Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
28 February, 2010
Sophie Morse
A Particular and Radical Love
The recent devastation in Haiti – and now perhaps in Chile – seems to have brought about a renewed spirit of global neighborliness, opening the hearts of people from around the world and from all walks of life. Along with near-universal display of compassion and generosity, we also have seen the revival of the pop hymn “We are the World” – an anthem to the belief in the interconnectedness of all humans.
The Olympic Games, now concluding today so close to us in Vancouver, are another avenue of course for visioning our world as a single, global community. Despite the deep competitiveness involved, the Games both call on and inspire a spirit of generosity and mutual respect.
I like to think that these cycles of global camaraderie reveal a growing desire to experience one another, regardless of nationality, race, religion or circumstance as unified, sharing a common fate as a single community. As Christians, we may call this community the Kingdom of God, the land of promise that we are assured will one day prevail “on earth as it is in heaven.” Yet strong as this yearning is, as deep as our conviction is that this is where the arc of history is directed, the specific work it takes to make it happen can seem beyond our capabilities. If we take the rather general “We are the World” notion of a global family and make it particular and personal in our lives, it can almost turn our stomachs. To make real this vision of humanity as one family under God, challenges some of our deepest instincts and beliefs.
In the passage we read today from Luke’s gospel, we encounter a similar longing for a community to return to right relationship with God. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” Jesus laments, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…” The lament comes in the midst of an exchange between Jesus and “some Pharisees” who have come to warn him of a growing threat from King Herod. They suggest, perhaps a little disingenuously, that Jesus move along in order to protect himself. To this Jesus replies that he will continue to do the work he is doing, thank you very much. And then he lets us know why the threat from King Herod doesn’t seem to concern him. Jerusalem, the spiritual and religious center of the Jewish faith, will trump King Herod for the privilege of shedding Jesus’ blood. The threat of a puppet king doesn’t hold a candle to the threat represented by Jesus’ own people, symbolically and literally centered in the city of Jerusalem. “Go tell that fox” he says to the Pharisees, “that someone else – Jerusalem - has already lined up for the job of doing away with me.”
And then we hear Jesus’ lament for the city that he has kown so much love for.
We hear longing, affection, and loss in this maternal metaphor, a desire to gather up all of the disparate, feuding and sinful people within the city, as well as the kind and well-meaning, under his protective embrace. Perhaps this is why his lament is so poignant for us. Do we also not long to be gathered up into the loving arms of a mothering God? Do we not sense our own loss of the kingdom in our corporate deviation from God’s will? In the season of Lent, we are collectively and individually called to look at what holds us back from realizing the Kingdom, in this case, from making personal what we are wanting for our global community.
For this reflection we might look more closely at this passage from Luke. It might be easy to read Jesus’ lament for Jerusalem as an impersonal cry for the fate of Israel, having transgressed over and over in the history of her relationship with her God. After all, perhaps because of the recent loss of the temple in Jerusalem, the author of this gospel makes Jerusalem the most central character in his gospel besides Jesus. In Luke, Jesus’ life meanders in and out of this metropolitan center with surprising regularity. Jesus’ lament could be the cry of Luke’s listeners, longing for some way to turn the clocks back, to bring redemption to a city that now seems lost to them forever.
Yet Jesus’ lament is as particular as it might also be symbolic. This is “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” There are people in this city who are likely to arrest Jesus, to try him, to nail him to a cross. Jesus knows this, yet he cries out in sudden anguish for them. He will continue his work in Galilee and on his way to Jerusalem because he loves them. He will stand against the Pharisees and the King’s military because he loves them. He will turn over the money changing tables in the temple, and offer bread and wine to the very person who will betray him, because he loves them. Jesus will walk into their gates of hell, because he loves them. Not naïvely, not symbolically, but specifically and with his eyes wide open. He is crying over his family, his people, from whom violence, deception, and betrayal cannot separate him.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often have I desired to gather your children together…”
We are challenged by this passage not just to understand the extent of Jesus’ perseverance and love for the sake of the Kingdom of God, although that is certainly a key part of this passage. We are also challenged to understand the kind of costly love we are called to join him in.
Once many years ago, a niece and nephew of mine were bickering in the presence of their grandfather. In a fit of pique, with a vague gesture toward the kitchen radio, their grandfather asked them “How do you expect countries to stop bombing each other when you can’t even get along?” A little heavy-handed for a 5- and 8-year old to be sure, but his logic was – well - hard to argue. How often do we ask for the reconciliation of those far from us, when we cannot forgive an offhand remark by a coworker? How much do we clamor for the terrorists and countries of the world – our own even - to lay down their arms, to cease their campaigns of destruction against one another, when we are at the throats of those we are closest to? Is it not much easier to pray in general and symbolically for peace and reconciliation than to love the one who has hurt us, or even to love ourselves? Is it not much easier to promote a vision of one great global family than it is to embrace the humanity of one who has just done violence to us? (I occasionally volunteer at the Kitsap Dispute Resolution Center and if people were allowed personal nuclear weapons, none of us would be here I swear!)
Rev. Dr. Allen Story shares a concrete illustration for the meaning of global family. Rev. Dr. Story was one of a father-son pair – both white ministers - who visited one of my classes last fall on a trip from their home in South Africa. I may have mentioned them a while ago. Both of them spoke from a life time of discerning, as Christians, how to remain faithful while living and ministering within the brutally oppressive regime of apartheid. Both were compelling and deeply inspirational. But the anecdote that Rev. Allen Story, the son, shared was not about apartheid; nor is it, unfortunately, a unique story. It was about a woman in his region of South Africa, a mother of two sons, one of whom had tragically murdered the other. Her one remaining living son was serving time in jail. The anguish of this woman was the particular anguish of someone who is simultaneously the parent of the murdered and the murderer. No one but that person can understand what it is like to continue to love the son who has murdered the other, but he invited us to imagine “This is how God feels,” Rev. Story said. “Whenever one human being kills another, God is simultaneously the parent of the killed and the one who kills.” This was his point. God does not cease loving the one who kills. God cannot, just as that mother could not cease loving her living son.
This is tough stuff. While we claim “just” killing, “just war”, or self-defense against those who might kill us, Jesus makes no exceptions, not for Judas, not for the Roman centurions, not for those who hang him on the cross. Our instinct, our laws, our conditioning direct us, when faced with danger, to do what is necessary to protect ourselves, our country, and those whom we love. Yet these instincts, Rev. Story would assert, are exactly what the life and ministry of Jesus calls into question. He might also assert that It is precisely this radical and particular, no- holds-barred love, that is at the root of keeping right relationship with God.
Lest we think that this ideal is too lofty or far-fetched, we might do well to recall the degree to which God has extended God’s self to preserve this right relationship with us at all costs. This is the other message we get from today’s Lenten readings. The kind of love that fueled Jesus’ ministry and gave him the courage to turn his face to Jerusalem is also that kind of love out of which God formed the first covenant with Abraham, this same covenant that was renewed at Mt. Sinai, and that was in Jesus’ time perhaps facing a tragic unraveling.
A love that embraces enemies and is rooted in radical nonviolence is not one that we associate much with the Old Testament. We struggle with the cultural images of an often violent and retributive God, and easily forget or overlook a far different image that inhabits these Scriptures. One such glimpse comes to us in the Genesis story that describes God forming a covenant with Abraham. We understand our covenant with God as a two-way street: that God’s graciousness calls on us to respond and nurture our relationship to God, and it is. Yet what is notable here is who is taking the most risk.
To fully understand this it helps to look at the nature of covenants at the time. Before there were written contracts, rituals of agreement had to be performed before witnesses. Both parties of such an agreement or covenant would walk between the cleaved halves of an animal while repeating the terms, the not-so-subtle implication being that if anyone broke their part of the agreement, they could suffer the same fate as the animal at their feet. The agreement could also be one-sided: one party making a promise would walk between the halves of the animal while the other one stood and observed. This, then, some scholars claim, is what God did with Abraham in this story. God, in the form of the torch, walked alone between the two halves of the animals. God was taking all the risk: if God did not follow through, Abraham could “kill” God, or more accurately, reject God as God. God was binding God’s self to the mercy of Abraham and the future nations of Israel.
This is a radical love: God in all of God’s unimaginable power and scope, extending God’s self in utmost humility and surrender to Abraham and not just Abraham, a man he reckoned apparently to be righteous, but to all of his descendants whom God did not yet know. “To [you] I give this land…” And after the intervening centuries, when all has not gone well with Abraham’s descendants and their relationship with this God, God extends God’s self again, in the incarnation of Jesus. How could this incarnation embody anything but the same kind of love? A love that embraces and weeps for her enemies, that is willing to take all the risks, and that humbles itself to cry, in the face of persecution,
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”
How can such love not humble us? As we reflect on ourselves during Lent, and as we pray to bring about a kinder and gentler world, let us remember for whom Jesus walked to his death in Jerusalem: for the very people who were to murder him. Let us remember how God humbled God’s self to Abraham. This is costly love, achingly vulnerable yet deeply transformational love. Let us not be naïve about what we are asking for when we pray for peace. Let us not be surprised by the challenge and cost of putting such peace, such love into practice in our own lives. But let us also not forget who walks with us, who prays with us, who risks everything to show God’s love for us. God will gather us up under her wings when we turn our hearts toward this kind of particular and radical love.
Amen.