Jesus' Fiercest Insult

Jesus' Fiercest Insult--July 13, 2018

"At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, 'Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.' He said to them, '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 outside of Jerusalem'." [Luke 13:31-33]

For a guy who is often referred to as the "Prince of Peace," Jesus sure knows how to wield sharp words like a sword.  In fact, I would suggest that this scene gives us the fiercest insult--what the cool kids these days would call a sick burn--we ever find on Jesus' lips in the Gospels.  And really, it's a doozy.

But hold on for a moment. It's not what we might expect. The real insult here in this episode isn't simply that Jesus calls Herod a "fox," although that would have surely been something of a slap in the face by itself.  (Foxes, after all, are unclean animals, and notorious for eating the chicks around the henhouse, whereas Jesus will describe himself in the next few verses as a mother hen who intends to gather those scared chicks under her wing.  The message was clear: Herod was the predator, and Jesus was the defender.)  But no, the fact that Jesus calls Herod a name isn't really the insult, and the name-calling isn't really much of a sign of Jesus' power. 

No, the real insult, the game-changer in these scene, is not that Herod is crafty or sneaky like a fox.  It is that, in Jesus' eyes, Herod is irrelevant.  That is utterly damning.

That is a gutsy thing to say on Jesus' part.  But truthfully, the real power of Jesus is that he is undeterred, unintimidated, unhindered by all the threats and bluster that come out of the mouth of the royal windbag named Herod.  Jesus hears the report from the Pharisees, a report surely intended to spook Jesus and make him go into hiding... and Jesus just keeps heading on course anyway.  Jesus treats Herod as a non-entity--because from the perspective of Jesus' mission to bring the Reign of God near, Herod is, quite simply, irrelevant.  

Herod, of course, didn't like this kind of talk at all.  This Herod would have been Herod Antipater, son of the famed king Herod the Great who renovated the Temple in Jerusalem and had tried to have the infant Jesus killed in Bethlehem (which then forced Joseph to take Mary and the baby and seek asylum in Egypt). Herod the Great, by the way, was so insecure and concerned that he be mourned as a great ruler when he died, that according to one Jewish historian of the time, he instructed that a large number of important Jewish citizens be rounded up and killed when he died, so that there would be displays of grief on the occasion of his death. The Herod family had been placed in power by the Romans, which made the Herod of Jesus' insult basically an installed puppet-rule. He wasn't even ethnically Jewish, either--Herod the Great's father had been Nabatean, and there was Idumean and Samaritan in the family line, but those were all neighboring groups.  So, right off the bat, this is a peach of a guy, in a family tree full of such peaches.

All of this is to say that Herod Antipas was a pretender--claiming to be more powerful than he really was, wishing to be more loved than he really was, and even faking a piety that was never really his.  He was an entitled, insecure, egomaniacal, blustering blowhard who was intimidated by the rumblings and rumors he had heard about a homeless itinerant rabbi named Jesus.  And so he did the only thing that entitled, insecure egomaniacal, blustering blowhards know how to do: he made big loud obnoxious threats.  And he was sure that he could make this troublemaking rabbi, this... Jesus of Nazareth, back down and be quiet without any more talk of the Kingdom of God (which undeniably would have sounded like a threat to the installed puppet-king).  Herod expected that he could make Jesus do what Herod himself would have done--go and hide like a coward somewhere.  Herod was sure that with enough big talk and loud bullying, he could make himself look "tough" and "great," while making this upstart rabbi look like a weak loser.  Standard bully playbook, right?

Except, here's the thing.  Jesus won't be intimidated.  Jesus won't be thwarted or turned aside.  Jesus won't let the blustering blowhard stop him from his mission, and Jesus says as much.  "Go and tell that fox," Jesus says, before getting to the real slap in the face: "Tell Herod that he doesn't scare me one bit, and I am not going to be stopped in my work healing the sick and casting out evil, no matter what he says he's gonna do.  You tell Herod for me that he is, in a word, irrelevant."

Jesus is not naïve.  That much is obvious, too.  Jesus doesn't just have an optimistic wish that everything will turn our fine and that he'll be safe.  He knows he is headed toward Jerusalem, and that there is a cross waiting for him.  But as all the Gospel writers make clear, Jesus isn't simply some helpless victim taken advantage of by the religious and political rulers of the day.  Jesus lays down his life knowing that is exactly where the story is headed.  But Herod won't make him afraid.  No, and that is at the heart of Jesus' power--not that Jesus is blind to the danger of the puppet king with an army at his disposal, but that Jesus sees it head on and just won't be stopped.  Jesus sees the danger... and he keeps on going anyway.  Jesus sees the way his presence infuriates the blustering bully tyrant... and he stays on course anyway.   Jesus sees the easy path he could take if he just chickened out and kept his mouth shut... and he refuses the easy path anyway.  That is Jesus' kind of power.

And that is exactly what infuriates and perplexes Herod the most.  Jesus doesn't get violent back, and give Herod a reason to arrest him or have him killed yet.  Jesus doesn't sink to Herod's level and make threats back.  Jesus doesn't go making fun of Herod's wife, or family, or anything else.  No, Jesus does something that is at the same time less hateful and more devastating than any of those, something without bitterness at all, but with more of a blow to Herod's ego than the worst insult he could lob:  Jesus speaks and acts as though Herod, for all his threats and saber-rattling, simply don't matter.  They do not factor into his equations, and they do not enter into his calculations.  Herod is a non-entity.  And that is the one thing the Herods of the world cannot stand: having to see that their bluster and threats, their attempts to look "great" and "tough" are all irrelevant... and that they cannot thwart the real presence or power of the Reign of God. Herod bellows and rages... but Jesus remains calm and simply keeps on keeping on, not varying a lick from his course of action, because Herod simply does not have power over Jesus.  And that is the one thing a pompous puppet-king like Herod cannot bear.  Jesus exposes the truth--at most, that old fox Herod will be a footnote in history, remembered, if at all, for being the guy who couldn't stop an unarmed penniless traveling rabbi and his ragtag band of followers from turning the world upside down, even though Herod had riches and armies and the cultivated aura of "greatness," and Jesus was just "the carpenter's son."

This, dear friends and followers of Jesus, is our power as well.  Notice how utterly Jesus rattles Herod without so much as a sword or a spear.  Notice how completely Jesus exposes the empty, hollow husk who wears the crown, simply by not letting fear back Jesus into a corner.  Look at how impotent Herod is revealed to be, if he can't even get this bumpkin from Nazareth to lay off his preaching and healing.  It doesn't mean that there isn't still a cross waiting--it just means that we don't have to be ruled by fear of it.  To walk the way of Jesus doesn't mean we won't take on additional heartache, or share the pain of others, or have mean words lobbed at us by angry bellowing Herods--it just means that we are free from being ruled by their anger.  And in that freedom is a power that Herods past and present simply do not understand.

The power of Jesus--and the power given to his people--is the power to go on loving, even when the loudest voices in the room only know how to shout from their own fears, insecurities, and bitterness.

You are free, dear people of Jesus.  You are free from all that.  Free to keep on speaking life and embodying grace for the world.  Herod cannot stop you.  And here's the secret that even fox ol' Antipas knows: no power of the day, past or present, can stop the Reign of God unfolding.

Dear Jesus, give us the power of your courage and love in the face of bluster and bitterness.  Give us the power to keep on embodying your Reign.