photo by Alain Rouiller, under Creative Commons licence
Jesus always likes
to use vivid, familiar images to catch the attention of his audience.
In today’s Gospel reading (Luke 13:31-35), he uses images of animals - the
fox, and the mother hen brooding her chicks.
Jesus has set his feet on the road to Jerusalem, to the Temple at the
heart of Jewish religious life, where he knows that he must confront his
opponents. He is not rushing, but wending his way slowly through the towns and
villages on the way, where he continues to teach his followers, and to heal
those who come to him.
Let us travel in our imaginations with him, standing close to him, where we can hear him speak.
Jesus is in the territory of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, a
client state of the Roman Empire.
His family has form. Herod Antipas is the son of King Herod the Great,
who had ordered the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem after Jesus’s birth
there. And Herod Antipas ordered the beheading of Jesus’s cousin John the
Baptist, at the behest of his wife Herodias. He is a violent and dangerous petty
ruler.
Some Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him ‘Get away from
here’,
they say, ‘for Herod wants to kill you’. The Pharisees in
the Gospels are often portrayed as bitter enemies of Jesus, as many were. Perhaps
these Pharisees have been sent by Herod to threaten Jesus, or maybe they just
want to get Jesus off their own patch. But I prefer to think that they came to
warn Jesus because they admired and respected him. We know that some Pharisees did:
Nicodemus, for instance, who came to Jesus by night to discuss his teaching,
and who helped to bury him after the Crucifixion.
Jesus replies to them with the first vivid image. ‘Go and tell that fox for me’, he begins. People then saw foxes as both
sly and destructive, as those who keep chickens still do today. But they also
saw them as dirty, impure, because they scavenged in rubbish tips for dead,
rotting meat. To call Herod a fox in public is a great insult – perhaps a bit like
a Russian in Red Square today loudly describing Putin as a vulture. Imagine your
shock, and the shock running through the crowd, when you hear Jesus’s words!
With his eyes wide open to the danger Herod represents, Jesus refuses
to run away from his ministry. ‘Listen’, he says, ‘I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on
the third day I finish my work.’ Then, says Jesus, ‘I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed
away from Jerusalem.’ He will reach Jerusalem in time for Passover, when
the city will be crowded with people, both up from the country, and from across
the Roman Empire.
By the time Jesus’s words are reported back to Herod, it will be too late for Herod to send his men to arrest and kill him. Jesus will have left Herod’s domains, walking the road to Jerusalem with his disciples, in obedience to his loving Father’s will. There he will confront the religious and political leaders, with his prophetic message. We are following him on that road this Lent. It leads to his crucifixion on Good Friday, and resurrection on Easter morning.
Jesus knows what he must expect when he reaches Jerusalem. He laments: ‘Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those
who are sent to it!’
Jerusalem is the seat of Jewish political and religious power, and a
headquarters of Roman imperial rule in Judea. Those who speak truth to power
never receive a welcome, but that is what Jesus is going to do when he gets there.
In the OT story, time and again the children of Israel go astray from
God’s ways and reject the prophets, sent by God to bring them back to the right
path. Jesus knows himself to be sent by God in that same tradition. He has
already suffered rejection on a previous visit to Jerusalem. But still Jesus
yearns for the people to come to his call, where he can nurture them, and teach
them the ways of God’s kingdom.
‘How often’, he exclaims, ‘have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her
brood under her wings, and you were not willing!’
Jesus employs a second lovely image – that of a mother hen brooding and
protecting her chicks. Can’t you just see these little balls of fluff, so tiny,
so fragile, so vulnerable to predators?
Surely this must be how God sees us - like curious little chicks, scattering this way and that, wandering in the farmyard and even out the gate, wandering far from our mother hen, far from Jesus, far from God’s love, easy prey for foxes.
We are not so very different from the pious Jews of Jerusalem in
Jesus’s time, I think.
It seems so in our nature to wander wilfully. We often ignore God’s
call to love him as he loves us, and to love our neighbour as ourselves, which
makes us easy prey for many evils. The evil of selfishness that hurts other
people. The evil of greed that wounds the beautiful, bountiful world we have
been placed in. The evil of hatred that causes war and oppression. Evil is
real. We see it in the war in the Ukraine. We can see it all around us.
Many today are just as oblivious to the dangers as the pious Jews of
Jesus’s day were. To them, Jesus says, ‘I tell you, you
will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who
comes in the name of the Lord”’. When Jesus finally enters Jerusalem riding
on a donkey, Luke (19:38) tells us that a multitude of his disciples greeted
him in these very words. But not the pious Jews of Jerusalem.
By his life and teaching, death and resurrection, Jesus has shown his
disciples – those who have seen him – that’s you and me - how to resist and
defeat evil. He tells us that he will be with us always, and he sends his Holy
Spirit to guide us, to be like a mother hen to us, gathering us under the
shelter of her wings.
But Jesus does not give up on those who have yet to see him. He also
tells us that we are to go out and make disciples of all nations, to gather all
people under those protective wings.
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