Severed Animals

 

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, AD 2025 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Have you ever been chased by a chicken? They prove to be impressively ferocious.

When I was a kid, I was taught that birds evolved from dinosaurs—which is true, strictly speaking, but is kind of akin to saying that mammals evolved from other mammals. Because birds don’t just descend from dinosaurs; they are dinosaurs, the only ones left. If you ever watch a chicken eat a mouse, you’ll realize it’s really just a little feathered T-rex.

Our readings today have to do with the ferocious love of God, so intense as often to seem scandalous, shocking, beneath the dignity of the divine. We start off with Abraham, the spiritual father of us all. God gave to Abraham a promise: that even in his advanced old age, he would have a family; and that family would become a people; and that people would become a nation; and through that nation God would bless all the peoples of the earth.

By the time of our reading this morning, in Genesis Chapter 15, it has been a decade since God first made this promise, a decade that Abraham does not think that he can spare. He has prospered, certainly, as God has led the way. Obstacles have crumbled before him. But he still doesn’t have what he was promised; he still doesn’t have a son to be his heir, a son by his wife Sarah. God keeps saying that it’s coming—in fact, His promises only get bigger—yet the years continue to roll on by, and Abraham ain’t gettin’ any younger.

And so God cuts a covenant. Now, a covenant isn’t quite a contract. It doesn’t lay out the duties incumbent upon each party. Rather, a covenant cements a permanent relationship, a permanent commitment, pledging the parties one to another. Of course, this is the Middle Bronze Age, so things tend to get a little gory; the squeamish don’t last overlong within the Bible. To seal the pact, Abraham kills a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtledove, and a pigeon, splitting the beasts in twain.

The ritual for the covenant would consist of a man walking between the severed halves, as if to say, “May what happened to these animals also happen to me, should I ever break my faith with you.” It’s very visceral, very dramatic. But Abraham doesn’t walk it, does he? No. As darkness descends and sleep weighs upon him, he sees a smoking pot and flaming torch pass between the corpses. And this of course is God, as any good Judean ought to know; for when Moses led the Exodus from slavery unto freedom, God guided them through the wilderness in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

It is God, not Abraham, who cuts this covenant. It is God, not Abraham, who says, “May what happened to these animals also happen to Me, should I ever break my faith with you.” And that’s pretty shocking. God pledges His life to His people, upon penalty of death. You’ll never read anything similar of Ra or Zeus or Thor. What god would die for human beings? What god would die for love?

Enter Jesus. Skip ahead a couple thousand years from Abraham to our Gospel reading for this morning, and we find the Pharisees, so often unfairly painted as the villains of the New Testament, trying to save Jesus’ life. A Herod is out to get Him once again. This would be Herod Antipas, one of the sons of Herod the Great, who features so prominently in our Nativity narratives. The horrid House of Herod governed the Holy Land under the auspices of Rome. Herod had been a puppet-king; his sons were puppet-tetrarchs.

Why Herod Antipas hunts for Jesus, we don’t quite know, other than Jesus’ tendency to rile up a crowd. Mark and Matthew indicate that Herod fears Jesus as John the Baptist back from the dead. But honestly, no Herod ever needed much of an excuse to kill someone, again. After the beheading of John the Baptist, Jesus “sets His face” toward Jerusalem. With His Forerunner dead, the Christ knows that His time too is soon at hand. He must make one last pilgrimage from Galilee to the Temple, there to bear the Cross we have prepared.

“Tell that fox,” Jesus says of Herod, “that I will continue to do the work of God, curing and casting out demons, and on the third day be on My way, for it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside Jerusalem.” He’s in no rush, in other words. He’s not afraid of Herod, yet must be on His way nonetheless. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” He laments, “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

It’s a bit of wordplay: Herod the fox, Jesus the hen. Yet hens can be ferocious in their way. Christ has come to gather all His wayward children home, even as He knows we will reject Him; even as He knows that we will kill Him. All our sin cannot deter His love. “See,” He continues, “your house, your temple, is left to you. And you will not see Me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”

And we know of which He speaks, do we not? We know as well as those who recognized the torch and fire pot. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord”—that’s Palm Sunday. That’s how we shall hail Him, as He comes to die. He knows what’s going to happen, Luke makes clear, yet Jesus will not waver. He comes to gather us home, as a mother hen her chicks.

There was a Pharaoh Akhenaten, between Abraham and David, to whom people point when seeking history’s first monotheist. In his time, the Egyptian temples and their priesthoods had wrestled much power away from the throne, rivaling the authority of Pharaoh. And so Akhenaten outlawed the temples of the gods, worshipping instead One God, Aten, made visible in the burning disk of the sun. Yet the common folk were not allowed to worship Aten directly. No, that honor fell to Pharaoh, to Akhenaten alone.

People prayed to Pharaoh, the son of God on earth, while Pharaoh prayed to Aten, the only living God. It was as much a political power play as it was religious, and triggered a backlash as soon as he was dead, but kings around the ancient world took note. A few centuries later, King David came to power, uniting the Twelve Tribes of Israel under one crown, at a single capital city with a single centralized Temple. Here the king also called himself a son of God, while rival sites of worship were suppressed.

Jesus notes this duality of Jerusalem. On one hand, it is His Father’s house, the one true Temple of the one true God. Jesus follows the Torah His whole life long, coming faithfully to Jerusalem multiple times a year, for the observance of the high holy days. On the other hand, Jesus calls Jerusalem out for what it truly is: the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. He acknowledges its sanctity yet scoffs at its structures of power. The Temple, for Jesus, is at once both holy and wholly corrupt.

And so its time at last has come. Soon and very soon, not one stone shall be left upon another. The true Son of God will not monopolize monotheism, will not keep God from His people, but shall break the Temple open, tearing in twain the sacred curtain. “The time is coming,” He prophesies, “when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem … but the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.”

The severed animals, the Man on the Cross, the broken-open Temple: these are all one and the same. These are all the love of God, willing to go to any extreme, to go to hell and back, in order to bring us home in Him—even as we murder Him! “I will die for you,” our God declares, “before I would ever forsake you.” And we made sure that He did, didn’t we? Yet even the Cross couldn’t stop Him. It barely slowed Him down.

The love of God is scandalous; ridiculous; ferocious. It is the love of a Mother for Her child. Nothing will keep God from His people, from fulfilling His promise to us all—not the Cross, not the Tomb, not the deepest pits of Hell—for when that Love encounters death, it’s then that death must die.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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