At that time some Pharisees came to Jesus and said to him, “Leave
this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you.” He replied, “Go
tell that fox, ‘I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow,
and on the third day I will reach my goal.‘ In any case, I must keep
going today and tomorrow and the next day—for surely no prophet can
die outside Jerusalem! Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets
and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your
children together, as a hen gathers her checks under her wings, but
you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate. I tell
you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes
in the name of the Lord.’”

THE FOX AND THE HEN IN YOUR OWN BACK YARD

Introduction

The stories we often reserve for children save their most profound meanings
for adults. We tend to forget that Aesop wrote his fables for adults, not children,
and that Lord of the Rings , hugely popular with children, has depths
of meaning only adults can fathom. The same may be true of Luke’s telling of
this snippet of his Gospel which is today’s Lenten text. In the first place,
if you take Luke’s Gospel as a whole, you can’t miss the fact that everything
is moving, inevitably, toward a destiny. This is a goal-oriented mission. There
may be circuitous routes taken along the way, and we may be allowed to learn
more of what’s going on behind the scenes than we need to know, but Jerusalem
is where we’re heading. That’s clear in today’s text as well. In the second
place, the text reveals more than a mere warning about a potential trap from
Herod and Jesus‘ response and lament over the Jewish people. This is a reversal
story about leadership and power in which those whom we might think have control,
surely don’t, and the way in which control is exercised will surprise all who
pay attention. It’s the old story about the fox and the hen, told with a twist
which only Luke could have mastered.

The fox is not destined to have his way

There are many fables about foxes. Just check a search engine
on the internet. In almost all of them, the fox is wily, deceitful, seeking
to be in charge. His method of control involves strategies and power
plays. He’s in it for himself. He wants to get something in his chops.
In one version, he runs in circles around the hen house until the hen
gets dizzy watching him and falls to the ground, only to be thrown in
a sack by the fox. However, when the hen revives, she replaces her weight
in the sack with a rock, and the fox goes home with unsuspected booty.
Foxes are often devious, yet dumb.

In Jesus‘ world and in ours as well, there were/are wily types who want
to control people, to secure their personal advantage. The Pharisees
tell Jesus, for example, that Herod is out to get him. One wonders, however,
which is playing with the greater ploy. The Pharisees are not known for
their love for Jesus who often challenges their self-centered religiosity.
Some of them might be only too happy to send Jesus into Herod’s clutches.
On the other hand, Herod, known for his cruelty and devious mind, has
long awaited an audience with this upstart Galilean. Both had their strategies,
both their hope to acquire control by pulling the right strings. Both
were foxy in their own way.

We have such people in our own time, people who seek their own advantage
and use others only to secure that interest. Some of them occupy visible
seats of power. Perhaps their names come too easily to our lips. We have
been told that they have names like Hussein, Bin Laden, Kim, and Kdafy.
We have to be careful, however, because sometimes the very people who
want us to brand them the axis of evil, themselves have their own agenda
for personal power. Additionally, some of these people are not among
the rich and famous. They work in our offices, teach in our schools,
worship in our churches, and live in our homes. They may rightly claim
that they seek the best interests of others, the advantages of those
nearest and dearest to them, but, in reality, they are controlled by
self-interest, that base motive which has something to say about all
our actions, leaving none of us without condemnation. We are all about
power, so it is best not to point the finger. It is better to beat one’s
breast in confession and repentance.

Jesus minces no words. He knows exactly what’s going on in the self-serving,
conniving of those who seek to control, so he calls Herod the fox he
really is! “Herod may want me to do this or that,” he says, “but I have
my own agenda. I have various ministries to take care of and then I’m
heading for Jerusalem, the holy city, where they kill the prophets!” Jesus
knows where he’s going and why—and it has something to do with us as
well. He goes to Jerusalem because the foxes of this world want to have
their way. He goes there because of us.

The holy cities of this world may give the pretense of leadership. Leaders
who work in their self-interest, for that matter, sometimes give the
impression of righteousness. However, Jesus knows that these are hollow
claims and that such definitions of power ultimately lead to self-destruction.
Herod who ruled as a deceitful oppressor was finally exiled to Lyon in
39 A.D. by Caesar. The Pharisees who claimed inherited privilege lost
their control with the destruction of their sanctuary in 70 A.D. Those
in our own world, ourselves included, who insist on idiosyncratic values
and alien priorities may be oppressors for a time, but ultimately control
is lost. The reign of the fox is sometimes brilliant and flashy, but
inevitably short. Here and there prophetic voices may be raised to challenge
control takers and self-seekers, and at times they are silenced. In the
long, run, however, Jesus says that if the voices of reason and justice
are silenced, the very stones will cry out (Lk. 19:40), especially if
the prophets are killed. The fox is not destined to have his way.

The hen gathers where others scatter

It should be noted that Luke chooses to combine some sayings
of Jesus in this text that Matthew places in other contexts. In so doing,
he gives the reader a delightful comparison between the old fox and the
hen stories, although the much-loved reference to the hen and her chicks
is originally from Jesus himself. When you think of all the animals with
which he could have compared himself, it is quite interesting that Jesus
chooses the hen. Not only is there a lovely feminine allusion to a mother
hen gathering her chicks in these words. There is also something bold
and brave here which other animals could not represent for us. When the
hen attacks, there are no fangs, no claws, no tearing of flesh. If the
fox wants her chicks, he will have to kill her first—wings spread, breast
exposed. And this is exactly what happens. She is there, in a new form
of power and leadership, as the one for others, the servant leader, the
one whose extravagant love considers the welfare of the lost foremost.
Thus the means of survival over against the attack of the wily foxes
of this world is provided not by retaliation or brute force, but by gathering
the innocent, the victims, into a community where the love of the mother
hen lives on even after her death.

I wonder whether you can think of settings in which such love works
for you in your own back yards. Often our children, our friends, our
colleagues do things to others or to one another which are wrong and
hurtful, yet we cannot stop them. We cannot prevent their power plays
and control strategies because it may not be our role to do so. Wings
spread, breast exposed, we stand visibly on the sidelines or in the backgrounds
of their lives, calling them to remembrance of our love for them, of
the gathered community in the church where a different kind of power
is celebrated. We are not the lion, the eagle, the panther, nor was Jesus.
And sometimes we can be surprised and touched as they back off or apologize
or make amends when they remember having once experienced at our touch
a love which was bolder than force, a compassion which was greater than
might.

Four-hundred and eighty-two years ago this week, throughout the first
eight days in Lent, 1522, Martin Luther returned from the Wartburg to
his parish at St. Mary’s in Wittenberg and gave us an example of this
very compassion. He had heard that in his absence foxes had gotten into
the henhouse and stirred up the flock. They had begun to use violence
to initiate the reformation and, following false leaders, began to destroy
property and lives. For eight days in a row, Luther preached to a packed
house, encouraging, pleading, challenging, and gathering. At the end
of those eight days, the revolution came to an end and the reformation
of which all of us are heirs moved in quite different directions. The
proper leadership is crucial. Calling and gathering one another into
servant communities in which Christ’s love changes lives is the most
important task of the church. In the families, neighborhoods, cities
and nations in which foxes seek to divide and conquer, to operate unilaterally
and arrogantly, there has never been a greater need for the spirit of
the gathering mother hen, the consolidating and compassionate Christ,
who points us away from ourselves and to the needs of all humankind.

Conclusion

Of course, we know that not everyone comes when the invitation to such
loving communities is given. Today’s Old Testament and Epistle lesson
remind of times when Abram and Sarah were suspiscious of God’s love,
and the Philippians had their doubts as well. For that matter, contrary
to the politically-correct movie reviews of Mel Gibson’s The
Passion of the Christ , many in authority in Jesus‘ day, including
Herod’s court and many of the Pharisees and the Sadducees, did not in
fact heed Jesus‘ invitation to enter a community in which love held sway
over privilege and law. Luke tells us that Jesus had dim hope for the
future of these men and their style of leadership and power. (And it
does not make us anti-Semitic for holding this perspective since we know
that all people are capable of such inauthentic living, including the
Jew’s of Jesus‘ day.) “Your house is left desolate,” he cries out to
them. And this is true for many in our own work and social settings as
well, and perhaps for some of us too. If your style of relating to people
serves your needs rather than theirs, your leadership will not last.

Jesus is calling us today to make some choices, knowing that many may
reject his invitation. He calls because there are still money changers
in the temple, widows and orphans without support and a Lazarus at the
gate of rich men and women. He calls because there are wars and rumors
of wars, religious leaders straining at superfluities and young people
lost in the vast innocuous promises of virtual reality TV and the promiscuity
of virtual reality lives. As long as the foxes roam unchallenged in our
own backyards, Jesus calls to a new possibility. As long as Jesus sees
us building lifestyles that use the fox’s strategies of self-serving
power, he will stand before us with wings outstretched and breast bared,
gathering us and showing us his wounds. He will call us to the only life-style
which builds lasting relationships. He will encourage us to consider
the caring and loving practices on which wholistic marriages, ethical
companies and just nations are established. And when we are weary from
battle, and questioning our success in going it our own way, he may hear
us plaintively and longingly shout, “Blessed is he who comes in the name
of the Lord.”

Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
Concordia University at Austin
Austin, Texas
dzersen@aol.com