Luke 13:31-35
Introduction
Our Gospel reading this morning almost has a barnyard feel to it. If our reading was a play, there would be three main characters, the Fox, the Hen, and the City. Now it’s kind of funny to think of a city as a character, we think of it as a destination or a place in the story, but we’ll see it’s helpful for our understanding to be a character.
The drama of this story is that the Fox and Hen are on a collision course with each other and with the City.
In all of this, Jesus is in control of the story. Indeed the story is about him, about God and what God has longed to do, and what God will finally do in Jesus when the Fox the Hen, and the City come face to face.
The Fox holds no terror v31-32
This collision course is a journey to Jerusalem. More than half of Luke’s Gospel is told ‘on the go’ so to speak, with the stories taking place while Jesus is slowly making his way to Jerusalem teaching his disciples and people on the way.
But some Pharisees come to warn him of a rumour that Herod Antipas, the same Herod that had John the Baptist killed, now wanted Jesus dead.
Jesus is in Herod’s territory. We can think of Herod being based in Jerusalem. He had several palaces including one in Jerusalem. But he was specifically a tetrarch or ruler of Galilee where Jesus was from and is moving down on through.
Hence, the Pharisees warn that this isn’t the best place for Jesus to be ministering at the moment.
The way we read the gospels, often without a first-century cultural lens, means we often view the Pharisees with suspicion. As Josh reminded us a few weeks back we can sometimes see them as cardboard cut-out figures of bad guys.
It is hard to tell their motivations here, they could be trying to get Jesus to shut down his mission in the area. But if we try to put all those ideas aside here for a moment, we catch a glimpse that the warning of these Pharisees could indeed be genuine. Of all the Jewish sects in the first century, the Pharisees were closest, theologically, to Jesus. As we know, we often argue the most with those most like ourselves. Despite our conflict, we also, deep down, don’t want anything bad to happen to them. Maybe this text can help us see the Pharisees in a new light.
However their warning was intended, and Jesus brushes off the threat of Herod with an insult that would almost sound more at home in a school playground standoff rather than in the gospels.
We often think of foxes as cunning and clever. Maybe that’s down to just Aesop’s fables or Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. But for Jesus, the insult is less complimentary. Herod and the alliances of power with the Empire that he represents are dangerous to God’s people as a Fox is dangerous to Chickens in a farmyard.
We know this too in our day, those in power can and do sit on the little people. That’s how you get people to do what you want.
But for Jesus, he knows his destiny, the culmination of his life’s work is tied up in his coming death, and his resurrection, on the third day he will reach his goal.
Illustration City
I wonder if it’s a bit like a water fight. You know those family water fights you have on hot summer days? It all starts off with people trying to stay dry, but once you’re thoroughly saturated the threat of getting squirted with water doesn’t seem as effective any more does it?
Jesus’ life was thoroughly soaked in our human experience, he’s been surrounded by the ill effects of humanity’s missing the mark, the effects of injustice and danger the Fox represents. He’s been bringing life and sowing hope and healing wherever he goes. But Jesus knows the threat of the Fox, that the threat of death itself must be disarmed by walking straight into its jaws himself, allowing himself to be overcome. Entrusting himself to the love of God.
Jesus won’t let the threat of death turn him from his mission to free the world from death and injustice. The fox’s teeth must be faced.
The loved city does not want to be gathered v33-34a,35
Then there’s the character of the city. Jerusalem. Jesus says this city kills the prophets and stones those sent to it. It’s a sweeping statement, rooted in the wider prophetic tradition in Israel’s history that speaks to the many times in scripture when the people’s ears were closed to the words of their prophets. Not all of God’s messengers were killed. The ones that were, were often killed outside Jerusalem. But time and again, God’s people resisted God’s way of life.
We’re not meant to take this image as descriptive of Jerusalem itself. Jesus is not saying Jerusalem should be on a list of the world’s most dangerous cities for prophets. He’s not saying all the people there are bad eggs.
He’s definitely not dismissing the Jewish people or Judaism.
This, is why perhaps we’re better to see the city in the story as a character that stands for something.
An example of this is the Swedish-American poet Carl Sandburg personified the city of Chicago as the city as rough and broad-shouldered young man, ready for anything as he saw it carrying the burden of American industry in the early 20th Century.
Jesus personifies Jerusalem as the city, as a character that does not want to be gathered, the character that pushes away the love of God, to choose its own destiny.
In that sense, it’s a character of all humanity, through the ages, including us. It can be hard to admit, but there are moments we don’t want to be gathered by God and held in the way of Jesus.
We’d rather respond with anger than with gentleness when we rage against our enemies, big or small, rather than love them.
When we choose to ignore the quiet invitation of the Spirit to consider God’s goodness and beauty. There are times we push away the embrace of God for fear of hurt or rejection.
The story of the city that does not want to be gathered is also humanity’s story. It’s our story.
The season of Lent, as we anticipate the cross and resurrection, is traditionally also a time of self-examination and repentance. Our reading today even comes at the end of chapter 13 of Luke’s Gospel, and the whole chapter seems to be concerned with calling people in. Jesus’ time is close, and the Kingdom of God is near. Christ’s invitation to be gathered to him still stands for us today. In what ways do we notice in ourselves that we feel resistant to being gathered close to Jesus?
Jesus is stepping into our story. A story of a people who because of their brokenness do not want to be embraced. He will step into that story as the prophet, knowing that in this story, our willingness, our rebellion, and our poor choices will be the death of him. Through the work of his living dying and rising we will come to trust the embrace of the divine love and dare to say, Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
The vulnerable mother hen v34b
We also learn that Jesus, in this role of prophet, has a character of his own. He described himself as a mother Hen.
Perhaps going up against a fox we’d prefer another image of Christ, maybe the lion of the Tribe of Judah, like an Aslan-type depiction. But Jesus chooses another image for himself. A humble hen.
Children’s Farmyard stories often have illustrations of a mother hen clucking around her brood, keeping an eye on them, teaching them how to peck, scratch, and forage for food, when a threat comes or a storm rolls in, she calls them in and the chicks scurry to burrow underneath her soft feathers. A mother hen doesn’t abandon her children. She nurtures and protects them.
No picture in scripture offers us a complete picture of what God or Jesus is like. But some have had more airtime over the centuries.
Scripture also speaks of God in Motherly terms, as a divine midwife, a woman in labour, and one who provides for God’s children. When God describes God’s own character, the term for God’s compassion is closely related to the word for a mother’s womb and the connection that comes from mothering children.
Images like these and of the Mother Hen remind us that God is not only the best of what we can imagine a Father to be, but also the best of what we can imagine a Mother to be.
But, God is also none of these, and at the same time more than any of them.
Ultimately, any metaphor for God is incomplete. Especially, when our own experiences leave us hurt, and wary, creating painful associations with words and images. The language of parents and being a parent can be problematic for us. But, ultimately, all language falls short in the face of the divine Glory.
We humans have always had problems holding the expansiveness of God together in our idea of one being. In the polytheistic ancient world, it was a bit easier, you had male gods and female gods. A god of love and another god of truth, or the weather. Deities in terms we could understand and pigeonhole.
But God will not be defined in human terms, except for how God has disclosed God’s own nature. In the God of the universe, all things, sometimes seemingly contradictory things, are held together in a mystery we struggle to fathom. Love and justice, mercy and consequences.
Also, in that tension is God’s role as our divine parent, our source of life, the being in whose image we are made. A Mother and also a Father of us all.
These metaphors of divine parents have nothing to do with biology but point to God’s deeply relational nature. The scared Three in one, bound in an unbreakable relationship.
But in this relational and motherly image of the hen, what sort of mother has Jesus chosen?
Sometimes in our day, we use a different image to describe the child-protecting instincts of the Mumma bear. The Mumma bear is strong, and nurturing, but also ferocious, and territorial. A mumma bear won’t be pushed around. It’s good to be a bear cub when mumma bear is around.
But, Jesus chooses the hen. A hen is vulnerable to the Fox’s bite and death’s sting. When it comes to prowling around, she defends her children from within her compassion, not her anger. Hiding them under her wings allowing herself to be taken by the hungry predator.
In the same way, Christ has gathered us and longs to gather all God’s children under the shadow of those wings.
Christ seeing all the hurt, pain, and death in the world that our brokenness and rebellion bring, is driven by divine compassion and gave himself up for us.
The God of the universe made vulnerable and weak in Jesus, walks into the teeth of death and says in his resurrection, he will defang it.
Because of Christ’s life and death, and life, we live, now in this age and in the age to come.
The Fox, the threat of empire, of all that set itself up against the character of God still prowls the barnyard for the time being. But God’s chickens, needn’t fear its bite.
Closing
As we continue to travel toward Easter, maybe nursing wounds inflicted by all the fox represents, empire, selfishness, and death, may God’s Spirit make us aware of how we come, of our own will and resistance to the gathering of Christ
May the nature of the motherly hen of Jesus hatch in our lives the compassion of the God we love and serve.
Amen