Luke 13:1-5

“Did I give my grandmother cancer?” A student asked her lecturer Andrew Menkis. He writes that his heart broke as he realised that she thought God was punishing her grandmother because of some hidden sin or lack of faith in her life.

When life goes wrong or something bad happens, it is often that people jump to the conclusion that God is punishing them. It reveals that just below the surface, many people still live with a picture of God as being angry and punitive... God is the great punisher of sinners.


This tendency to attribute disasters to God’s punishment gives us a clue as to what is happening in our passage today.

In our passage, Jesus is speaking with a group of people who it seems have asked Jesus opinion on two dreadful tragedies that had happened. Underlying the discussion, the unspoken assumption is that God must have been punishing these people.

The first incident related to a group of Galileans, who came from the north of Palestine where they were particularly politically volatile. In Galilee there were regular insurrections against the Roman occupation. In this incident Pontius Pilate had acted ruthlessly to teach them a lesson. While making a religious sacrifice, Pilates soldiers had attacked them and mixed the Galileans blood with the blood of the sacrifices. It is really horrific stuff. For a Jew, mixing human blood in a religious sacrifice was sacrilegious. This was a ruthless and sacrilegious punishment for their political rebelliousness.

The popular conclusion of most Jews was, they must have sinned in some terrible way and so this was God’s punishment on them.

The second incident had to do with a group of 18 Jewish workers who had been killed in the collapse of a tower they had been working on. Pontius Pilate had raided the Temple treasury in Jerusalem and had used the stolen funds to build an aqueduct. The fact that Jews were employed to carry out the work was a scandal, because they were being paid with money that had been stolen from God’s temple. When part of the construction fell down killing 18 of the workers, it was interpreted by the general Jewish populace that this was divine punishment for having colluded with Pilate and for receiving stolen money.

And so both incidents were interpreted through a very simplistic understanding of God and life. If something bad or tragic has happens, then it means that God is meting out punishment for some hidden sin.

Jesus response to those who were present shows that he rejects this simplistic theology. “Do you think that these people who died were worse sinners than you?” Jesus asks and then immediately answers himself “I tell you no!” Jesus says In other words, do you think that God has punished them? I tell you no!

Jesus response shows that he rejects the understanding that says that if something bad happens it is a sign of God’s punishment. The more we read the Gospels, the more we see that for Jesus God is not a divine punisher. For Jesus, I believe the primary image of God is portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son. God is like a loving and patient father waiting longingly for his children to come home. In these verses today, Jesus rejects the image of God the punisher.

Now hopefully that should come as a great relief to us... the next time your boiler and your car and your cooker all stop working within a week of each other, you can be relived to know that it is not because God is punishing you! That’s not the God that Jesus reveals to us.

But the next response in our passage gets a little confusing.

After Jesus says: I tell you no! It was not God who was punishing them, Jesus gives them a warning: “But unless you repent, you too will all perish”. Is Jesus contradicting himself?

I believe that Jesus is drawing a distinction between divine punishment and consequences. There are times when our actions lead to tragedy, but the tragedy or the difficulty is not a divine punishment, but rather a consequence. Certain actions lead to life. Other actions lead to difficulty. It is just the way life works.

Both NT Wright and William Barclay suggest that when Jesus tells them that unless they repent they will perish, he is in fact referring to the political situation in Palestine at the time that was sitting on a knife edge.

Jesus could see that if the Jewish people continued on the pathway of violent resistance against their Roman occupiers the Jewish people would be heading towards national disaster. William Barclay writes:

One thing is clear – Jesus foresaw and foretold the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. He knew well that if his own Jewish people continued on with their intrigues, their rebellions, their plottings and their political ambitions, they were going to commit national suicide. Jesus knew that in the end, Rome would step in and obliterate them. And that is precisely what happened.

The fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD was a tragic moment in the life of the Jewish people. But it was not a divine punishment. It was a consequence of the increased militerisation of their own minds that set them on a collision course with the greatest Empire the world had known up until that point. Jesus could see that the way of violence was not the answer. It would reap tragic consequences.

And that helps us to make sense of the comment Jesus made in last weeks sermon: Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, how I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look your house is left desolate to you... in other words, your failure to heed my warning will leave you in desolation one day.

In our world, we have an increased divide and radicalisation. On the one hand, we have seen a rise in Islamic fundamentalism that has led to tragic terror attacks all over the world, but also in the UK. Last week, with the dreadful attack in Christchurch New Zealand, we have seen the rise of right wing white radicalisation. It is a sign that the world is not heading in a good direction. As Jesus called his own Jewish people to explore a different way of being in the world that would reject the way of violent resistance, so I suspect that Jesus would be saying something similar to the world today. The love of Christ urges us to explore other solutions to our worlds problems, other solutions to bridge the great divides that are opening up between us. As our Gospel story progresses towards Easter, we see how Jesus is willing to lay down his own life in love, to teach humanity a different way of being human in this world.

Luke 13:31-35

Our passage contains two contrasting images...

The first is the image of a jackal (some translations translate the Greek as ‘fox’). When Jesus is warned by some Pharisees that Herod is plotting to murder him, Jesus responds by calling Herod a jackal. It suggests a person who has a savage, ruthless personality, like a wild dog that feasts on dead men’s corpses.

Herod represents some of the worst aspects of humanity. Perhaps one could say that he represents the very worst in patriarchal figures. The tough strongman, who acts ruthlessly without any care or concern for others.

The second image in the passage is the image of a mother hen. As Jesus expresses deep sorrow over the city of Jerusalem where he knows he will go to meet his death, Jesus laments:

“Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you were not willing.” The first time I saw a hen gathering her chicks under her wings, I found it a very moving experience, seeing all these vulnerable little chicks disappearing under the soft feathers of their mother.

And so in contrast to Herod the scavenger and the ruthless jackal, Jesus is portrayed in this passage as a protective mother hen. There is a maternal protective instinct in Jesus. A heart moved with compassion for those he sees in danger. Jesus wishes to draw them all together under the protection of his wings. His heart is big enough that he wishes to hug, embrace and protect the entire city of Jerusalem.

To be a follower of Jesus and to become more Christlike, is to allow our hearts to grow and expand like Jesus, hearts that are able to create more and more space for others within our embrace.

A few years ago I heard about a women from India whose mission in life is to hug all of humanity. She is known by most people simply as Amma.

She was born into very humble beginnings in 1953. Her father was a fisherman. As part of her responsibilities, Amma gathered food scraps from neighbours to help feed her family's cows and goats. During this time she she came to see the intense poverty and suffering of others and in response began to spontaneously hug people to comfort them in their sorrow as well as share food and clothing from her own home. Her family who were themselves not wealthy, scolded and punished her, but she continued to hug anyone who she could see was struggling or suffering.

Amma is reported to have said, "I don't see if it is a man or a woman. I don't see anyone different from my own self. A continuous stream of love flows from me to all of creation. This is my inborn nature. The duty of a doctor is to treat patients. In the same way, my duty is to console those who are suffering."

Despite her humble beginnings, Amma now has people traveling to meet her from all over the world and she herself travels the world. A friend of ours went to see her in London when she was there a few years ago. She described how she lined up in a long line of people n a church who were waiting to be hugged by Amma. When it finally came to be her turn, she described the hug by Amma as was one of the most powerful and healing experiences of her life. In that moment, all the grief of losing her mom two years before came to the surface and she really felt a profound sense of love surrounding her and flowing through her.

As Amma travels around the world hugging people and sharing a profound sense God’s hug of divine love, she is seems to me to be expressing something of the spirit of Jesus in this passage where Jesus longs to hug and embrace and bring under his wings the entire city of Jerusalem who he sees are heading for disaster.

Brian Stoffregan points out that there is a Peanuts cartoon that also speaks to this text. He writes:

In the first frame, Lucy is standing next to a tree. Looking up, she shouts to Linus, "What are doing in that tree?"

Linus answers from the branches of the tree, "Looking for something." Then he adds, "Can you see Snoopy? We climbed up here together, but now I don't see him."

Lucy unsympathetically shouts back up the tree, "Beagles can't climb trees."

The next frame shows Snoopy falling out of the tree right on his head with a loud "klunk." "You're right!" Snoopy concludes.

Then Lucy lets Snoopy have it, "You stupid Beagle, what are you doing climbing around in a tree?" Snoopy's sore head is still spinning.

Linus interrupts from the tree, "Don't yell at him.... We're trying to find a strange creature in a nest...."

Lucy walks off saying, "You're both crazy! Go ahead and knock yourselves out! I couldn't care less!!"

Then Snoopy with his head still sore and spinning things, "Rats...I was hoping for a hug!"

Reflecting on this Peanuts cartoon, Brian Stoffregan asks the question: “Do similar scenes happen to us. We hurt ourselves -- perhaps physically or emotionally. A parent, friend, pastor, parishioner gives us a lecture about how stupid we were. "Rats," we may say to ourselves, "I was hoping for a hug!" There are those times when what we need most is to know that somebody still cares and loves us, because we already know we have acted like jerks.

And as Brian Stroffregan goes on to say, often one of the biggest failings of the Church has been that when people find themselves falling out of trees and hurting their heads like Snoopy in the cartoon, the church has been very quick to give lectures and preach on how foolish they have been, when all the while what people are really saying in their hearts is “Rats... I was hoping for a hug!”

May our hearts be opened and expanded like the heart of Christ in this passage, that we too might reach out with God’s love to hug those who feel lost and hurting in this world. Instead of saying “Rats...” may those who meet us say “Thanks... I was really hoping for a hug!”.

Luke 4:1-13

There is an old story told by a Jewish Rabbi that goes as follows:

The Evil Spirit once came dejected before God and wailed, "Almighty God -- I want you to know that I am bored -- bored to tears! I go around doing nothing all day long. There isn't a stitch of work for me to do!"

"I can't understand you," replied God. There's plenty of work to be done only you've got to have more initiative. Why don't you try to lead people into sin? That's your job!"

"Lead people into sin!" muttered the Evil Spirit contemptuously. "Why Lord, even before I can get a chance to say a tempting word to anyone, they have already gone and sinned!"
It is a little story that suggests that there are enough seeds of temptation already living within the human heart, without the need for some external evil spirit to account for our tendency to give in to temptation.

There are a lot of Christians who make a big deal of Satan. For some Christians, the figure Satan would feature almost as largely in their lives as God himself. For such Christians, the character of Satan takes on almost God-like qualities. Satan becomes omnipresent, in all places all at once, in order to tempt humanity. He becomes omniscient too, knowing all of our thoughts and weaknesses.

For myself, and I recognize not all would agree with me, I wouldn’t subscribe to such a doctrine of Satan. I wouldn’t deny that there is evil in this world. Of course there is evil. One only has to read the paper to see the evil in this world. But like this little story told by the Jewish Rabbi, most of the evil in the world comes from the human heart. One doesn’t need a doctrine of Satan to account for all the evil in the world. Human beings are quite capable, all on their own of doing some pretty terrible things. Personally I wouldn’t regard Satan as being a real external person, but rather a symbolic personification of the seeds of evil that lurk within the human heart.

I have also noticed that when Christians constantly refer to Satan, there is a real danger that it becomes a way for people not to take responsibility for their actions.

In April 2000 in international cricket there was a great match-fixing scandal, and very unfortunately, one of the key players implicated was the very successful captain of the South African national cricket side, Hansie Cronje. He had a great record as being one of South Africa’s best ever captains captains in terms of results, but at some point, the desire for easy money overcame him and he began to take bribes in order to fix matches.

When it all came out in the media and he had to testify at a commission of inquiry to get to the bottom of the whole scandal, after claiming to have had some kind of conversion experience, his defense in the end was that Satan made him do it. The whole testimony left a very bad taste in many people’s mouths, because it seemed that he was avoiding taking responsibility for his actions. He was trying to preserve a sense of his own innocence by placing the blame on someone else. It was Satan’s fault.

M. Scott Peck writes that one of the signs of a person of psychological maturity is someone who is willing to take responsibility for their own actions.

In this instance, Hansie Cronje’s blaming of Satan for his actions was a failure to take responsibility. A failure to admit that the darkness that led him to act in the way that he did was actually lurking in his own heart. Bringing Satan into it was a mere distraction, an avoidance of admitting even to himself, of what he had done.

As I said a moment ago or myself personally, when I read references to Satan in the Bible, I don’t take these references literally as referring to an objective being. Rather I would read them to be a personification for seeds the evil that lurk within every human heart. Given the right conditions, we all have the potential to act with a selfishness that overrides our concern for other people. It takes effort and inner self-discipline to choose the path of integrity.

How then do we make sense of this temptation scene where Jesus is tempted by Satan?

Firstly, I believe that what we are dealing with in this episode is symbolic seeking to describe dramatically poetic picture language a very real experience of temptation, a wrestling between one’s higher and lower self, the lower self, symbolized as the character of Satan. And the specific question that Jesus is wrestling with his what kind of messiah he is going to be?

All of us at certain times in our lives have to wrestle with questions of what direction we are going to take and what kind of person we wish to be.

In the passage just prior to this one, Jesus has just been baptised. He has had an experience of God – as though the heavens were parted and God’s spirit coming upon him. He has heard a voice speaking to him telling him he is God’s beloved. From this experience, Jesus has a deep sense of vocation. God has a special purpose for him.

Now in the desert, Jesus enters into a period of wrestling and discernment about what kind of Messiah he is going to be?

Is he going to follow his highest nature? Is he now going to truly live as God’s Son in the world, or is he going to choose an easier path? Is he going to short-circuit God’s purpose in his life and settle for being something much less than he has it in him to be?

• The first temptation to turn stone into bread: Is he going to seek simply to feed people’s stomach’s or is he going to be the bread of life, helping to feed people’s deepest longings for meaning and purpose.
  
  
• The second temptation – the temptation to worldly power and wealth... “all these kingdoms could be yours” says the tempting voice within. The temptation to amass worldly political power. And it is enticing. Think of all the good you could do if you rise up the ranks and become a politically powerful figure. But is it really power for doing good that we are after or the desire for self-glory?
• The third temptation, To throw himself off the top of the temple and have the angels catch him. Winning people over with magic tricks and miracles? A poor substitute for living a life that is true and real.

M. Scott Peck in his book a Road Less Travelled begins his book by making a very simply statement: Life is difficult. Ultimately as a psychiatrist M. Scott Peck says that all of our inner neuroses and all of our temptations in this world are an attempt to short-circuit the difficulty of life. We complain and we grumble because we believe life should be easy. But the truth is that it is not. To grow to wholeness and integrity requires effort and discipline. Every temptation in the end is an attempt to avoid the difficulty of life instead of doing the hard work of tackling those difficulties and over-coming them.
What are the temptations that you face? What are the places in your life where you are tempted to choose the path that represents your lowest self instead of your highest self? What are the places in your life where you are tempted to not take responsibility for your life and to rather blame someone else? Or to short-circuit some difficulty or challenge that lies before you?
There is a wonderful Native American story:

An old Cherokee was once teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. “It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.”

He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one that you feed the most.”

In our passage today, Jesus takes Peter James and John up a mountain. And there, Jesus is transfigured before them. In Mark’s version of the story it is Jesus’ clothes that become dazzling white, whiter than anyone could bleach them. In Luke’s Gospel which was written about 25-30 years after Mark’s version, there is a heightened sense of the supernatural. We read that “the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.”

When we read this passage of the transfiguration of Jesus, many would see it as proof that Jesus is completely unique, that he is completely above us... proof that Jesus is the Divine Son of God. the light of the world who comes to rescue us from our miserable and deplorable state in which we have no capacity at all for doing anything good.


But what if that is not the only way of interpreting this passage...?

What if the shining face of Jesus in this passage reveals to us who we have always been meant to be... that we were all made by God to shine like Jesus?

In Luke’s version of the story, unlike Mark and Matthew’s version, we are told that Moses and Elijah also appear in their glory. In Mark and Matthew’s versions, Elijah and Moses simply appear, but in Luke, they are described as appearing in their glory, a reminder that this is God’s intention for all humanity, not just Jesus.

Throughout the gospels we read clues that suggest that this is how Jesus viewed the rest of humanity... that we all have this inherent potential to be like Jesus, to shine. Yes, human beings have an enormous capacity for evil and wickedness too, but we also all have this inherent potential to reveal God’s life and light in the world.

In John’s Gospel chapter 10, we find Jesus speaking to the Pharisees. These are his arch rivals. In that passage they denounce Jesus for claiming to be the son of God. They say he is from the devil because he has spoken blasphemy... and then Jesus says to them an intriguing thing:

“Jesus answered them, ‘Is it not written in your law [in Psalms 82:6], “ ‘You are gods’ ”?

In other words, in John’s Gospel, Jesus’ claim to be God’s Son should not surprise his opponents, because in their very scriptures, God refers to them as gods. Jesus is speaking to his enemies, those who will later be responsible for putting Jesus to death: To them Jesus says: Your own scriptures say: you are gods.

We were all meant to shine. Johns Gospel suggests that human beings have the spark of the divine within them, human beings are gods who have somehow forgotten the great dignity of who we were created to be. We have forgotten how to shine.

The parable of the prodigal son, another of those stories that only appears in Luke’s Gospel suggests the same truth. The prodigal son has always been a son of his father. Even when he wanders far off and squanders his life in riotous living... even when he has forgotten who he is... the father in the story has never forgotten his son’s true identity, that his son was made to shine and not to live in pig sties.

In the beatitudes in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus says: Blessed are the peace-makers, they will be called the offspring of God. In this saying, Jesus is operating on the assumption that we all have this potential within us to be peace-makers in the world. We were all meant to shine.

A little further on in the sermon on the mount, Jesus says to the crowds who have gathered around him to listen to his teaching:

“You are the light of the world he says” (Matt 5:14). In other words, this is who you were created to be, you were made to shine. These would have been powerful words spoken by Jesus, mostly to peasants who would have been regarded as unclean by the religious elite of the day.

Just as Jesus is the light of the world, so Jesus says that we too have been created in God’s image to reflect God’s light. We too have been made to be the light of the world.

When we fail to shine, it means we are not living into our truest and deepest identity. When we fail to shine, it is a sign that we have forgotten who we really are, forgotten who we were meant to be.

At the end of John’s Gospel, in that moving scene where Jesus meets with Mary Magdalene in the garden, as Jesus leaves her he tells her: ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’

In this dramatic scene, Jesus makes no distinction between himself and Mary. She too is an off-spring of God. She just hasn’t been aware of it. She too has the spark of divine life within her. Up until this point, she has thought that it was only in Jesus. She too was made to shine. Up until this point, she thought that it was only Jesus that was the light of the world.

Going back to the scene of the transfiguration in Luke’s Gospel, Luke adds two new dimension to the story that are not part of Mark or Matthews version. Firstly in Mark’s and Matthew’s versions, we are not told why Jesus goes up the mountain. In Luke’s version, we are told that Jesus goes up to pray, to commune with God – this is a favourite theme of Luke. Secondly in Mark and Matthew’s versions of the story, the three disciples are awake the whole time. In Luke’s version, while Jesus is praying a heavy sleep has come over the disciples. In Luke’s version, the disciples only wake up half-way through the story. And it is only when they wake up, that they see the glory of Jesus.

It is a powerful image. The disciples in this story stand as a symbol for humanity who has fallen asleep to the glory of God. Like the disciples, there is a heavniness and a darkness that has come over us that prevents us seeing God’s glory. They are asleep in their ignorance about themselves. They have forgotten they they were made to shine. When they do wake up, they see the glory of God shining through Jesus. Seeing the glory of God’s light in Jesus is one of the first steps for them in discover that as Jesus has told them that they too are the light of the world. They too were made to shine.

I would like to close with a poem written by Andrew King as a meditation on this passage:

AWAKEN US - (by Andrew King)
(Luke 9: 28-36)
“. . .but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory”

Awaken us.

Awaken us in the fall of the snow, the drop of the rain,
the crash of the rolling thunder.
Awaken us in the song of the bird, the laugh of the child,
the gentle hug from another.

Awaken us in the flick of the fish, the leap of the fox,
the lean of the weeping willow.
Awaken us in the sift of the breeze, the lift of the hymn,
the gift of a bed and pillow.

Awaken us in the peal of the bell, the coffee’s smell,
the feel of running water.
Awaken us in the starlight’s gleam, the hot meal’s steam,
the flash of the diving otter.

Awaken us in the eagle’s flight, the mountain’s height,
the joy of the talk with a friend.
Awaken us in early morning calm, the medicine’s balm,
the quiet of evening’s end.

Awaken us in the sip of wine, the warm sunshine,
the colour of leaves in autumn.
Awaken us in the caring word, the truth that’s heard,
the fragrance of spreading blossoms.

Awaken us far, awaken us near,
awaken us with your story.
Awaken us from where we have come to be here,
awakened to all your glory.