Some Pharisees come with what sounds like a friendly warning: 31"Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." Whether their motive is concern or a convenient way to move Jesus along, Luke leaves unstated. Herod had already killed John the Baptist (Luke 9:9), so the threat is not idle. Jesus' answer refuses to be rattled: 32"Go and tell that fox." A fox is a small predator, and he dismisses the region's most powerful ruler with the word. His work continues, healing and casting out demons today and tomorrow, and 32"the third day I finish my course." The timetable is set by his Father, and no king's convenience changes it. Jesus walks at the pace God set, neither fleeing nor stalling.
Then he names what actually drives it: 33"it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem." The line is bitter irony, spoken matter-of-factly. Jerusalem, which should be the safest place in Israel for God's messengers, has become the place where prophets die, a pattern so consistent that Jesus states it as a rule. The danger was always Jerusalem's, not Herod's, and Jesus has already set his face to go there (Luke 9:51).
What follows is grief, spoken to the city by name, twice. Jesus will address Martha by name twice in her anxious distraction (Luke 10:41) and Simon twice before his failure (Luke 22:31). The doubled name carries tenderness, aimed even at a city about to reject him. He names Jerusalem's violent history plainly, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it, and then he reaches for an image of aching longing: gathering her brood under her wings. How often tells us that the longing has a long history. A hen shelters her chicks by instinct, at cost to herself, putting her own body between danger and the young. Jesus pictures himself this way toward Jerusalem, willing and longing to gather a city that refused to be gathered.
35"Behold, your house is forsaken." The temple stands under a verdict already rendered. And yet the passage does not close in despair. They will not see him until they say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. A crowd of pilgrims will shout those words when Jesus rides toward the city (Luke 19:38), and the answer Jesus has in mind still lies further off, in the day when Jerusalem itself says them and means them. The grief is real, and so is the door left open behind it. Even a city with this history has not said its last word. Luke's Gospel will end with the disciples in Jerusalem, worshiping in the temple (Luke 24:52-53), so the story of the city continues past the verdict.
Where have you been unwilling to be gathered? The longing in this passage is a hen with her wings already open. Do not wait for the house to feel forsaken before you say, and mean, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Prayer
Father, thank you for a Son whose grief over rejection never hardened into indifference, who kept longing to gather even the city that would kill him. Where we have been unwilling to be gathered, however long our resistance has run, meet us with the same patient, aching love. Let us say, and mean, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. In Jesus' name, amen.