"Jesus knows what is coming to him if he keeps pushing ahead on the path he’s on. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” And then comes a very famous image that is probably a whole lot richer than we normally notice. “Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” We too often hear this line on its own out of context to get the full force of it. What has Jesus just called Herod? A fox. And what does he now call himself? A chook looking after a brood of chicks. We are supposed to hear those two images together. In the paraphrase we heard read earlier, it was a mother swan and a vicious dog because, if I remember rightly, the week it was written there had been a well publicised series of attacks by feral dogs on nesting swans down at Albert Park Lake.
So here we have Jesus staring down the fox, knowing himself capable of calling down more than twelve legions of angels, but instead offering himself as the one who will absorb the full force of the violence without reciprocating it. He goes clucking into the city that stones prophets with his little brood under his wings while the foxes circle ever closer and the firestorm of hatred and hostility comes raging across the barnyard. Actually, a firestorm may be a helpful image in understanding what Jesus is describing here. No doubt there were plenty of chickens killed by that big grassfire on the northern outskirts on Tuesday, and there are often stories after fires of farmers finding live chicks huddled under the dead burnt bodies of their mothers. That’s what Jesus is saying to you. When the fires of hostility and violence come your way, he longs to be able to throw himself over you and take it all on himself to protect you. “But you were not willing,” he says. We make it impossible for him to shelter us when we are always running away to avoid being too close to the one who doesn’t run away.
But if Jesus wants to protect us so badly, why doesn’t he call down that twelve legions of angels and do just that? After all, usually when a mother chook throws herself protectively over her chicks, the fox or the fire simply take the mother first and the chicks next. The success rate as a protection strategy is very low. Why not the twelve legions of angels, or at least a couple of Acacia’s flying side kicks? A thorough response to that question can’t be jammed into a sermon that has already pretty much done its time, so let me just give one little bit for now. Jesus’ desire to liberate us from violence is not just in the immediate, but always also in the big picture, and Jesus knows that violence can never be defeated by violence. When violence is applied to violence, it always begets more violence. Sometimes it leads to immediate escalation, and sometimes when one side is vastly more powerful, it leads instead to festering resentment that eventually explodes in further violence. Jesus knows that if he calls on the twelve legions of angels to bring more violence into the system, it simply means that there is now more violence in the system and therefore everybody is even more in danger than before. Retaliation and retribution only ever increase the sum total of violence spiralling around in the closed system. There are only two ways that the total volume of violence is ever reduced, and they usually go hand in hand. One is by soaking it up, by absorbing it without returning it. “Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings in the face of the violence of the foxes.” And the other is by injecting the only known antidote to violence into the system, and that is mercy. And those two so often go hand in hand because mercy is at its most potent when it is offered by the immediate victim of the violence."
Rev Nathan Nettleton (for full sermon visit laughingbird - http://www.laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html
No comments:
Post a Comment