Luke 13:31-35
March 13, 2022 + Smithtown
I.
Jesus is in Galilee, doing his healing thing, when he is interrupted by some members of the Jewish sect of the Pharisees who tell him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Herod was the petty king whom the Romans allowed to be their agent in administering Galilee and some other areas east of the Jordan.
This may be taken as a warning or a threat. On the one hand Jesus was usually in conflict with the Pharisees, and they may have just wanted him to be rid of him. On the other hand, some Pharisees could have recognized Jesus as a fellow Jewish teacher who deserved to be protected from a slimeball like Herod.
In Jesus’ reply he refers to Herod as a “fox.” It is not a compliment. Our view of foxes today is kind of benign and Disneyfied, but in Jesus' day people understood foxes as sly and violent predators. I once had a cat who was rescued from the jaws of a fox by the heroics of a neighbor. That was a fifteen-hundred-dollar Vet bill. So I get that foxes can be dangerous. If you are a smaller animal or bird, a fox is liable to grab you and eat you at any time. Which seems to be the leadership model that Herod was going for.
This Herod is the son of Herod the Great, who tried to snuff Jesus in Bethlehem as a child, and ended up massacring a town full of infant and toddler boys. Earlier in the gospel this younger Herod beheads Jesus' mentor, John the Baptizer, who was criticizing him for marrying his brother's wife. So to call him a "fox" is an understatement, and perhaps even insulting to foxes; Herod was a corrupt, immoral, and brutal ruler.
In those days as in ours, subjugated, colonized, conquered populations were ruled by terror and mass murder. And violence hangs over this passage, and increasingly over Jesus' continuing ministry, as he heads towards Jerusalem. He mentions this destiny from time to time so that the disciples don't have inaccurate expectations (not that that worked), plus anyone hearing this gospel would have known the basic facts about what happens to Jesus when he gets to Jerusalem, that he is headed for a veritable den of foxes. Herod was small potatoes compared to Pontius Pilate who represented the awesome power of the Roman Empire, known for leveling cities and putting entire populations to the sword.
Meanwhile, Jesus is simply continuing his ministry which he describes as "casting out demons and performing cures." In other words, he is liberating people from spiritual, psychological, and physical disease. Jesus is known for giving away free health care, and it is making him quite popular. This puts him is on the radar of ruthless tyrants like Herod who will always resent anyone more popular than they are. Plus, Jesus is explicitly doing things the long-promised Jewish Messiah was supposed to do, and while the coming of the Messiah would be a great thing for the people, but for the ruling kings? Not so much. So Jesus is a threat. And Herod has put the word out that Jesus' life is at risk as long as he is in Herod's jurisdiction.
Jesus is already headed for the State-line anyway. But Herod does not have the power to obstruct Jesus’ plan. If it weren’t for the gospels no one would even remember Herod. He’s not nearly significant enough to get in the way of Jesus' movement.
II.
Jesus is headed for Jerusalem, where he knows he will be killed. He is a prophet, and Jerusalem is the place where prophets like him get lynched. Jesus says, “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.” That’s because Jerusalem was the site of the Temple, which was the only place where sacrifices could be made. When prophets are killed they serve as martyrs, witnesses, which is a kind of sacrifice.
People like Herod, Pilate, the establishment in Jerusalem, and national leaders in many other times and places were following the tried and true method of enforcing national unity and social stability by means of sacrifice. That is, they identified people as threats, common enemies whom the people could get together to oppress or kill. It is a common way that anthropologists observe different cultures use to maintain unity and order. And we still do it today.
We could call it scapegoating, but it is a bit more than that. Empire always needs to gin up enemies and get the people to take out their fear, rage, and desire on them, as a distraction, so that the people don't bother to look around them and realize who is really oppressing and exploiting them.
We can always identify tyrants because they are constantly throwing up targets for us to fear and hate: look, those immigrants! Muslims! Transgendered people! The Gay agenda! Socialists! Critical Race Theory! They're trying to take everything away from you! They are a secret global cabal of pedophiles and baby killers! Be afraid, be very afraid!
Jesus is healing many of the same people whom the establishment pointed at as "sinners" and deviates worthy of exclusion or death, whom we're all supposed to hate and fear. His ministry is with and to the marginalized, the outcast, the excluded, the poor, and the disinherited, that is, the people whom the rulers get a lot of mileage out of blaming for everything. In another gospel we find a story of Jesus actually stopping the lynching of a woman caught "in the very act" of adultery; such populist murders were unifying events.
Jesus' work undermines the ruling ideology by weakening this vilification narrative. The rulers require enemies, but Jesus says to love our enemies. At the same time, by identifying with these people he is joining them as an object of civil disdain. All the way to the cross, he will demonstrate solidarity with all who have been unjustly killed for the sake of someone else's power.
By going to Jerusalem, the site of sacrifice, he demonstrates that he intends his death to be the final offering that ends all sacrificial solutions to the problem of human sinfulness. His death will reveal what many of the prophets preached, which is that God does not desire literal sacrifice involving deliberate and deadly violence against an innocent victim. The prophet Isaiah reports God wanting "mercy, not sacrifice." The sacrifice God accepts "is a humble spirit," says Psalm 51. A sacrifice is supposed to be about thanksgiving, it's supposed to be an offering, not a cynical transference of our fear and rage on an arbitrary victim for the sake of a counterfeit unity.
If our politics too often degrades into scapegoating and sacrificing someone, Jesus deliberately undermines and cancels it with his example of self-offering love.
III.
Thinking about all this leads Jesus to meditate on his destination, the holy city of Jerusalem. His words are full of sorrow and longing. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!"
The den of foxes who run things have to concoct a false unity by finding a common enemy. Jesus says to the contrary that God's unity is represented in the feminine image of a mother hen, gently yet firmly gathering all her chicks under her wings, protecting them from their own ignorance, keeping them from wandering away from the nest before they can stumble into the sights of a fox or some other predator.
Jesus says this to Jerusalem, full as it is with "wayward chicks" who know not what they do, whom he knows will kill him. For the tragedy is that the people of the city do not come to God. They run away from the loving wings of God the mother hen. They prefer to be on their own, acting like foxes, making their own decisions, based on their own self-interest… and so they are left vulnerable, exposed, and alone. And they will eventually be destroyed when the city finally reaps the consequences of its injustice and violence, and the Romans demolish the whole place, which happens about 40 years after Jesus says this. If we live our lives venerating and celebrating foxes, we will surely die in the jaws of foxes.
It is not something that Jesus is very happy about. The one who identifies so closely with the victims also feels in advance the pain and horror that the children of the city will suffer, some of the very same people who will scream in a frenzy for his death. He will even address some of the women, the daughters of Jerusalem, on his way to the cross, "Do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children."
So he concludes his words to the city by saying, “And 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.’” He is quoting from Psalm 118. It is one of the Psalms traditionally sung at Passover, which is when Jesus plans on arriving in Jerusalem. People will pointedly sing these words when he enters the city, as they spread palm branches and garments on the street ahead of him in celebration. Then he and his disciples will sing this Psalm at the Last Supper, the night before he dies.
The Church has always sung it every time we celebrate the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper as part of an ancient hymn called the Sanctus. For this is when we see him now, whenever we eat the bread and drink from the cup, proclaiming his saving death and resurrection. At the end of this gospel two disciples will recognize him there, in the breaking of bread, realizing his abiding presence with them. Seeing him in the communion we eucharistically share together, we also perceive him in the mission for which we are fed to carry out.
IV.
This passage leaves us with a choice. Will we follow our fox inclinations, prowling around looking for someone to devour? Will we rely on our achievements, successes, and triumphs, all at someone else’s expense? Will we rely on our privilege, status, entitlements, affluence? Living by our teeth and cunning, our audacity and hunger, motivated by fear and desire? Will we therefore bring down the rage and hate of even bigger predators upon us, as the Earth itself reacts to our unsustainable consumer lifestyle?
Or shall we dance under the broad wings of our Mother who calls us together in love? Shall we live by God's maternal Wisdom, informed of a unity we already have, and don't need to invent by making up a common enemy? Shall we live as disciples of Jesus, who embodies a justice which lifts up, gathers in, and includes those on the bottom, and brings down those foxes who prey on them? Shall we trust in the living God, who created the whole place in love, an amazing, miraculous, and abundant planet with more than enough for all to share?
We are aware, of course, that a fox is going to win any encounter with a hen. But Jesus is connecting us to something deeper and truer than such temporary but persistent defeats. For even foxes have mothers; heck, even God requires a mother to be born among us. When he is killed by the foxes, his tomb becomes a womb from which he emerges in resurrection life.
For we always get back on ourselves the kind of energy we project into the world. It could be devouring fox-energy, or it could be energy of the Mother-hen, which gives physical form to God's unconditional, inexhaustible love poured into creation. She is the living Presence and Wisdom of God, and the heart of Jesus' good news and the soul of discipleship. She is the very Spirit of the Church.
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