A question of character
A sermon for Second Sunday in Lent,
16 March 2025
Gen 15:1-12,17-18
Philippians 3:17-4:1
Luke 13:31-35
It’s quite nice going on a trip, isn’t it.
Most of the time – when it is to a holiday destination, or to catch up with old friends, or when it is all just a bit of an adventure.
Some journeys however, are less than desirable – usually the ones when you know that the destination is going to be painful in some way (a trip, for example, to a dentist, 10 years after one’s last visit).
The latter is the sort of journey we find Jesus on this morning. He is on a solemn, deliberate journey towards Jerusalem and the grim fate that awaits him there. You get a strong sense of the foreboding when Jesus says,
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem [he exclaims], the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! (Luke 13:34a)
Despite the unpleasant nature of the mission, Jesus forges on, not because he is reckless or beset by a death-wish but because he is responding faithfully to God’s call, to his Father’s purpose. He is the ultimate person of character or moral integrity.
As he travels, Jesus is moving largely through the region controlled by Herod Antipas, one of Herod the Great’s sons. The New Testament paints him as a complex character – attracted to the reform of John the Baptist and Jesus but too caught up in his own self-interest to allow it to remain unchecked.
Antipas controlled the area of Galilee and a strip of land (Perea) to the east of the Jordan River, south-east of Galilee that extended to a point well south of Jerusalem. This strip of land would have been a popular highway for Jewish pilgrims in the northern part of Roman-occupied Palestine to visit Jerusalem because it allowed them to avoid the region of the Samaritans that lay between them and Jerusalem. As we learn from passages such as John 4:9, there was real animosity between Jews and Samaritans – even though their beliefs were very similar. Identity politics rather than religiosity was the apparent source of friction.
Jesus describes Antipas in this morning’s Gospel as a fox – which we immediately associate with wiliness and cunning. I think that is a reasonable inference to make – Herod the Great and his sons were, almost without exception, very sharp operators and thoroughly ruthless – particularly the former. Antipas was very much his father’s son when he had John the Baptist executed (the first account of this being Mark 6:14-29), and his head served up on a plate. But unlike Herod the Great, Antipas’s actions weren’t motivated by cruelty but by political expediency.
You will recall that Antipas’ hand was forced somewhat when it came to John’s execution. He pledged publicly to his daughter, Herodias, anything she wanted after she danced at a gathering he was presiding over. When she asked for the head of John the Baptist on a platter, he was honour-bound to fulfil the request. You get the sense from the New Testament account that Herodias’ request put Antipas in a difficult position because he recognised, in his heart of hearts that John was a prophet, feared him, and was even moved by what he had to say (Mark 6:20). Unfortunately for John, Antipas’ moral character was not great; he took the path of least resistance in the circumstances and had John killed (Mark 6:27).
Antipas’ lack of integrity in this matter contrasts markedly with the moral backbone that Jesus demonstrates on his journey to Jerusalem. Jesus has committed himself to the Father’s will and is determined to do what he has been sent to do, regardless of the consequences. Both Jesus and Antipas had ‘eyes to see’ but Jesus had moral character and Antipas did not.
One of the nuances we might not pick up on when Jesus calls Herod Antipas a fox, is one that would have been immediately recognised by the Pharisees who came to warn Jesus that Herod was seeking to kill him – and by every other spectator to the event; for Jews, the fox is not only cunning, it is also unclean, like a pig; so to label Antipas a fox was to suggest, in the strongest of terms, that he was ungodly, unrighteous, un-Jewish – a risky thing indeed to say about a ruler who was concerned to keep up the appearance of his religious orthodoxy while at the same time enjoying everything that Greco-Roman culture had to offer – including dancing. In relation to the latter, when Antipas allowed his daughter to dance for the entertainment of himself and other men, he was behaving like a licentious gentile, not a modest, God-fearing Jew.
Herod Antipas was the moral antithesis of Jesus. Whereas Antipas based every decision he made on surviving in the political arena, Jesus, without exception, followed his conscience, regardless of the cost.
The model that Jesus presents us with, of total dedication to God and God’s will for the world, is a very hard act to follow. Indeed, in human terms, it is impossible to even begin to follow it. Left to our own devices, we much more naturally fit into the pattern modelled by Herod Antipas, deluding ourselves and others in our moral decision making; ‘keeping up the appearance’ of living virtuously, whilst doing whatever is permissible (or undetectable) to ‘stay in the game.’ This is the sad truth that Paul addresses in his Epistle to the Philippians this morning, and the rot sets in, he suggests, when we set our hearts on earthly things and not on the things of God:
…many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. Phil 3:18b-19
Thanks be to God, Jesus, the pioneer of our faith, has not left us to walk the narrow path of righteousness on our own. He has done the real heavy lifting for us. Through the Holy Spirit he walks beside us as we journey towards the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem that we wait in anticipation for (alluding again to the Letter to the Philippians, 3:20).
For each of us, the details of that journey will vary; we will be tried and tested through different events as our road twists and turns, but if we heed St Paul’s exhortation to stand firm in the Lord, we will emerge from that journey the better for the experience, renewed and enabled to see God’s Kingdom come.
Tony Surman