look. 

People who’ve been involved in advocating for criminal justice reform, and for reform of our immigration system, which has also held huge numbers of people – including children – in detention centers, under presidents of both parties, would say that this dehumanizing and circular logic remains alive and well. 

There’s nothing new about this. 

And yet we are facing something new right now. 

This is scary to talk about, but it just hasn’t left me alone. 

I promise this is a sermon about Jesus. Bear with me. 

You’ve probably read some news stories about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the father of three who was illegally deported from the US on March 15 and sent to CECOT, a terrorist detention center in El Salvador notorious among human rights watchdogs. The Trump administration acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported, but is refusing to comply with the Supreme Court’s call to facilitate his return to the United States. 

But Abrego Garcia is only one of many caught up in this brutal situation. Maybe you’ve heard about some of the others, too. Like Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19 year old living with his father in the Bronx. He was seized by ICE agents just outside his apartment. A friend heard one agent say, “He’s not the one,” as if they were looking for someone else. But another agent said, “Take him anyway.” Merwil has no criminal record, and his family says he has no ties to gang activity. 

A cruel irony of this situation is that many of those who have fled to the United States from Venezuela and El Salvador came here to try to escape endemic gang violence in their home countries.

Like Kilmar, Merwil was taken to CECOT in El Salvador. CECOT does not have programs for inmates to learn, serve, or earn freedom by good behavior. There’s no due process, no trial by jury or review of evidence, involved in getting sent there. And there’s no way out once you’re there. CECOT does not have a process for people to be released, to return to their families and communities. It is explicitly intended for lifelong detention. 

The US Holocaust Museum has a definition of a concentration camp: “What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison… is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” 

My oldest child is 19, the same age as Merwil. I cannot imagine the agony of anxiety and grief of having my child in such a place, with no way to reach them, help them, or free them. 

If this man were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

There’s no offramp in that logic. There’s no falsifiability. There’s no room for exploration of guilt, circumstance, responsibility. There’s certainly no room for repentance or rehabilitation. There’s no escape, and no mercy. 

Sometimes the church makes Jesus too ordinary. A wise and kind teacher who got crosswise to the authorities.

I do believe Jesus was God. I believe something extraordinary is happening in the story we tell each other today. 

But sometimes the church makes Jesus too extraordinary, too. 

As if he were undergoing something uniquely awful. 

In fact, what Jesus endures here is relatively commonplace.

Crucification is a terrible way to die. It was not a particular form of torture devised especially for Jesus. It was just one of the ways the Romans killed people. It was a mode of public execution intended as a deterrent. You execute somebody by crucifixion if you want other people to see it happening and think, “You know, maybe I won’t start that rebellion.” There were mass crucifixions following several revolts against Roman rule in the first and second centuries. Scholars think that by a conservative estimate, the Romans may have executed 300,000 people by crucifixion during their time of empire. 

Dying by crucifixion was not special. 

In the Passion Gospel, Jesus is entering into the commonplace horrors humans have created for millennia. And it starts before he’s nailed to the cross. It starts when he’s drawn into the criminal justice system of his time and place. 

Into the circular and dehumanizing logic of:  If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you. 

This is the sense in which Jesus died for our sins: 

He died with and like one of us. 

Christ himself, God themself, entered the jaws of our brutal system of scapegoating, dehumanizing, punishing. 

He allowed himself to be chewed up. Consumed. 

Today we bow before the humbling reality that God submitted Godself to the kind of senseless cruelty that humans regularly visit upon one another. Today we wonder at God’s fierce love shown to us in God’s willingness to walk with us into the dark. 

But. And. The fact that God goes there too doesn’t make it OK. 

If Christ stands with us, so too are we called to stand with Christ. 

With Jesus, the Christ, who told his followers: When you help the hungry, the outsider, the sick, the prisoner, you’re helping me. 

What does our fidelity to this story – to the man at its center, to the God we know through this man – what does striving to keep faith with Jesus look like, today? 

What would you do – how would you live – if you weren’t afraid?

Maybe that’s not quite the right question. There are many reasons to be afraid. What would you do – how would you live – if fear didn’t bind you? 

One of my favorite parts of my job is sitting down with folks who are new to St. Dunstan’s to hear their stories and start to get to know them. A few weeks ago I did that with Sarah and Ingrid. Ingrid told me about what an impression our crucifix made on her when they first came to worship here. It’s big! It makes an impression on a lot of people! Ingrid said she thought of it as a kind of visual aid, like a PowerPoint slide, that shows the power of not being afraid of what anyone can do to you. Not letting fear that the worst might happen make your choices for you. 

And of course, she said, people need to come back and see that every week, because that’s a really hard way to think and live. You go out into the world and there are so many things that put you back into a small, self-focused, fearful mindset. You have to come back here often, to this gathering under the cross, to keep training in how to live a different way. 

This past Wednesday, April 9, was the 80th anniversary of the execution of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Dietrich was born in 1906 to an educated, middle-class German family, one of the youngest of eight children. His family were Lutheran Christians, like many Germans. He had a strong faith as a child, and felt drawn to the study of theology, seeking deeper understanding of God and faith, from a young age. He started his theological studies at 18. 

By that time, Adolf Hitler was already on the rise, feeding on the struggles and dissatisfactions of post-World War I Germany. Hitler attempted a coup in 1923; it failed, and Hitler was jailed. He wrote Mein Kampf during that imprisonment. 

As the violent nationalist thinking of Hitler and his inner circle simmered beneath the surface of German public life, Dietrich studied, traveled, and matured. In 1930, he spent a year in New York City, studying at Union Theological Seminary. But the most important thing about that time was not his studies but his friendships. He became close friends with a young Black man, Frank Fisher. He went to church with Frank and experienced prophetic preaching and powerful music. He traveled the country with Frank, and saw overt racial discrimination firsthand. Another deep friendship with a student from France – an enemy nation in the recent war – shook loose Dietrich’s deep assumption that duty to God and duty to country would always run in the same direction. His time in America left Dietrich with two questions that he’d explore for the rest of his life: What is the church? And, how is the church called to love the other, those outside the church? 

He returned home in 1931, to a country where Hitler’s promises of a Germany restored to strength and glory were gaining popular appeal. Hitler was appointed chancellor by the aging president in 1933. Soon afterwards, a mysterious fire at the German legislative building, the Reichstag, provided the justification for an edict taking away all civil liberties, including free speech, free assembly, and a free press. Hitler began calling himself Der Fuhrer – The Leader – and started talking about his plan to purge Jews and other minorities from German society. As part of his total takeover of German society, Hitler convinced German church leaders to see him as the head of the church, as well as head of state. Many churches gladly joined the movement, pledging faith in Hitler and God. But not all. 

Bonhoeffer knew all this was wrong. He published a paper outlining three ways the church should respond in such circumstances. First, question the state and its methods: a true church must reject government encroachment on its beliefs. 

Second, help the victims of state action. The church has an unconditional obligation to the victims of any ordering of society. Third, strike back. Bonhoeffer wrote, “It is not enough just to bandage the victims [caught] under the wheel – but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.”

Other like-minded German Christians began to gather and connect. Eventually they called their movement the Confessing Church. Bonhoeffer gathered a group of students in a small German coastal town and began an informal rebel  seminary. During that time, he wrote two important texts, “The Cost of Discipleship” and “Life together.” 

Meanwhile, Hitler continued to consolidate power and crack down on dissent. By 1937, churches were forbidden to publicly pray for anyone resisting the Nazis, and nearly 800 Confessing Church leaders had been arrested – including Martin Niemöller, who wrote the famous lines, “First they came the socialists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a socialist…”

At the same time, Hitler’s intentions to invade and conquer much of Europe were becoming clear. Germany annexed Austria in March of 1938. Some of his generals and other leaders had concerns. They saw his cruelty and limitless ambition, and they feared for Germany, and the world. Gradually, some of those doubters began to coalesce into circles that conspired to hamper Hitler’s plans or even eliminate him. Through some family connections, Dietrich became connected with one of these groups; this one included several high-up members of the Abwehr, the German CIA. 

The increased attacks on Germany’s Jews fueled Dietrich’s resistance. He wondered, if the church doesn’t exist to protect others, in a moment like this, is it really a church at all? But the risks for those who resisted the regime were increasing. 

Early in 1939, a network of family, friends, and allies managed to get Bonhoeffer out of Germany, back to New York City – free, and safe. But he felt desperately alone there – and far from God. He felt a call back to Germany, convinced that he had to be part of Germany’s present if he wanted to be part of its future. He rushed home, on one of the last ships before the war began. He felt God’s presence once more, but still struggled to know the path ahead. 

One question began to rise again and again in his soul: Would God forgive one who murdered a tyrant? What could it mean to put a spoke in the wheel of the Nazis’ oppressive violence? Soon after his return to Germany, he wrote, “If I saw a lunatic plowing his car into a crowd, I could not casually stand on the sidewalk and say, ‘I am a pastor. I’ll just wait to bury the dead afterwards.’”

Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939. Reports from the front lines of mass executions of civilians, including women, children, and elders, drove Hitler’s secret opponents to begin plotting to assassinate Hitler. Dietrich still felt conflicted about being part of the conspiracy – yet so much evil came from the words and actions of just one man! Bonhoeffer became almost a chaplain to the resistance, talking with others about what faithfulness could mean in those terrible times. 

The first assassination attempt took place in March 1943; it failed. Another followed just two weeks later; it also failed. The conspirators were able to cover their tracks to some extent – but Germany was beginning to lose the war, and pressure on internal dissent grew ever stronger. Bonhoeffer was arrested in April of 1943. The charges against him were refusal to enlist in the Army; he was suspected of conspiracy against the regime, but the Nazis had no proof. Dietrich was in prison for two years. For much of that time, he was able to write and receive letters, and sometimes even visitors. The guards liked him, and he provided spiritual support for other prisoners too. 

In July 1944, there was another – final – attempt to assassinate Hitler. This time the bomb went off – but Hitler survived. Afterwards, Nazis found records linking Bonhoeffer to the Abwehr conspirators. Dietrich was moved to the custody of the Gestapo. He knew his life was in imminent danger. John Hendrix writes, “Bonhoeffer had… called for a radical obedience [to God] that was not cheap but costly. Faith wasn’t just about creating a set of comforting thoughts about God; it was living out an ethic that called for sacrifice. You didn’t just pray for the tanks to stop rolling. You threw yourself in front of them.” Bonhoeffer himself wrote, “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is going to live.” And elsewhere: “If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the moment of danger comes…. Mere waiting and looking on is not Christian behavior.” 

By April of 1945 the Allies were marching across Germany. Hitler was terrified and furious. He ordered the execution of all conspirators still in custody. On April 8, Bonhoeffer and others were subject to a rapid “trial” and condemned to death. That night, Dietrich dreamed of wading into the ocean, down into the depths – then swimming upward, to where he could see the feet of someone standing on the surface of the water – someone who reached down and pulled him up into the light. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged on April 9th, 1945. His last words were, “This is the end – for me, the beginning – of life.” 

“If we want to be Christians, we must have some share in Christ’s large-heartedness by acting with responsibility and in freedom when the moment of danger comes….”

What would you do – how would you live – if you weren’t afraid?

Maybe that’s not quite the right question. There are many reasons to be afraid. What would you do – how would you live – if fear couldn’t bind you? 

In today’s Gospel, we meet three friends of Jesus: Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. But they’ve shown up in the Bible already, and you may have heard about them. They live in Bethany, a village a couple of miles outside of Jerusalem. The story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection comes to us in four books of the Bible, called the Gospels. They record the work of four different people or communities trying to put together people’s memories of these important events into a coherent story to pass on to the future. The Gospels overlap in lots of ways, but they’re different too. And what they say about this household overlaps, but is different too! 

Mark’s Gospel, the earliest written, doesn’t name these people, but does place Jesus in Bethany several times. On one of those visits, a woman breaks open a jar of costly ointment and pours it on his head. Luke’s Gospel has a story about Mary and Martha: Jesus comes to visit; Martha is very busy, tending the household and probably preparing a meal for her guest and his dozen-plus friends. Meanwhile, her sister Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and listen to his teaching. Martha tells Jesus, Tell my sister to come help me! And Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part.” That’s all Luke has to say about Mary and Martha – but we do hear their names, and get a sense that they were close to Jesus. Consider that Martha felt comfortable complaining to him! That makes them feel very real to me. 

And then there’s the gospel of John, the source of today’s story. It’s interesting how much John’s Martha and Mary sound like Luke’s Martha and Mary – another hint that these were real people! 

Today’s reading comes from Chapter 12, but something pretty big happens in chapter 11: “Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.” It’s interesting that John points forward, here, to a story he hasn’t told yet; notice that in today’s reading he refers back to this story, saying, “the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” I guess he wants to make sure we read these stories together. 

Mary and Martha send a message to Jesus, asking him to visit and heal Lazarus. Even though we haven’t met them yet, this is an established friendship – John says, “Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” But he stays away for a couple more days – and Lazarus dies from his illness. Then Jesus and his friends come to Bethany. Jesus weeps with the sisters… then goes to the tomb, has the stone rolled away (despite concerns about the smell of death), and brings Lazarus back to life. 

Today’s scene follows quickly in John’s Gospel, but some time has passed – a few days or weeks? The plot to kill Jesus has advanced, and Jesus spent some time lying low away from Jerusalem. But now the great Jewish feast of Passover approaches, and Jesus knows it’s time for him to fulfill his mission. So he and his friends head to Jerusalem – and stop over with his friends in Bethany for a meal. That’s today’s Gospel story. 

Let’s pause and notice a couple of things about this household. 

Apparently we have three single adult siblings, living together. That would be somewhat unusual here and now, especially if they’re over 30 or so. I won’t pretend to know how unusual it was in Jesus’ time. Certainly the norm was for people to live with a spouse, plus some extended family. 

But people died a lot, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe one or more of the three had lost spouses.  Maybe somebody just never got married, for any of many reasons. One gets the sense that Martha is holding the whole thing together, looking after both Lazarus and Mary. However you read it, I find it endearing that this somewhat unconventional household were such dear friends of Jesus. 

The other thing to notice is their economic status. There are only a few clues. They have the capacity to host a large group of guests, and they have enough standing in their community that everyone shows up when Lazarus dies. But it doesn’t seem like they were really wealthy – Martha is dependent on Mary to help around the house, not a bevy of servants. So Mary’s expensive bottle of scented oil is probably not an everyday luxury. 

Lazarus, Martha, and Mary. Lazarus never does anything very interesting except die. I’m a big fan of Martha; she deserves a sermon of her own sometime. But today I’d like to hone in on Mary, who’s at the center of our Gospel story. This is the last of three stories; what picture do we get if we layer those stories and see what they show us? 

Let’s start with that story from Luke, the one where Mary just wants to sit at Jesus’ feet and Martha is annoyed that she’s not helping set the table. Last week we heard Jesus’ parable about a younger son who’s impatient with life on the farm with his father and older brother, demands his share of the inheritance, and runs off to blow it all on dissolute living. I’ve never put that story side by side with this little scene about Mary, Martha, and Jesus before… but it’s interesting to do so! I had to re-read all the Mary and Martha stories to convince myself that it doesn’t actually say anywhere that Martha is the older sister, because I am so sure that Martha is the older sister! 

But even if that’s not true – I see some resonances between Mary and the younger son in the parable. How might Mary be a little bit like the Prodigal Son? I have the definite impression that this is not the first time that Martha has had to ask Mary to help out. In this scene, she’s not helping because she’s listening to Jesus, and she gets praised for that! 

I wonder what she does instead of helping, when Jesus isn’t around? Drawing… reading… napping… going for long walks… gazing into the middle distance. Maybe she tries to help but doesn’t track what needs doing very well. Maybe she pretends to try to help and then breaks a dish or spills something to escape. Maybe Mary and the younger son are both people who are just not especially interested in, or suited for, the roles and the work that their households expect them to fulfill. 

The big difference between Mary and the Prodigal Son is that Mary does seem to really love her family. We see that in the second story, John’s first story. When Jesus arrives in Bethany after Lazarus’ death, Martha meets him first, saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” They talk briefly about death, and resurrection. Then Martha goes to find Mary, and tells her, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you,” and she hurries to meet him. So much tenderness hinted at, there – that Jesus asks to see Mary; that Martha wants her grieving sister to have time with their friend and teacher. 

Mary kneels at Jesus’ feet and says the same thing as her sister: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” You get the sense they’ve been saying it to each other a lot, over these agonizing days: If only he had been here! That’s all Mary can say; she is overcome by weeping, so much so that Jesus begins to weep too. 

Then Jesus goes to the tomb, works his greatest miracle yet, and restores Lazarus to his sisters. That only deepens Mary’s devotion, as we see in today’s story: “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” 

We can see things we already know about Mary in this moment: She loves deeply – her family, her Lord. She listens closely to Jesus when he speaks. She’s not the most pragmatic or practical. This is the third time we’ve found her at Jesus’ feet – sitting close to listen; weeping in overwhelming grief; now, tenderly anointing and wiping. This extravagant, richly symbolic act seems like a culmination of sorts. 

Why wash someone’s feet? We often talk about this on Maundy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter, when we hear the story – also from John’s Gospel – of Jesus washing his friends’ feet before his arrest. People’s feet got really dirty, in the ancient Near East. People generally wore sandals or other open shoes. Roads and streets were dusty, with animal poop and garbage and worse, especially in the cities. Foot washing became an act of hospitality for guests, both to offer comfort and relief, and to prevent all that filth getting tracked into your house. 

But it wasn’t just a pragmatic act. It had social and interpersonal meanings too. Because feet were filthy, foot washing was done by people of lower status – often servants or slaves. That’s why the disciples struggle with it when Jesus wants to wash their feet. Foot washing was also something wives would do for husbands, as an expression of physical care and intimacy. 

In reading around about this story, I saw some debate over whether Mary’s act expresses transgressive intimacy, or not. 

It is hard to interpret all the meanings of a gesture from another time and place. But it seems to me that there’s a big dose of deep resistance, here, to the idea of anything sensual or “inappropriate” involving Jesus – a resistance that flies in the face of the facts. Just think about what’s happening here: she’s pouring oil over a man’s feet, perhaps rubbing it around to cover every surface, then wiping it off with her unbound hair. Imagine seeing someone do that at a dinner party! Imagine having someone do it to you! On the one hand, having your feet washed by someone else was much more common then than now. On the other hand, physical contact between unrelated men and women was much less common, and more culturally fraught. It seems undeniable to me that this was an act of uncomfortable intimacy for the onlookers. Maybe when someone complains about the waste – only John blames it on Judas – that’s the discomfort that they’re really expressing. 

What is Mary doing here? Anointing, too, is an act with particular cultural meanings. Kings and priests were anointed for their roles, with holy oil poured on their heads. That’s what Messiah, the Hebrew word for God’s promised, long-expected savior, means – the Anointed One. That’s what Christ means – the Greek equivalent of Messiah. The special, scented oil we use in baptism is called chrism – same word as Christ. But, though there are other stories of oil being poured on Jesus’ head, that’s not what happens here. 

People also anointed dead bodies with oil, as part of the cleaning and care shown for one’s beloved dead. That’s the meaning Jesus offers for Mary’s act: “She bought [this oil] so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.” If that’s true – if Mary bought or set aside this perfumed oil in anticipation of Jesus’ death – that tells us something about how closely she’s been listening to him. 

Jesus has been talking a lot about what’s going to happen to him – what has to happen to him – but the other disciples keep resisting, misunderstanding, and denying. But Mary hears. Mary believes. Mary understands. Mary knows it’s coming, and that it’s coming soon. So she anoints her beloved friend’s feet, and wipes them with her hair – a gesture of devotion and tenderness that perhaps can only be expressed in action, not in words. The extravagance – the waste – is clearly part of the point. 

What do we take from this exercise – of looking at Mary across the texts that name her? I’d never done it before, and I enjoyed it. She has come to life for me, a sister in faith across the centuries. I see and appreciate her quirks, her yearnings, her warm and responsive heart. 

Ultimately, though, what I find here is not just a fuller picture of Mary, but a fuller picture of Jesus.  Standing beside Mary, trying to get shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye with her, I start to see what she sees in Jesus – that he was someone who inspired this kind of devotion, tenderness, and trust. That says a lot. Think about the people in your life you feel that way about; it’s probably a short list. 

That man – Mary’s beloved teacher and friend – that’s who we’re about to follow into Holy Week, friends. That’s who his friends and loved ones are about to lose. 

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