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Lent 2025 – midweek
12 March 2025
Luke 13:31-35
31At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ 32He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” 34Jerusalem, 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! 35See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’
One of my favourite films is the Tim Burton film Big Fish. It chronicles the life of Edward Bloom. Bloom is on his death bed and it is from here that his life unfolds in retrospective through stories remembered and stories he tells now. Near the end of the film Bloom’s doctor tells us that Bloom’s tall tales are not a distortion of the truth but serve to lend importance to the ordinary events of his life. Therein lies the misunderstanding between father and son.
Those of us who celebrate the sacraments and sing about how God makes the common holy understand.
On his way home to be with his dying father Bloom Jr remembers a story his father had told him when he was young: One night when his father was a boy, he and other children walked through the woods at night, arriving outside the house of the town witch, because, as his father had told him, “(…) it’s common knowledge that all towns of a certain size have a witch.” Among the children there is talk of spells and of the witch’s glass eye, which is said to possess extraordinary powers.
One of the other children dares Edward to go knock on the door. As he is about to, the witch opens the door. Edward politely introduces himself and tells the witch that his friends would like to see her eye. She follows him off the porch and down the stairs to the garden gate where his friends had remained and removes her eye patch. Looking into her eye they see how they will die. Edward stays a while and before he leaves tells her that it may be helpful if he also knew how he was going to die. She lifts her eye patch again and Edward sees.
That Edward now knows how he will die is key to understanding his courage in the tall tales that follow. He can show great courage knowing that the situations that unfold before him are not how he is going to die.
I am not sure whether I am a person of great courage. I am courageous about some things and not so much about others. Recently, someone asked how people in Nazi Germany lived in the face of a morally corrupt and violent regime.
My paternal grandfather had the courage to deny my father’s enrolment in an elite Nazi school when my father would have been 12 or 13 years old, but other than that, my family were bystanders. And it would be presumptuous of me to think that I would have done better, though it is my goal to live as a witness to the reign of God.
Yet, I have long believed that one reason my family were bystanders was that they lacked a counter narrative to the Nazi narrative of race and nation. My family was the product of what we now call Christendom, a cultural construct that equated western society with Christianity and vice versa. In that view there was nothing unique about the Christian faith, faith was assumed to be represented by the dominant culture and vice versa. Consequently, many lacked the ability to discern and to name evil.
I am not sure whether I am a person of great courage but I know that I have already died and since I have already died I must not fear death. In Romans six St Paul reminds us that, When we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live a new life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
These words remind us that even though we die, death no longer has power over us. St Paul’s words are not morbid but are hopeful, for they also remind us that if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! (2 Cor 5:17)
In that sense I always connected Bloom’s vision of his death when he looked into the glass eye with our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection. Luther speaks of the drowning of the “old Adam”. Luther does so in the context of our daily remembrance of our baptism. It is about remembering the life we are called to live, the life our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection has made possible.
This comes to mind because we live in culture that largely denies death. I have never liked the expression of “bucket list,” partly because it shows no respect for death itself, but mostly because it’s an expression of hedonism, defining life as free from dying, even though every loss we suffer is a small death: Losses of hope, of opportunities, of relationships, of things that did not come to be, of people we love. A life that works a “bucket list” has no answer for and no approach to life’s mysteries.
This also comes to mind because in our Gospel reading Jesus is warned that Herod seeks to kill him. The warning, however, leaves Jesus undeterred. In fact, he speaks of his impending death in Jerusalem and that he must be on his way. The warning is not news to him. Twice before has he spoken of his death and resurrection.
Jesus remains true to his vocation because, trusting in the Father, he has accepted his death. If he sought to avoid his death, Jesus would not have fulfilled his vocation, not just because he would have avoided death but because rather than his life being guided by his relationship with the Father, his life would have been guided by the avoidance of death. That is, the avoidance of death would have meant in inordinate attention to death.
It would have meant risk aversion and challenging neither the empire nor the religious authorities, it would have meant the avoidance of sacrifice even while it is in giving that we receive, it would have meant a life turned in on itself.
As we journey together through Lent and Holy Week to the feast of Easter when the catechumens are baptized and the church remembers its baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, we know that since Christ is the life of all the living, is the death of death, our foe, we need not be afraid but can live lives of courage, sacrifice, and hope that bear witness to the victory of God even in the midst of death.
Amen.
