Genesis 15:1-18
Psalm 27
Luke 13:22-35
As we gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s life last November, several of us recalled the character “Nurse Fox†from a children’s book Gram read to us when we were small. A vixen serving as an R.N. seemed perfectly normal to us as kids, our world already chock full of anthropomorphized talking animals, though it turns out nursing does not exactly fit the fox archetype. Foxes are traditionally thought of as clever, sneaky, chicken-stealing scoundrels, truly wily unlike that hapless coyote. You see a hint of this in Disney’s Zootopia, where a petty criminal, the fox Nick Wilde, is one of the co-protagonists. It is Disney, of course, so Nick has to turn out to be a good guy by the time the credits and the blooper reel roll.
It was not Disney’s first animated fox by any means. There was Br’er Fox in “Song of the South,†a 1946 mixture of live action and animation that is today seen as racist. Almost three decades later, Disney’s 21st animated feature, “Robin Hood,†had a fox in the title role, sparring with the Sheriff of Nottingham depicted as a wolf. The message is that if foxes are tricksters and steal your chickens, wolves are truly to be feared, for they will eat you. Fear of wolves is, of course, ancient.
The animated “Robin Hood†actually combined the classic tale of robbing from the rich and giving to the poor with elements of another Medieval tale, that of the fox trickster Reynard, where the opponent was also a wolf. Disney had considered making a film about Reynard and Chanticleer the Rooster in the mid 1930s, around the same time as Snow White, and the character was considered for projects again and again for the next two decades. The tales of Reynard originated in the historically-contested territory of Alsace in the 12th century and spread throughout Western Europe. So popular was the character that reynard became the French word for fox, replacing the previous word, goupil.
There are several species of fox in Palestine, so it is not surprising that Jesus refers to Herod as a fox in today’s gospel lesson.
Note that Jesus is warned about the potential danger to his life by Pharisees. We have long bought into the lie that Pharisees are always the bad guys. They sometimes are the bad guys in the gospel narratives, but Pharisees also serve as supporters and even followers of Jesus at times. In the 23rd chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, Paul describes himself late in his ministry as still being a Pharisee. Many believe that the polemic against Jews and Pharisees, the latter the founders of Rabbinic Judaism, set the stage for centuries of antisemitism that continues to this day, even though that polemic seems more informed by events after 70 C.E. than anything that happened while Jesus was alive, for Jesus was, after all, a Jew, and had much in common with the Pharisaic movement.
Also worth noting here is that the Herod mentioned is Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee. His father was Herod the Great, the puppet king when Jesus was born, the one who encountered the wise people from the east and ordered the slaughter of the infant boys of Bethlehem. Four of his sons would also be named Herod. This particular Herod, Antipas, is the one who ordered the execution of John the Baptizer, but his father’s sphere of influence had been divided, and his rule as a client of Rome did not actually include the title king, nor did it encompass Jerusalem, something that comes into play later during accounts of the trial and execution of Jesus. In this story, Jesus is still on the road, presumably still in Herod’s territory, but dismisses concerns over Herod as a threat, since he claims he can only be killed in Jerusalem, where they kill prophets, and precisely where he is headed. This is the story as seen through the lens of later events, and this particular portion of the text is unique to Luke, appearing nowhere else.
When Jesus uses the image of a fox, his contemporaries might expect the corresponding image to be the Lion of Judah, ferocious and superior in every way. Instead, Jesus gives them a hen. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!†One of the apocryphal texts found in some Bibles and written in the same century, Second Esdras, has God describing God’s own actions as “I gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,†so it appears to have been a familiar trope in sacred Hebrew writing of that era.
Of course, there is this weird disconnect in the story, at least as recounted here in Luke. Herod “the fox†is not a real danger because Jerusalem is where a prophet must die. The hen imagery itself, the final two verses, come from the lost gospel Q and are shared by Matthew. It seems likely that Luke invented the fox saying to pair with the hen image in the lament, but it doesn’t quite work. The hen doesn’t even succeed in protecting the chicks, for Jerusalem, which may or may not be the chicks, is unwilling to gather the children, and will be destroyed in the lifetime of many who heard Jesus preach.
But the fox is not the threat, so what is? Which is why the logic here doesn’t quite work.
But let us leave behind, for the moment at least, this forensic examination and ask ourselves what we might make of Luke’s decision to juxtapose images of a fox and of a hen attempting to protect her chicks. What might we learn for today from this ancient text?
This gives us a chance to look back at our first reading, Abram challenging God, God making promises, and the whole thing sealed with sacrifice and mystical fire. Let us not gloss over the fact that Abram challenges God, struggles with God, which will become the name of his grandson and of the nation. Abram’s faith is not passive. Every great biblical figure struggles with God, so if you do, you are in good company.
Just as Luke is writing the story of Jesus through the lens of later understandings, of the crucifixion and belief in the resurrection, of the transformation of the Way of Jesus from a Jewish reform movement to a multi-cultural religion, so the authors of Genesis are writing through the lens of the Exodus, the Davidic kingdom, and the First Temple cult, allowing them to insert a prophecy of that period of slavery in Egypt into the narrative. But the real story here is not that supposed prophecy. It is that God was understood as relational but egotistical in the way that earthly rulers are egotistical, and covenant with God required blood. This scene is not a bird protecting its chicks from a fox, but a human murdering two birds and three other pieces of livestock to appease God.
Here are two very different forms of sacrifice. In Genesis, the text does not specifically use the word sacrifice, though it appears over a hundred times in Hebrew scripture. The Greek version of the word actually comes from the root for smoke, like that smoking firepot, for a sacrifice went up in smoke, and here we have smoke and fire associated with this symbolic killing. It is a sacrifice around power, ego, honor, not so different from the ancients killing virgins and kings and enemies to appease invented gods who might, just maybe, spare them from drought or flood, or from violence at the hands of other humans. Ritual slaughter was primitive and cross cultural. It could vary in form and formality, from barbarous child sacrifice, at one point abandoned by the Hebrews only to reappear during the time of Jeremiah, to the highly-regulated cultic sacrifices of the Second Temple. During Jesus’ time, sacrifice at the Temple was still taking place, but was diminishing in importance as Jews began to turn their attention to the local synagogue and to the text, people not of the blood but of the book. Even so, sacrifice would become a lens through which Jews and especially Paul would interpret Jesus.
In Luke, we have these juxtaposed images of hen and fox. The hen does not run away, leaving the chicks as easy pickin’s. That’s not how nature works, not how life works, not how this amazing mystery we name as God really works. Instead, the hen does her best to protect those that are more vulnerable. This maternal image of God is a God that sacrifices herself if need be, not that demands sacrifice from others.
Here, then, is an image with which we might work, neither an angry blood-thirsty tyrant nor a suicidal savior, but instead an image and a life that embody something so good and so fundamental to the miracle of creation that it is hard-coded into each of us. The hen does not hurl herself into the jaws of the fox. But neither does she preserve herself at the expense of the chicks. What the hen does is protect those who are weaker from the predator, even if there are risks. And obviously, there are, for unlike the frightful fox-killing hens of Brittany reported by the BBC this week, normal hens are likely to lose.
This is not sacrifice in the traditional sense. The sacred is that which is set apart, is made holy, and the sacrifice is that which is set apart and destroyed for religious purposes. But placing oneself between the predator and those who are weaker does not make one holy. Holiness, or at least a pedestrian righteousness, must be present first, driving us to put ourselves on the line.
The weak were being destroyed in Galilee and Judea in 30 C.E. as Jesus made his way to Jerusalem. Rome was draining its distant colonies to fuel the excesses of the wealthy at home, spectacle and debauchery. Local leaders decided that their best bet was to play along, and besides, the Temple had always been one more place where ego and greed bent and deformed what was meant to be holy. These Jewish collaborators, Sadducees and Sanhedrin, claimed that they were doing God’s will. They believed the rich deserved to be rich because they were righteous and the poor and diseased clearly had done something wrong, were touched by sin. They believed that God was egotistical and vindictive despite centuries of prophets who told them they were wrong, that what God wanted was human love and justice and kindness, not vengeance and slaughtered bulls.
And here was Jesus. His understanding of God and what God demands of us was both radical and yet consistent with so much that the prophets had spoken down the years.
Nothing makes human predators, bullies, angrier than truth, than courage, than love. So they took this man who spent most of his time healing the sick and interpreting scripture, arrested him, stripped him, beat him brutally, and executed him in the most humiliating way possible. This man who dared to challenge power, dared to speak for the victims, the weak, the outcast, the judged.
We know how the story ends. If we didn’t we wouldn’t be here. But let us linger on this road to Jerusalem, on foxes and hens and chicks. Let us ask what it was about his encounter with the divine in scripture, in prayer, and in the people all around him that gave Jesus what he needed to do the things he did.
And now, two thousand years later, where are there weak who are being crushed?
The final indictment of Jerusalem, the seat of power and privilege, is just six words in the New Revised Standard Version, “your house is left to you.†In other translations, it reads “your house is abandoned.†What does it mean? The house is the Temple, and God is no longer there, has left it in the hands of the unjust and sinful. God is with Jesus, is in the streets, on the hillside in Galilee, is anywhere that one human protects, serves, heals, speaks for and walks with. God is love, and love is not a building. But love can be in a building, then can flow out of that building into the world.
Amen.