Apparently, I neglected to post this last week…

March 16, 2025

One late November afternoon a couple of years ago, as the shadows were lengthening, I was taking a walk on the southwest bike path. I looked ahead and saw a man and his son standing still, watching something. I stopped and asked what was going on. The man pointed; there was a fox in someone’s backyard, trying to figure out how to get into a chicken coop. Eventually, the dad took matters into his own hands, possibly because he wanted to shield his young son from seeing the mayhem that could take place.  He climbed down the bank, entered the yard, and chased the fox away. The hens were safe, at least for now.

It’s one of those cultural tropes we all know: foxes and henhouses, common to cartoons, stories, and fables, and even the teachings of Jesus. It’s startling though, to encounter it in real life, even if in the back of our minds, we know that there are lots of foxes around here—I’ve even seen one in front of the church—and there are lots of hens. Yet it’s startling to encounter the image in scripture.

Luke has done something quite interesting with these sayings. In Matthew, they appear much later in the story, when Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem in the last week of his life. Luke places them much earlier. Jesus and his disciples are on the way to Jerusalem, but they won’t get there for quite some time. Herod (Antipas) the Son of Herod the Great has already appeared in Luke’s gospel—he arrested John the Baptist just before Jesus began his public ministry. Although Luke doesn’t mention John’s death in his gospel, it is assumed.

 We’re actually jumping around a bit in our reading of Luke. For the past several weeks, our texts have come from relatively early in the gospel. Last week we read the story of Jesus’ temptation, which takes place just before Jesus begins his public ministry. Today’s reading comes from Luke 13, and it’s important to note that it comes from a lengthy section—chapters 9-19, that Luke places is the context of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. It’s also important to note that Luke has moved one of these sayings, Jesus’ lament for Jerusalem. In Matthew, Jesus says this in the last week of his life, while he is in Jerusalem, and in fact, while he is in the temple.

So, Luke removes these sayings chronologically and temporally from Jerusalem and the cross, but even here, with perhaps months or weeks to go before Calvary, the crucifixion suddenly impinges on Jesus’ activity. Pharisees come to Jesus to warn him that Herod wants to kill him. That in itself may seem surprising. We’re programmed by two thousand years of history to assume Jesus and the Pharisees were opposed to each other but remember both wanted to take Torah seriously, to offer ordinary people ways of being faithful in the world.

Jesus calls Herod Antipas a fox. There’s a double edge to this epithet. We tend to associate foxes with slyness or craftiness, so there’s a sense in which Jesus may be offering Herod a compliment. After all, it takes tact, and wiliness to succeed in an imperial system like Rome. At any moment, the caprice of the ruler may turn on you, and survival requires being very adept at maneuvering. But at the same time, foxes are predators, preying on the weak and vulnerable, taking advantage of every weakness in an opponent, or potential meal.

But even if Herod is a fox, a threat, Jesus seems to be saying that he will go about his work—casting out demons and healing people. He won’t be distracted from his ministry by Herod’s machinations. 

There’s a full range of emotions on display in these few verses. Jesus expresses courage in his refusal to turn away from the threat; he shows his sense of purpose in continuing to go about the business of his daily ministry. He is resolute about his fate, as he reminds them that he is on his way to Jerusalem, and that he knows that like other prophets, he will be killed there. Holy Week and the cross loom very large. The sequence of days is mentioned; and Jesus alludes to the triumphal entry—Palm Sunday. 

 In spite of all that, knowing what is to come; how he’ll be treated not only by the authorities but by the people of Jerusalem, he expresses deep love and concern for the city to which he is travelling. The tenderness with which he speaks, comparing himself to a mother hen protecting her chicks, is a world away from the defiance with which the passage begins. 

There’s something else worth pointing out. Jesus and Herod would have a final confrontation, in Jerusalem, in Holy Week. In an episode unique to Luke’s gospel, it would be Herod who would have Jesus dressed in purple, royal garb. Intended as mockery, the incident lays bare the different kinds of authority wielded by Jesus and Herod. Herod relied on force to maintain power; exploiting the weak, and punishing those, like John the Baptist, that he perceived as threats. On the other hand, Jesus’ power was and is a power based in love and vulnerability, like the care of a mother hen for her chicks; the love of the crucified one.

These alternative models may seem as relevant today as they were two thousand years ago. We see Jesus weeping for Jerusalem, here, and again, only in Luke, when he enters Jerusalem in the final days of his life. Luke’s readers would have known all too well what would happen to do Jerusalem; defeated and destroyed, laying in ruins, its riches and bounty carried back to Rome to demonstrate Rome’s power and the fate of those who opposed it. 

We see those alternative models of power and authority on display in our world today, and much closer to home. The power of greed, the lust for domination, the demands for utter fealty fill our media and stoke our fears and nightmares. We see institutions and individuals submitting meekly and without protest, passively watching as victims suffer and rights are trampled. And we feel helpless, impotent.

But Jesus wept for Jerusalem, he lamented that he wished he could gather its residents like a hen gathers her chicks. It’s hardly an act of defiance, or one that would make a difference in the long run. But his example, an example of self-giving, sacrificial love, poured out on the cross, leads to God’s victory over evil and death. It is our hope, our faith that God’s love prevails, and that our own small acts of love, weeping for victims, protecting the vulnerable, bearing witness to Christ, do make a difference. They are signs and acts of love that bind us to and in God’s love, confronting and breaking the powers of evil and death, and building blocks of God’s coming reign.