Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
Lent 2, 16^th of March 2025

Luke 13:31-35
Philippians 3:17-4:1

‘Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.’ If you have ever committed to Lenten fasting and then struggled to stick to it, and I must confess that this year I have regularly failed to not to eat chocolate, then you might find this reading on the second Sunday of Lent all too pertinent. If that is you, relax. Paul’s ire is not directed at those of us failing to fast. His concerns are much greater.

Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi is one of his warmest, full of kindness and appreciation. Paul loves the Philippians. He does not love those he believes might be imposing inappropriate rules on them. Some of Paul’s language is so extreme that it does not make it into the Revised Common Lectionary. Those of us who follow that lectionary will never hear read in our churches: ‘Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh! For it is we who are the circumcision, who worship in the Spirit of God and boast in Christ Jesus and have no confidence in the flesh.’ (Philippians 3:2-3) Given the Christian tendency to antisemitism, it is understandable that the lectionary avoids passages about ‘those who mutilate the flesh’. But today’s reading only makes sense in the context of the argument about whether Gentile Christians need to become culturally Jewish by embracing circumcision and the dietary laws.

We can get some understanding of why Paul’s language about those who practice circumcision is so extreme by comparing this letter with Paul’s letter to the church in Galatia. In that letter we see a Paul who is incandescent with rage at the Galatians, Gentiles, who have started to follow the Jewish law. Paul knows that by the grace of God, Gentiles have been saved through Jesus’ crucifixion. For Gentiles to seek righteousness on any other basis, including by being circumcised and taking up dietary restrictions, would be to reject both God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice.

Those of us reading Paul’s letters some two thousand years later need to remember that Paul is a Jew arguing with other Jewish Christians about whether Gentile Christians need to become Jewish. He is not writing about the differences between Judaism and Christianity. Paul and his opponents would both have agreed that faith in Christ is a way of living within the covenant people of Israel. The controversy is about whether that faith is sufficient, or whether following the Jewish law is also necessary. This is an intra-church argument, not an argument between religions.

With all those caveats, let us look at today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the church at Philippi, a Roman city in what is now Greece. Those that Paul describes as living ‘as enemies of the cross of Christ’ are the Jewish Christians who want Gentile Christians to follow the Jewish law. Their god is the belly: they believe that following Jewish dietary restrictions is necessary to salvation. Their glory is in their shame: they focus much too much on whether men are or are not circumcised, which, when you think about it, is a strange thing to be discussing in public. Their minds are set on earthly things: they believe that people need to belong to a particular ethnicity and culture to be saved.

Paul knows that none of this is true. The only thing necessary for salvation is Jesus. It is through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection that humanity has been united with God. For this reason, Paul can advise the Philippians to imitate him. He is not portraying himself as a great saint who does everything right. He is showing himself to his readers as someone whose faith is in Jesus. Immediately before today’s reading Paul has declared that, ‘If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless’. (Philippians 3:4-6) But he now regards all of that as worthless. It is not membership in a people or a tribe, it is not circumcision or zeal in following the law, that leads to righteousness but ‘faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith’. (Philippians 3:9)

Paul reassures the Philippians that ‘our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ,’ and to any men in Philippi who might be worried that they need to modify their bodies through circumcision, Paul writes that Jesus ‘will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.’ Do not worry too much about your body now, because it will be changed. ‘Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved’.

The Lord in whom we are to stand firm is the one who walked willingly towards the cross. In today’s gospel reading we are joining Jesus on the road to Jerusalem and his death. On this road, Jesus is confronted by some Pharisees who warn him to leave because Herod wants to kill him. (That Pharisees seek Jesus out to try and save his life is another reminder that there should be no place for antisemitism in Christianity.) But Jesus will not be diverted from his purpose: ‘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. Yet 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.”’ Jesus then laments over Jerusalem: ‘How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’

It is an extraordinary lament. There is no biblical precedent for the use of the humble hen as a metaphor. There are references throughout the Hebrew Scripture to people taking refuge under God’s wings, but those wings were unlikely to have been imagined as a hen’s wings. (Exodus 19:3-5; Deuteronomy 32:11-12) And if Herod is a fox, then Jesus describing himself as a hen is a big clue that he knows he is walking towards his death. As it happens, it will not be the fox, Herod Antipas, who kills him. But on the last day of Jesus’ life, Governor Pilate will send him to Herod to be seen and mocked, and Luke tells us that: ‘That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.’ (Luke 23:12) In this encounter between the fox and the hen, the fox will seem to have won.

Jesus knows that Jerusalem is going to kill him, but he does not threaten it with punishment. Instead, he laments over it, in the same way that on the cross he will pray ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,’ and tell a repentant thief: ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.’ (Luke 23:34, 43) We see here, as we do throughout the gospel according to Luke, Jesus’ astounding compassion towards even those we might want him to condemn.

‘Many live as enemies of the cross of Christ,’ Paul writes to the Philippians. These enemies were once those of the ‘circumcision faction’ who believed that followers of Jesus needed to do more than rely on him. Today, they are those who refuse to accept the image of Jesus as a humble farmyard hen and prefer to see him as a victorious warrior. Before the last election in the USA, Russell Moore, who had been an official in the Southern Baptist Convention and is now the editor of the Evangelical publication Christianity Today, told a radio program that he had had,

multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — “turn the other cheek” — [and] to have someone come up after to say, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?” And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, “I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,” the response would not be, “I apologize.” The response would be, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.” And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.

Of course, the teachings of Jesus are subversive to the powers of the world. But they are not supposed to be subversive to members of the church! We can now see just how much damage is being done in the United States and throughout the world by those who think the Sermon on the Mount is unacceptably ‘liberal’.

Let us not be enemies of the cross of Christ. Throughout Lent, let us continue to journey with the liberal ‘watered-down milquetoast version’ of Jesus, the one who was willing to die out of love for us all. Let us imitate Paul and all those throughout history who have imitated Christ and, in a world of foxes, persist in being hens.