Sermon for Lent II --- 24 February, 2013

(This is not the sermon I delivered. When I got into the pulpit, I decided I didn't like the sermon I wrote. So after a show of hands, I junked the written one and preached off the top of my head on the Genesis reading and God's covenant with Abram. Anyway, here's the written sermon.)

Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.

• With all the talk of foxes, hens, and chicks, this Gospel reading takes on a “barnyard” feel. In fact in this week's Bible Study, I learned a lot about how hens protect their chicks, and this passage suddenly made even more sense. And beyond that, there is a further real lesson here.
• It's worthwhile to focus on the mission of Jesus. He tells the Pharisees who came to warn him of Herod's plotting. He calls Herod a “fox” but also speaks of his mission, which he characterizes as casting out demons and healing the sick. These might be seen as the high points, the most powerful and dramatic aspects of his mission among us. He doesn't speak of his preaching and teaching, but as a rabbi, this might go without saying.
• Jesus goes on to say that, despite the opposition of Herod and others, he will continue his mission today and tomorrow then adding what might be a cryptic phrase to end his statement: and on the third day I finish my work..
• From the way this is said, it appears that what Jesus does today and tomorrow continues on until he come to the end of what he had intended to do. His reference to the third day appears to a lot of commentators and to many of us to be directed to Jesus' crucifixion, death, and resurrection. (Later, when we recite the Creed, listen to what is said – especially when we get to the phrase “On the third day he rose again”.)
• What comes before our eyes here is that Jesus' mission of preaching, healing, exorcising demons, and proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God cannot be separated from his death and his resurrection. To do that would mean losing something of either.
• In history, some rather famous people have held Jesus to be a great teacher of ethics, giving the world an example of how to live. One very famous writer-statesman went so far as to publish an edited version of the four Gospels in which he removed all the miraculous events and anything that had a supernatural or spiritual “feel.” What was left was Jesus' social and ethical teachings, which that man felt were the only worthwhile items to be kept from the Gospels. This whole train of thought avoids what Jesus did in his teaching and it certainly avoids any relationship to the Cross of Christ. His death might be seen as an unfortunate consequence of politics, but it has no bearing on us except to deprive us of further wisdom from the Master.
• There are other people who emphasize the death of Jesus as if it were an event having nothing to do with his teaching and preaching. It's as if Good Friday existed without any of the days before and often, any of the days after! Admittedly, this is not too common, but this too leads to a skewed and twisted view of what Jesus was about. This view doesn't avoid the cross but it makes barren all that led up to the Cross.
• I don't feel that we are in either camp. Once again we'd best see Jesus and his ministry as a whole.
• His teaching, preaching, healings, and exorcisms are vital to show us and all his followers since his time that the Kingdom of God has come near in our own present. The words of Jesus, his healing of the sick and his casting out of demons are all demonstrations of the coming of the Kingdom. His death and his resurrection – since we can't really separate the two – brings the Kingdom of God even closer because it makes the forgiveness of sins and the presence of the grace of God in creation more and more a part of our own existence. Jesus as the Word-made-Flesh shows that God is not simply interested in this world and in the life of each of us, but is quite willing and able to become part of the interweaving of all life and events in this world.
• For us, Jesus' death on the Cross cannot be separated from Jesus' teaching for all the reasons I've laid out. If we should want to do this, we could well be guilty of desiring “cheap grace”, that is grace without cost, without commitment, without repentance, indeed grace without the cross. The cross of Jesus Christ is a very stark reminder that although grace may come to us without our payment or our worthiness or our deserving, it does not come without cost. That cost has been truly paid for us.
• So Jesus tells those Pharisees who warned him of Herod's plotting and ill-will that he will continue his ministry even if it takes him to Jerusalem and to the cross. In fact, there is so other way for his ministry to come to it's fullest and highest meaning.
• In our own way, we cannot avoid the cross in this time of Lent. It is precisely where our journey of these forty days leads us. At the end of the journey is the cross, the odd, upside-down sign of the endless love of God and the fathomless depths of grace from which all our life comes.
• We know of the cost of this grace and we also know that, whatever else it might mean to us, the cost of our salvation and our lives of grace was paid for on the cross.