Seek; don’t just see – Thursday, 25^th week in ordinary time – Lk 9:7-9

In Luke 7:1-9:6 we saw how Jesus’ kingdom message is for men AND women and how it also shatters the boundaries of clean and unclean. The section opened with a the healing of the centurions slave and the raising of the widows son in Nain ( both were men) and ends with healing of a woman who had a bleeding and the raising of Jarius’ daughter ( both women)

We now enter a new section (9:7-50) which consists of the responses to Jesus as His Galilean ministry draws to an end. From 9: 51 Jesus will begin His journey to Jerusalem.  For now there is a sense a curiosity about Jesus from none other the Herod the tetrarch himself.

The passage just before this tells us that Jesus sent out the twelve to preach the kingdom of God giving them power and authority over demons, to cure diseases and to heal. We are told they went ‘everywhere’. In a flash, the ministry of Jesus has just exploded twelve times over, all throughout Galilee. They went out in Jesus’ name (not theirs) and became to the Galileans the equivalent of twelve ‘news channels’. The name of Jesus is now known with awe, wonder and respect, enough to get the rulers attention.

Herod Antipas was no friend of John the Baptist or Jesus in fact the Gospel of Luke presents him as being hostile to both. Herod was a self-serving egoistic man whose desire was no more than a titillation of the senses. On hearing of the works of Jesus, now made known even more thanks to the ministry of the twelve, he desires to “see” Jesus. Thrice, the Gospel of Luke will talk about Herod’s desire to “see” Jesus (Luke 23:8) but that is all Herod desired.

Perhaps here in lies a lesson for us too. Faith in Jesus is not a titillation of the senses; something new that comes round the corner which gets me excited only to die down again. Faith in Jesus is a long and arduous journey of consistent belief and often as the Gospel of Luke will put it, has the cross as an essential and central component.

For now Herod only desires to see and not to seek Jesus. Herod was no sinner seeking to be a saint; he had blood on his hands which he did not desire to repent of. By his own admission, the Gospel records him saying, “John, I beheaded.” This younger son of Malthace who had inherited Galilee and Perea as a tetrarch was no more than a petty prince who ruled over one forth part of a great territory. He made his way into the good books of the Emperor Tiberius by building a magnificent capital on the western shore of Galilee and named it after the Emperor.

Taking after his father, Herod the tetrarch was vain, indolent, hostile and crafty yet he knew how to curry favour with Rome. After marrying the daughter of the Nabatean King Aretas IV he repudiated her in favour of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife whom he met on a trip to Rome but was finally defeated by Aretas IV and sent into exile by the Emperor Caligula in AD 39.

Herod, as I said earlier, sought to see and not seek Jesus. Faith is not seeing the Lord but seeking Him, like the shepherds and wise men that sought the babe in Bethlehem; for faith is a journey. Our faith too should lead us to constantly ‘seek His face’ and in doing so, His will; if not we will end up like Herod ‘seeing’ a man with great powers to dazzle and entertain us. So the question is, are we ‘looking at’ or ‘looking for’ Jesus

Fr Warner D’souza