Get Away from Here, for Herod Wants to Kill You

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, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition)

We seem to have entered into a moratorium in my household on the phrase “the cruelty is the point.” Like many people, we got a lot of mileage out of it during the first Trump administration, and after 2020 it remained a convenient shorthand for authoritarian agendas across global politics, but eventually it began to feel obvious rather than insightful. And about two months ago I noticed my wife’s social media language had escalated. 

You’ve probably seen people lamenting online that current American policies on matters such as immigration, foreign aid, diplomatic relations, medical science, and the very existence of transgender people will “get people killed.” If we could just make the politicians understand this, the sentiment runs, surely they could persuade their leaders to govern more responsibly.

No, my wife counters: This regime and its supporters want people to die.

I can’t bring myself to disagree, although I still can’t quite make out whether all of them actually desire mass deaths or simply don’t care if they bring those deaths about. I get the distinct impression, though, that at least some of the more enthusiastic eugenicists in that crowd can’t wait to see “the weak” die off in the next pandemic, economic catastrophe, or genocidal purge. And the vehemence of the persecution waged against trans people around the world speaks for itself.

(If you’re paying close attention to trans people’s concerns, you know many of them have a clear sense of the deeper intent behind the proposed laws aimed at curtailing their basic rights—and the rhetoric fueling that project.)

Matthew and Mark tell us Herod Antipas lived in fear of John the Baptist, whom he had had executed, and thought John had returned from the dead. (Luke’s Herod acknowledges that rumor but can’t decide what to believe.) I don’t know whether he ever connected Jesus to the prophecies that led his father, Herod the Great, to order the slaughter of infants in Bethlehem. It does seem safe to say, though, that Herod saw in Jesus a challenge to the power he had secured for himself by collaborating with the Roman Empire, and wanted to eliminate him as he might any political threat.

Of course, Jesus posed more than a political threat.

In his sermon The Lamb’s War Against the Man of Sin, the Quaker minister James Nayler reminded Friends that Jesus had come “to make war with the god of this world,” who had led much of humanity astray. As the Lamb, Jesus would “judge this deceiver openly before all the creation, showing that his ways, fashions, and customs are not how God ordered man to live in the beginning.” The Lamb’s War may have begun in first-century Judea, but Nayler declared it had never stopped. Indeed, many Friends believe it continues to this day.

“Is this your war?” Nayler asked readers:

“Is this your calling, and are you faithful to Him that has called you, so that you can by no means bow to the god of this world, nor his ways, even to save your lives or credit or estates in the world? And yet can you serve the lowest creature in the way of God, though it mean the loss of all?”

(I should clarify: Friends do not fight this war with conventional military weapons. In Nayler’s Christ-centered formulation, which draws heavily on Paul’s message to the Ephesians regarding spiritual warfare, the Lamb’s troops rely upon “the Spirit of the Father and the Son… and [our] paths are prepared with the gospel of peace and good will towards all the creation of God.”)

Jesus went to Jerusalem to invite everyone caught in the grip of empire to re-embrace God’s plan for humanity. He knew full well that Herod might try to have him killed to squash any potential rebellion among the people—just as today’s Herods must similarly dream of wiping away the marginalized people who dare, sometimes by simply existing, to expose the flaws in an ideology that calls empathy weakness and esteems the acquisition of wealth above all else. 

Whether or not we believe in the divine aspects of Jesus’s life and work, his social vision invites each of us to make our own stand and confront today’s empires with the promise of a loving community. Perhaps the ruling powers will simply ignore us; perhaps, if we kick up enough fuss, they will attempt to push us aside or lock us away out of view. Perhaps they might even try to kill us.

Let’s show those foxes they can’t scare us off the path to Jerusalem—or Washington, D.C., or Moscow, or Budapest, or Istanbul, or anywhere else they’ve planted their thrones.