Luke 13:31-35

Lent 2 - Year C 

Luke 13:31-35

Dire warnings are all around. Rebecca Ann Parker in her book, “Blessing the World: What Can Save Us Now”, reminds us there are two ways of looking at disaster through an apocalypse lens.

1) We can anticipate an apocalypse and become passive or simply await its arrival to set things straight. 2) We can claim an apocalypse has already occurred and our work is to redeem the current time.

While we usually find ourselves somewhere between a glass more than half empty (anticipating an apocalypse to fill the remainder?) and a glass more than half full (working to remove the rubble and establish community yet available to share the little we have with those who have less?), the addition of perspective on apocalyptic matters does add value to our interpretation of what the next needed thing might or might not be for us.

Jesus is speaking here post-apocryphally – he continues, not in fear of what is to come but in blessing-mode on what has already happened. You can hear the passion for setting things right after they have gone terribly wrong (and aren’t we living in a time when we can say things have gone terribly wrong!). If there is not weeping as we rehearse Jesus’ words about Jerusalem, about our place of living, we have not read them well. This is not a time for a monotone reciting of holy words. Rather our pre-apocryphal resignation or engagement with a post-apocryphal setting will be revealed through the reading of and response to these words: “This place, here, now, arrived at by ignoring/killing prophets and dismissing/stoning those who would bind up wounds! I offer consolation and consolidation as a hen gathers her brood under her wings even as I am isolated/exiled. Yet I proceed in hope that a time will come when you experience a need for blessing to go forward and will remember it is in blessing I have been among you.”

Hopefully we will someday take this symbol of a protective hen 

undergirds us and is more powerfully motivating than a cross.

In so doing we will reveal our orientation at the side of G*D mopping up willful and involuntary messes.

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Video bonus of Dominus Flevit