The fox and the hen – a sermon about the journey to resurrection

Sermon given at Creaton United Reformed Church, 17 March 2019. Text: Luke 13:31-35. See also earlier address about Abram and covenant.

We’re all about the animals in this passage. St Patrick is said to have chased the snakes out of Ireland (he didn't), but here we have a fox and a hen appearing. They make a nice contrast, and we’ll come back to them later.

Image: Endless Road by Margret Hofheinz-Doring,
via Vanderbilt University

So Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem. The gospel of Luke has a lot to say about journeys, and especially the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem. We first hear about him ‘setting his face to Jerusalem’ in chapter 9, and the account of Palm Sunday is in chapter 19. In other words it takes 10 chapters, out of a book with 24 chapters, for him to reach Jerusalem after he starts on his way there. And he’s still got a long way to go, here in chapter 13. There’s an admirable sense of determination here. Jesus is absolutely sure he’s got to be there, to accomplish his task. And yet also lots of things happen on the journey. Much of Jesus’ ministry, his teaching and his miracles, his encounters with crowds and with individuals, happens on the road to Jerusalem. He’s on the journey, but part of that journey is what he does on the way.

Why Jerusalem? Why does it matter so much? That might sound a strange question, but why was his work not happening in Galilee? Or further afield, in one of the Roman garrison towns such as Caesarea Philippi, or even in Rome itself? That might sound an odd question, but the answer sheds important light on Jesus and his mission. He was going to Jerusalem because he was a Jew, and because to the Jewish people, Jerusalem was the most important place in the world. It was the place where God and humanity communicated. It was the place of worldly power and authority, but it mattered much more as being the place of spiritual authority. Everything that mattered happened in Jerusalem. It’s not literally true when Jesus says that all the prophets were killed in Jerusalem – Jeremiah died in Egypt and Ezekiel died in the land of the Chaldeans, to name two, but it expresses the truth that Jerusalem was absolutely central to Jewish life.

We do well to remember this, in our fevered atmosphere of us-and-them, of Leavers and Remainers, of Jews and Muslims, of Protestant and Catholic. There’s no us-and-them between Jesus and the Jews, and when we find Jewish leaders persecuting Jesus that doesn’t reflect some kind of separation, and should never ever have been a justification for the church’s poisonous brand of antisemitism that has marred our faith for centuries and killed so many. The Jews are not the enemy here. Likewise, the gospels are full of invective against Pharisees, but that’s mostly because Jesus was so close to the ideas of the Pharisees so it was one of those wars of small differences, like the Judean People’s Front against the People’s Front of Judea in Life of Brian. There were differences of emphasis, but Jesus is forever hanging out with Pharisees, often arguing with them, but eating and spending time with them. And importantly we see Pharisees warning Jesus that Herod’s out to get him. So the Pharisees aren’t the enemy either.

So who is the enemy? That would be Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, ruler of Galilee under the Romans, killer of John the Baptist and eventually of Jesus. Herod Antipas ruled for 41 years, and while he wasn’t the worst of the Romans’ client kings, like all rulers of the day he was dedicated to power, violence, hierarchy and exclusion. And by contrast, Jesus was dedicated to the opposite of these – to living with the outcasts and marginalised, to preaching hope to the downtrodden, to proclaiming the kingdom where power would be turned on its head. He had a job to do, he said – to cast out demons and perform cures. He knew Herod was the opposite of this worldview, had the opposite mission to him in the world.

And thus the fox reference. In the Greek world, foxes were cunning and quite impressive – think of Aesop’s fables. But in the Jewish world, they were a destructive pest, and their cunning was one of evil rather than something to be impressed by. They got in the way, and they were horrible. But they also weren’t the worst of enemies that could be found in the animal kingdom. It’s not like Jesus called Herod after the kinds of animals that threatened people and sheep in Israel – say a lion, or a wild beast, or even an eagle like the Roman one. So there’s a double insult here – Jesus is being quite dismissive of Herod, at the same time as he’s saying he’s untrustworthy. He’s a nasty piece of work, but he’s also not up to much. I’ve been thinking about Harry Potter analogies here – the cunning and nasty bit sounds a bit like Jesus is saying Herod should be in Slytherin, except it would be a version of Slytherin that was simultaneously nasty and a bit rubbish.

Jesus, of course, has a nice farmyard contrast to the fox. He wants to nurture the people of Jerusalem like a hen protects its chicks under its wings. I love this image, because it’s so loving and caring. It reminds me of the Celtic blessing that ends ‘until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his hand’. God will hold us all in the palm of God’s hand, and will care for us under her wings. It’s also a feminine image that stands in contrast to all those God-the-father images. Many of us know perfectly well that God has no gender, yet the scriptures are saturated with masculine imagery, and sometimes they’re not good enough to capture the full nature of God. If we can only think of God as a father, and our father was abusive or controlling or absent, how can we love God? If we only have images such as Lord God of Hosts, at the front of armies, how can we react if our lives have been blighted by war? God goes beyond gender, but our images don’t. At best we might have a sense of the holy spirit as female, but even that gets resisted by some people. And yes, Jesus as a human being was male, but a man who can’t embrace feminine imagery for themselves is emotionally impoverished. So I really like this image of Jesus the mother hen.

Image: Circle of Hope

But of course Jesus notes that ultimately he was expecting to be rejected by people in Jerusalem. Because he’s realistic about what he’s facing. He knows that whether or not people saying “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”, as of course happened on Palm Sunday, his ideas are too radical to be accepted. He knows that what he preaches, the way he lives, goes against the ideas that the powerful in his world will accept.

Jesus knows that when he finally gets to Jerusalem, he’ll face struggle and death. And he’s willing to embrace it, but I don’t think that’s the point of his journey. Because in this reading we hear twice about Jesus finishing his work on the third day. Not the day of the cross, but of the empty tomb. Not the crucifixion, but the resurrection.

And here’s the good news about this passage. We heard in the first reading that God formed a covenant which, if broken, required the death of God. Well we know that covenant was broken many times. We know that relationships between humanity and God broke down, and have broken down. But they broke down precisely because of the violence and oppression which Herod Antipas and the Roman Empire stood for. And they weren’t going to be cured by a continuation of the same thing again.

So for Jesus to die wasn’t enough. That wouldn’t solve anything. The cross by itself, that instrument of torture and Roman power, solved nothing. But what came next was the third day. The day when God took the power of violence and turned it on its head, when the nurturing God remade not just the covenant with Abraham but every covenant, and every idea of every covenant. On Easter Sunday, God changed the rules themselves. He brought up the powerless, and sent the rich away empty.

Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem wasn’t to go and get himself killed. He went with a much more important mission – to change the nature of the world, to set aside the power of empire and to bring forward the new reign of God on earth.

So as we prepare in the coming month to journey towards Easter, we must remember that when we stand for equality and justice, and stand against authority and power, we are on the side of Jesus. When we approach defeat by the powers of the world, we are in the same position as Jesus. And we can be assured that, like Jesus found, love and hope will prevail even in the deepest darkness. Amen.