2^nd Sunday in Lent - February 28, 2010            

Luke 13:31-35 

“If the Fox Wants Them, He’ll Have to Kill Me First!”

               Rev. Dr. Craig M. Whitcher

Barbara and I traveled in Israel with another couple many years ago in a rental car.  I personally loved the experience of finding our own way.  However, it was in Israel, that I finally learned to always stop and ask for directions. Two quick situations brought that home to me.  In Galilee,  divided between Jews and Palestinians back then, I found myself driving down an unmarked, desolate, narrow road and finally stopped to read the little yellow signs which had little scull and crossbones on them… I knew immediately… minefields… both sides.  I think it was the very next day we attempted to get near the Jordan River where we saw an out cropping of trees only to arrive at the gates of a Kibbutz, manned by machine gunners in bunkers and no one speaking English.

 Another downside to not being in a guided tour is that you can miss things.  On one of our last days we were all over the Mount of Olives where Jesus prayed on the night of his betrayal.  It is actually across a wide thoroughfare outside the Walls of Jerusalem that comes down from Bethany and crosses the Kidron Valley.  We missed the little chapel, Dominus Flevit, on the western slope.  The Latin name comes from Luke’s Gospel, which contains not one but two accounts of Jesus’ grieving or weeping over Jerusalem.  Tradition says that it was here that Jesus wept over the city that had rejected him: our lectionary for today.

Episcopal Priest, author and professor, Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a wonderful story about that chapel. She described it as having a high arched window behind the altar that looks over the city.  It is a clear window, but the iron grillwork on a sunny day makes the view actually take on a stained glass appearance with the Dome of the Rock, bottom left, and the Church of the Sepulcher appearing in the middle section.  Two-thirds of the widow is blue sky.

Down below the window on the frontal piece of the altar is a mosaic medallion of a white hen with golden halo, her red comb resembling a crown, and her wings are spread wide to shelter the yellow chicks that crowd around her feet.  While the chicks are peaceful looking the hen looks ready to spit fire if anyone comes near her babies.

The Medallion is trimmed in more red pooling at the bottom with the words of Jesus in Latin: 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!”

I want you to picture that window and Luke’s portrayal of the personhood of the Christ who comes to us, today

Interestingly, the Gospel of Luke begins and ends in the Temple of Jerusalem (Luke 2:29).  Do you remember that part in the nativity story following Jesus birth?  Zechariah is the Temple High Priest when Jesus is born.  He is married to Mary’s cousin Elizabeth to whom Mary announces her pregnancy.  Zechariah and Elizabeth are the parents to John who becomes the Baptist; so, John and Jesus are cousins.  Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph bring Jesus on the 8^th day after his birth to the Temple for his “presentation” or circumcision.  There they meet a righteous Jew named Simeon, who, tradition says, believed in the coming of a Messiah to bring salvation; along with the prophetess, Anna, each of whom offers Jesus their prophetic blessing identifying him as the long expected one.   Luke’s Gospel will return us to the Temple in Jerusalem with a story about Jesus at age twelve dazzling the teachers of Israel with his knowledge, while his parents are frantically looking for him.

Luke speaks of Jerusalem and the Temple twice as often as all the other New Testament writers, combined.  Luke loves Jerusalem.  Jerusalem has a rich history as the center of Jewish life and religion, a city built to be the symbol of God’s Shalom (Yeru Salem)…And, today it is an International City of the World where three major religions see Jerusalem, as the dwelling place of God, the place where God’s glory was and is revealed.  Yet, ironically and revealing of sinful humankind, Jerusalem is filled with contradictions: fear and expectation, misery and hope, war and peace. 

The OT prophet, Micah (3:2), writes that it is the place where God is betrayed by those who hate the good and love what is evil.  Nothing that happens in Jerusalem is insignificant.  It is said that “When Jerusalem obeys God, the world spins at peace on its axis.  When Jerusalem ignores God, the whole earth wobbles.”

Jesus’ tear-filled words portrays the city as inhabited by the vulnerable who were like little, innocent, yellow chicks; terrorized by one big Fox, King Herod, who represents all that betrays and threatens Jerusalem and the world.  Jesus, representing the response of God toward the sin and evil of humanity’s demand for power and control, identifies with the image of a mother hen, who from across the Kidron Valley, clucks to her chicks for all she is worth.  But most of the chicks do not listen, or choose to make no response.  Maybe they no longer recognize their mother’s voice or they have forgotten who they are.

Have you ever loved someone and you could not save or protect them because they would not listen?   Then you understand the depth of Jesus’ sadness - God’s sadness at our disobedience.  All we can do, we who truly love, is to open our arms and wait…we can’t force anyone into them.  This is the most vulnerable and anxious posture in the world.  Picture those wings spread, breast exposed.  If we mean what we say about love and freedom, then that is how we who love must stand, watching and waiting, vulnerable and anxious.  That’s how I see the father of the Prodigal Son, watching and waiting by the kitchen door, everyday, for his lost son to come home. 

At this point the question might be asked: “Why does God choose the way of weakness and surrender?” 

Why didn’t Jesus imagine an eagle as a symbol?  He would still have been biblically correct: there was the eagle of the Exodus.  The Prophet Isaiah says: “They shall mount up on eagle’s wings.”  The prophet Hosea uses the symbols of the leopard, and the Lion of Judah, pictured destroying the enemies of Israel.  These well known animals were used to symbolize the Messiah…the Son of God.  It is how Israel pictured God coming to their rescue.

(I am reminded that Ben Franklin suggested that the symbol for the new United States ought to be the turkey…given the ways of government these days, he may have, prophetically, been on to something.)

But Jesus chooses a vulnerable mother hen.  It doesn’t necessarily inspire much hope in the power of God.  If you were a wayward chick, you truly might try sucking up to the fox.  But it does suggest something else in the face of our fears, terrors and threats.

Because Jesus chooses a mother hen to represent what competes with that fox, Herod; the options (choices) for us and humanity become crystal clear.  You can be the fox who licks his chops; or you can choose to live and die protecting your chicks.  Now I ask you, what role does the good parent play?  The People of God?  A nation under God? Do you get the picture?  Do you see in whose image you were made and called into being?

God does not come to us in Christ to be king of the jungle, the righteous terrorist, or vengeful victim; nor does God call us into that role.  Rather, Jesus speaks of a mother hen, who stands between the unknowing, helpless chicks and those who mean them harm…the fox.  She has no teeth, no sharp claws, no powerful wings.  All she has is her courage to shield her babies with her own body.  If the fox wants them, he will have to kill her first.

And we know that Herod and Rome will do just that.  Jesus stands in the way of those whose agenda demands the lives of these chicks.  Jesus will not resist in the manner of war and destruction, but rather like a defenseless mother hen. Jesus knows that the Fox will come in darkness, before the rising sun, to do violence when all the innocent and helpless are asleep.  In the final scene, she suffers and dies where the fox and chickens can see her…wings spread, breast exposed, she bleeds.   

Here is my point:  The focal point of our conversion is when this sacrifice grasps your imagination, then everything changes.  The Lenten season is the church’s design for showing us the way of Christ.  Our salvation comes when the totality of God’s sacrificial love grasps our imagination. If you know what it is to suffer for your own children/grandchildren; then you know our calling as Christ’s brothers and sisters to the world.  It seems powerless and foolish in our world of violence and hate, but this kind of love has and will change the world.

 Someone has said, “If you love you will grieve.”

My Friends, that’s the price of love, the tax we pay.  When the world experiences and witnesses such grieving, not as victim but as savior, peace will come, the hungry will be fed, the thirsty will receive drink, the homeless will be sheltered and the sick healed.   Indeed, it is the only response that will save the world.  We all know it…we just lack the will to trust it.