“A job to be done”

By Rev. Michael Stonhouse

Meditation – Friday, November 8, 2024

Luke 13: 31-35 (Forward, p. 10) CEV p. 1080

If there is one thing that can be said for certain about our Lord is that He simply would not allow Himself to be deterred from His mission—that is, except for one thing, human stubbornness.

His determination is aptly illustrated in the first part of today’s reading. Some Pharisees, for good or for ill, come to Jesus with a warning. (Here we cannot know whether they were trying to protect Jesus from harm or trying to scare Him off from continuing His mission). Anyway, their warning is that Herod, Herod Antipas, wanted to kill Him. (This is the same man who had John the Baptist executed, but other than this, we don’t have any indications of his ill-will towards Jesus. In fact, according to Luke 23:8, Herod had long wanted to meet Jesus. Nevertheless, given Jesus’ popularity, Herod may have seen Jesus as a threat.)

Anyway, Jesus’ response to this warning about Herod is most illustrative of His determination to get on with the job. However, we, here in the West, might well miss out on the meaning of Jesus’ words. Jesus calls Herod a ‘fox’, which to us denotes a certain cunning and slyness. We even use the term with a sense of grudging admiration. In the Middle East it had virtually none of those connotations. A ‘fox’ in their terms was a jackal, a hyena, a scavenger animal that lived largely off the pickings of larger predators such as lions. A fox was a disgraceful, low life, underling who lived only off someone else’s leftovers, in this case, Caesar’s. In other words, Herod was a powerless nobody. Jesus would continue His ministry and mission until it was over (today, tomorrow and the next day). When His time was up was not in the hands of any human potentate but solely in the hands of God and He would continue on until that day came.

As I said, Jesus was not to be lightly deterred in His mission. However, there was one thing that could stop Him, and that is, human free will. Or to put it otherwise, human stubbornness. Jesus had long yearned to enfold the people of Jerusalem into His loving care, but they had refused. And soon it would be too late. Fortunately, after the Resurrection and after Pentecost, they would again have a chance, but even then the time was limited. Before many years the Temple and the city would be destroyed and they would be dispersed. The apostle Peter says, “the Lord is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). And Paul said to his friend Timothy, God’s desire is that all people should be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). However, the window of opportunity is not open forever. Jesus does indeed have a ‘job to be done’ and is not easily deterred, but we humans, sadly and unfortunately, can get in the way of that taking place. So be it.

Forward notes: “At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you’” (verse 31).

“Whenever I am reminded that Jesus knew all along that he was going to die, I am astounded. Again and again, Jesus takes up his responsibility and keeps moving toward the cross; I suspect most of us would move as far away from it as we could.

“The Hawaiian word for responsibility is kuleana. My mom taught me that the word breaks down into kū, which means to stand tall or strong; le’a, which means joy; and ana, which is a way to demarcate the future. Your responsibility, therefore, means that you stand strong on the shoulders of your ancestors, looking with joy into the future.

“Jesus gives us a beautiful model to follow of what it looks like to live within your kuleana, within your responsibilities. Even when Jesus is confronted with death, he still has joy and hope for the future because he knows that death is not the end of the story.”

Moving Forward: “What are your responsibilities? How can you live within your kuleana?”

A concluding note: He knows that His death—an emphasis on the His—is not the end of the story, because it was through His death that He brought life, salvation, and forgiveness to all humankind.