Lent 2, Year C

“What do you want?” In the play, the actor who is playing the part of the stage

manager asks that question to the other characters near the beginning of the play. The

characters call out what that each of them wants. “Money!” says one. “Love!” says

another. “Glory!” says another. “Everything!” says another. He asks them “What are

you prepared to do to get what you want?” And the rest of the play explores the lengths

that they will go to, to get what it is they want. The play is Vanity Fair, Kate Hamill’s

lively adaptation of William Thackeray’s 1848 novel. It wrestles with the love-hate

relationships the various characters have with issues of class and money and social

structures and gender as they scheme to get what they want. The characters interact with

each other throughout most of the play. But every once in a while, one of them will step

forward and address the audience directly, to tell the audience “Don’t judge my faults as

if you have no faults of your own. You have the same faults that we do here.”

The question, “What do you want?” comes up in today’s gospel passage as well.

One of the scripture scholars that I was reading pointed out something that I had not seen

before because it gets lost in translation. And that is the fact that the Greek word for

“want” comes up three times in today’s passage.

The first one is the place where some Pharisees come to tell Jesus, “Herod wants

to kill you.” There is some scholarly debate about what is going on here. Especially

since Luke goes to the trouble of saying some Pharisees, I’m inclined to think that Luke

is not lumping all of the Pharisees together as a monolithic entity; he sees their

individuality. So it seems likely to me that even though the Pharisees may not all agree

with Jesus on everything, that there are some of them who don’t want to see him

murdered, and that they’re trying to do him a favor and warn him that his life is in danger

and he needs to keep that in mind. Some of them may be sincere about warning him that

Herod wants to kill him.

While Jesus is in some ways defiant toward Herod’s wanting to kill him, he

responds by placing it in a larger context of the desire to kill the prophets, which is a

recurring theme throughout scriptural history. It is the prophet’s job to point out the

people’s sins: very often sins of oppressing of the poor, sins of injustice, sins of greed,

sins of misusing of power, sins of violating God’s law, all sorts of sins of selfishness, and

all sorts of sins of wandering away from where God calls us to go. People usually don’t

want to hear that. And so, instead of changing our lives to bring them back in line with

God’s law, it is a very common tendency to deal with the prophet’s message by simply

killing the prophet and getting rid of that message. And Jesus places Herod’s wanting to

kill him in that context as he laments for Jerusalem.

There is also, I think, the same thing going on here as is going on with the play.

That is that it’s very easy for those of us who are in the audience watching this scriptural

drama to judge the people of that time and that place and say, “oh yes, they’ve got all

those faults. We don’t have any of those faults ourselves.” Like the characters in the

play, scripture often tells us that we’re the pot calling the kettle black.

So the first time “want” appears is Herod wants to kill you. The second one is

where Jesus is expressing this lament over Jerusalem and he says, “I have wanted to

gather you under my wings the way a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.

The third time is right after that: “But you didn’t want to”: “you were not willing” in

some translations. It’s the same word. I wanted to gather you. You didn’t want to.

We get plenty of images in the scriptures of Jesus as a father. One of them is the

well-known parable of the prodigal son and the forgiving father that comes up in our

lectionary two weeks from now. Here Jesus is giving us something a little different.

Jesus is speaking of himself as a loving mother, a mother hen to these little chicks. And

the desire, the wanting, of this mother, to offer love to her chicks, to gather them in the

warmth and protection of her wings. And what the chicks want is to scamper around in

search of the next shiny object, scurrying around to find what they think they want

because they don’t know that everything that they truly want is right there with her in the

loving embrace of their mother.

Lent is a time in which the Church offers us the opportunity to do two things.

One of them is to hear the call of the prophets for repentance and to turn away from all

the things in our lives that we think we want and our scampering after them. The other

invitation that Lent gives us is to be able to turn back to what we truly want, which is the

maternal embrace of God who provides all the love and warmth and care we truly want.

We don’t have to go out to scatter ourselves in distant places to find it. We don’t have to

go to great lengths to try to get what we want, because everything we truly want is

already here for us in the loving embrace of God, who wants nothing more than to love

us.