Delivered on Sunday 21 October 2007 in St George's Chapel

Luke 13:31-35

Our New Testament reading this morning is a curious one. A group of Pharisees rush up to our Lord. "Jesus, sorry to interrupt you but you really ought to get away from here; we've heard on the grapevine that Herod wants to kill you." I don't suppose for a moment that Jesus was taken in by this charming show of concern. For that is why the passage is curious. Up until this point, the Pharisees have shown no genuine interest in Jesus. We first met the Pharisees in Luke's account when Jesus healed the paralysed man. On that occasion the Pharisees accused Jesus of blasphemy. We next meet them when they challenge Jesus about not keeping the Sabbath; he does not keep the commandments. A little later one of the Pharisees invites Jesus to his home for a spot of dinner, only to wonder why Jesus doesn't see that the woman with the perfume jar is really a prostitute, a sinner. Still later another Pharisee tries the dinner invitation only to observe that Jesus fails to wash before dinner; he fails to keep the law. Jesus is not doing terribly well. According to the Pharisees he blasphemes, he refuses to keep the commandments, he keeps company with sinners, and he fails to maintain the religious law. Why then, all of a sudden, do they have a change of heart? No criticism, no argument, no condemnation, only: "Jesus, sorry to interrupt you but you really ought to get away from here; we've heard on the grapevine that Herod wants to kill you."

Why the sudden change of heart? Jesus doesn't flinch - he takes the comment at face value: "You go and tell that fox, that he knows right well where I am; I am on my way Jerusalem". But he too knows right well that there has been no sudden change of heart. This is not a genuine show of concern; it is an attempt to divert. He can hear the plotting of the Pharisees: "If we can get this Jesus off the road to Jerusalem we'll be able to convince the crowds that he is a false prophet; let's try and persuade him to save himself". And so it is - in this frame of mind - that they approach Jesus. At all costs let us deflect him from Jerusalem. But Jesus was having none of it - he would continue his journey to Jerusalem even in the knowledge that that journey would lead to his death. He knew that his business was the urgent business of redemption, and he also knew that the real fox in this story was not Herod but the Pharisees themselves.

We're sort of used to hearing the Pharisees spoken of in these terms: hypocrites, pompous fools, foxes. But how would it sound if we were to describe our own clergy or bishops as hypocrites, pompous fools or foxes? Well of course we wouldn't do that, because that would be, in the first place disrespectful and the second place inaccurate. These terms were appropriate for the Pharisees exactly because they tried to deflect Jesus away from God's purposes. Our clergy and bishops don't go in for deflection; these charges would be entirely unfair.

Would they?

This week in the newspaper there was a horrific photograph; I wonder if any of you happened to see it. In the foreground of the photograph is a small emaciated starving Sudanese child. The child is hunched over, clearly weakened, strength draining away from moment to moment. That image is horrible enough. But look behind the child, no more than a few metres and there stands ... a vulture. The bird of prey mercilessly, but patiently waits. It can wait; it won't be long now. The first horror is the photograph. The second horror is the realisation that someone is wasting valuable time simply taking the photograph. The third horror hits when you learn that Kevin Carter, the photographer, was so haunted by the work which won him a Pulitzer prize that he took his own life. One photograph, layers of horror.

Although reprinted this week, that photograph was actually taken in 1994. It attracted great attention then as now. It is the a pictorial story of horror and - as it turns out - our unwillingness to deal with that horror, or at the very least, the ease with which we can be deflected from the urgency of the situation. Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, to his crucifixion, to the urgent business of redemption, steadfast in his path, undeflected. But which path are we on? Within the Anglican communion the two burning questions that we currently face are these: should we appoint gay bishops and should we accept female bishops? They are not unimportant questions but they are only questions of church order. They deflect our gaze away from the issue of redemption. For whatever redemption means it must surely have something to say about making this world a better place. But these church issues are distracting our gaze away from the vulture. And while we have been distracted another image has taken on a catastrophic reality. Just over the horizon there is a runaway train heading straight for. It has carriages laden with problems relating to economic equality, international health and education, environmental meltdown. These problems are not waiting patiently they are coming straight for us. But we are deflected. More interested in questions of gender and sexuality we haven't seen the vulture and we seem unperturbed by the runaway train. When we are deflected in these ways, we really ought to listen to our Lord: Go and tell that fox, "Listen: today and tomorrow I shall be driving out demons and working cures".