(You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.)
Jesus’ observation on the outskirts of Jerusalem – often depicted on a hillside overlooking the city – is sometimes seen as a nurturing lament for the great city which had for many centuries been the center of Israel’s religious life. Maybe it’s that repetition of “Jerusalem,” and the hen thing, that make it sound that way.
But when we look at what he actually says, and what’s going on at the time, it’s hard to read much nurture into it. Jesus is passing judgment on the ancient city, which he says has always excelled in missing the point, often violently so. After noting – with sarcasm? – that “it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem,” he goes on:
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you.”
Israel’s history was replete with prophets whose dire warnings of judgment to come went unheeded, who were rebuked, imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed by the powers against whom they inveighed. Prophets were seen as holy men who spoke for God – unless their message was too harsh or unpopular, or perhaps conflicted with the message of another self-acclaimed prophet. Who’s to know who to believe? People will generally stay with the one whose message is most palatable, much in the way Americans now choose which media from which we get our news, and what friends’ opinions are likely to show up on our Facebook feeds. We didn’t invent the narrow feedback loop.
It’s awfully hard to know who is a true prophet until after the fact. But we have been given full revelation in Jesus Christ, and it’s not so hard to know him. Many who knew him in the flesh ultimately turned away, rejecting, betraying, even condemning him. What would we have done? Would we have recognized him as a true representative of God or rejected him as one more disappointment, one more person out of touch with how the world really is, one more would-be mouthpiece distorting God’s word?
Go back and read the words of Jesus in the Gospels this week. What is he really saying?
Do we accept his often hard teaching, or dismiss him?
Jesus may have been uttering judgment upon Jerusalem, so soon to repeat its tradition of death-dealing, but we would be foolish if we thought this lament doesn’t cover us too. Jerusalem was and is a place with a particular history and customs, but in the Bible it is also a symbolic place where God and humankind meet. The Book of Revelation speaks of the “new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.” Jerusalem represents the hope of reconciliation, of fidelity and obedience, of that mystical place where God himself will dwell, “and they shall be God’s people, God himself shall be with them.”
We have a choice of which Jerusalem we will be – the one that kills its prophets and stones its messengers, or the new Jerusalem where heaven and earth can truly meet.
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