Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 15:1–12, 17–18; Luke 13:31–35
Church of Scotland, Geneva, Auditoire de Calvin, March 16 2025
The story our Bibles tell is like a Russian doll.
A Russian doll isn’t just one doll, but a set of dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another. In the same way, our Bible story isn’t just one story, but a set of stories of decreasing size nestled one within another.
The Bible’s largest story begins with the first verse of Genesis and ends with the last verse of Revelation. It’s a story of creation and new creation: of the world God makes and the people in it, who promptly go astray, so that God has to work quite hard over a long period of time to put the world to rights; and the story of the world God re-makes, with new heavens and a new earth, and a new Jerusalem, which isn’t at all like the Jerusalem that Jesus knew, still less like the Jerusalem we know today, from whence Benjamin Netanyahu sends forth the IDF to commit genocide in Gaza and, more and more, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank too.
This is what we may call the grand narrative of the Bible. But nestled within it are a whole set of smaller stories, as we can see in our two readings today.
There is, first, the story of salvation: a story that begins with Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, and ends with Easter and Pentecost, all the while looking forward to the day when the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of God and God’s Messiah.
And then there is the story Luke tells from chapter 9 to chapter 19 of his Gospel, which begins with Jesus setting his face like flint to go to Jerusalem and ends with Jesus looking down on the city from the Mount of Olives, weeping.
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The chapters in Genesis that tell of Abram or Abraham – he gets a name change in chapter 17 – bring together some very ancient traditions with some less ancient reflections on their meaning. No attempt is made by the editors to bring all these materials into a single coherent account. So we must make of them what we can.
The ancient ritual described in our reading from Genesis 15 is certainly alien to us and may even seem a little weird. In the Auditoire, we decorously pour water and share bread and wine. We are not accustomed to cutting animals in two.
The point of all this blood-letting seems to be this. God is telling Abram, “May I in the same way be cut in two if I do not fulfil my covenant with you and keep my promise!”[1]
But what exactly is this promise?
In Genesis 12, God promises Abram: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great… and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
In Genesis 18, God says, “I have chosen Abraham, that he may charge his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is just and right, so that I may bring about for Abraham what I have promised him.” The family of Abraham is to be blessed by following the way of the Lord and by doing what is just and right, and in this way blessing others.
But the children of Abraham don’t always see it that way. In today’s reading, the emphasis is not on justice but on real estate: “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates.” Which is most of the Middle East.
There is here an obvious tension, a clear and present danger. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells us to take care: “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed, for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” Rather our life consists in trusting God, as Abraham did, and walking faithfully in God’s way.
This tension runs throughout the story our Bibles tell: between power and wealth, on the one hand, and compassion and faithfulness, on the other. It is, I think, clear which side the Bible finally comes down on, but it doesn’t force that choice upon us. It leaves us to discern the truth. It asks us if we have eyes to see or ears to hear. It leaves us to decide.
It is a decision that determines who we are.
“All that matters,” says the English novelist DH Lawrence, “is that men and women should do what they really want to do.” But, as Lawrence goes on to say, this is not as simple as it sounds. For we all have a double set of desires – the superficial and the shallow that give us only a moment’s satisfaction and the deep inner desires that are fulfilled in long periods of time. Lawrence says, “The desires of the moment are easy to recognize” – just look at Donald Trump – but the deeper desires are difficult. Indeed, it is only over the course of a whole lifetime that we come to recognize them and thus to recognize who God calls us to be.[2] We can choose to be slaves to our superficial and shallow desires, or we can accept God’s challenge to become fully ourselves.
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Turn now to Luke’s smaller story of the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. Two Sundays ago, we heard his account of the transfiguration of Jesus, in which the three disciples see Moses and Elijah talking to Jesus.
What are they talking about? Our different Bible translations put it differently.
The King James Bible says that they are talking about his decease, his death, which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. The New Revised Standard Version speaks of his departure. Four years ago, an updated edition of the NRSV appeared,[3] and it speaks of his exodus.
This is closest both to Luke’s Greek and to Luke’s intention. Jesus, he is telling us, is the new Moses. Just as Moses led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, so now Jesus is leading the whole human race out of slavery – a slavery that is, above all, a slavery to our lesser selves.
Linguistically, the King James translation may be the least accurate, but it illustrates nicely the sure instinct of our 16th-century ancestors. For it is precisely through his decease – his death, and all that follows from his death – that Jesus will lead us out of slavery.
This is what Luke tells us in the first verse following his version of the transfiguration. “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
To be taken up: Luke means the whole complex of events that will lead Jesus back to the Father: his suffering on a Roman cross, his death and burial, his resurrection, and ascension.
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How many names do our Gospels use to speak of Jesus? In our hymnary, the American Presbyterian Thomas Troeger offers us a bunch:
Word and Wisdom, Root and Vine,
Shepherd, Saviour, Servant, Lamb,
Well and Water, Bread and Wine,
Way who leads us to I AM.[4]
If we were to ask our Sunday School to list them all, they might do as well or better. But I’m guessing that none of them – not even the irrepressible Jako – would come up with “hen”.
That, however, is how Jesus describes himself in our reading from Luke:
“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!”
Jesus the hen! The image is of a hen defending her chicks against a predator – a fox like Herod, or even more dangerous predators like Tiberius, the emperor in Rome.
We are still four Sundays and six chapters of Luke away from Palm Sunday. On that day, as he comes down the Mount of Olives on a donkey, the Jerusalem crowds will cry out, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” But Jesus will pause to weep over Jerusalem, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.”
And they are still hidden.
It is his journey to Jerusalem that takes Jesus back to God. It is his journey to Jerusalem that turns us back to God and puts us in touch with our deepest desires.
If, that is, we have eyes to see.
[1] It is a little beside this point to note that no one, not even God, can cut God in two.
[2] DH Lawrence, Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1931)
[3] What a further revision in due course will be called must be a matter of conjecture: NRSV 3.0?
[4] CH4 133: “Source and Sovereign, Rock and Cloud,” Thomas H Troeger (1945 -2022)