Lent II, Year C, March 11, 2025
Throughout Lent we find ourselves on a journey with Jesus where we will follow him all the way to Jerusalem. In a few weeks we will relive what happened to Jesus in that city. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! Easter is coming, but for now we are in the desert of Lent, wrestling with those things that tempt us away from God.
Jerusalem was the center of the world in Jewish imagination, and in biblical narrative generally. The last temptation the devil offered Jesus on the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem was a lesson that it was God’s presence that made it the place where true power lay, not in testing God, commanding God to do our bidding, not in making God in our own image. And today the Gospel again contends with the power of Herod and the power of God. The difference between foxes and hens.
We start off today’s passage with some Pharisees coming to Jesus to warn him about Herod. “Don’t come to Jerusalem,” they tell him, “Herod is after you!” Let’s not forget that this isn’t the first time a Herod has claimed to have power over Jesus. This Herod is the contentious and paranoid Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee, son of Herod the Great who wanted to kill the infant Jesus. This isn’t anything new to Jesus. He has been a threat to the authorities since birth. Yet he refuses to be played by those in political power.
Now we don’t know the motives of the Pharisees here, they could have had ulterior motives, but it seems likely here that some Pharisees listened to Jesus and weren’t threatened by his teaching but had open hearts to hear his message. And it had affected them. These Pharisees really could have been trying to protect Jesus. Whenever we label a group of people and assume they all have the same intentions and motives, we get things like anti-semitism, as what happens when we make all Pharisees bad.
There are other places in the Gospels where we realize Jesus and the Pharisees took each other seriously and that not every interaction was immediately a conflict; yet here in today’s reading, their warning reflects a lack of understanding of what Jesus must do when he gets to Jerusalem. And what is ironic here, is that Jesus is actually on his way to see Herod, but on his terms and in God’s time. “Go and tell that fox for me” is a scathing analysis of Herod’s character and actions. Jesus never minces his words for those in power who caused the poor, the marginalized, and the stranger to suffer. Even though we may see them as enemies, Jesus also never closed the door on them, always engaging in conversation, always giving them a chance for repentance, always leaving a way back to God, while calling out their sin.
Jesus alludes to the coming “third day” in vs. 32 and we see the juxtaposition of Jesus’ present ministry and his work of healing and wholeness with Herod’s work of destruction and betrayal of his people. Yet in both his acts of healing power and in his willingness to suffer, Jesus will show Herod what real authority means. On the Third Day, we find that Herod didn’t really hold the power. And while Pharisees and disciples and zealots of the day wanted Jesus to be on their political side, Jesus has another way. In our own day when we allow ourselves to think in binary black and white terms, it’s either this or that, no middle ground, no gray area, Jesus defies it and says no, my ways are not your ways, I will make another way.
You see, Jesus isn’t on the side of political parties, Jesus is on the side of the poor, the stranger, the disenfranchised. Jesus is with those who struggle and suffer. He hung out with outcasts, not the famous and prosperous. Like St. Francis who learned he had to kiss the leper in order to see God, if you truly want to meet Jesus, he is the refugee, Jesus is the man on death row, the veteran in the street, he is the single mom with two jobs, the friend with an addiction, the non-gender conforming co-worker, the lonely, the one who is ill with no insurance.
Jesus has a radical anti-politics because the people that claim to follow the way of Jesus are citizens of a different country–the Kingdom of God. We are sojourners in this land–on our way to another place God has prepared for us. This is not our home. Standing with Jesus for those who suffer is a much harder choice for us to make.
Even though Jesus doesn’t allow himself to be co-opted or threatened by Herod, he laments over Jerusalem. Although this city will eventually kill Jesus, like it has the prophets, we discover Jesus’ love for it. Jerusalem, Jerusalem, he laments. We will discover in a few weeks, as he enters the city, that he will weep when he sees it. He weeps over the people who have lost their way, he weeps over a city that has forgotten what it was to stand for–even in that, he loves it deeply, like he loves everyone here today.
While Herod is likened to a fox, Jesus is compared to a mother hen who broods over her children. We are reminded of Psalm 91:4, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.” Julian of Norwich, one of Christianity’s great mystics, said this of Jesus, possibly inspired by that psalm, “It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good. Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him … And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never cease to surround us.”
This juxtaposition of the fox and the hen thus forms a lesson about power and its true nature. Herod sees his subjects alternately as threats to be neutralized or punished, or just as prey for exploitation, and [therefore] proves to be only interested in his own welfare. Jesus’ unmitigated care for his own people, on the other hand, protects them, [surrounds them with love,] yet makes him apparently vulnerable.
The image of the mother hen is one of deepest love and care, but also of vulnerability. Luke’s readers were aware of the suffering that Jerusalem underwent a few decades after this encounter, as well as Jesus’ own passion. This is not a dismissal of Jerusalem’s suffering, but Jesus’ solidarity with those that were suffering. He mourns not just the rejection he receives but the suffering the people will undergo at the hands of other predatory powers.
Jesus laments how we continue to reject his desire to comfort and protect. We are a people enamored with power and are uncomfortable with a vulnerable Messiah, a Savior that refers to himself as a mother hen. If anyone has ever raised chickens, however, you will know that they have a ferocious protective side. I have childhood memories of entering the chicken coop with a baseball bat for protection. A hen that will protect us from the foxes that prey, a hen that will brood over us and shelter us, a hen that loves to the point of giving its own life.
We are reminded in Matthew of Jesus’ warning about harming or causing the little ones to stumble, “It would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea.” That’s not a hen to trifle with. There are consequences to ignoring the poor and allowing the children to be harmed.
Herod and Jesus will eventually meet in person in Jerusalem. That encounter will replay this comparison of the two models of power. Herod in this version will be the one responsible for dressing Jesus in royal apparel, an intended form of mockery whose irony will double back on Herod. Mockery and derision in the mouths of the corrupt powerful, the foxes, serve mostly to show their own unfitness to wield authority. The hen is a symbol of the crucified, one whose work is fulfilled not in her own protection, let alone pursuit of her own self-interest, but in the healing and flourishing of her children.
This Lent I invite you to reflect on this image that Jesus offers, one who longs to care for you. A God whose character is to overcome evil with good. And why do we have a tendency to reject it? What is it about obedience to the way of Christ that we resist? Is it that trusting a Savior who is vulnerable, who understands that real power lies in sacrificial love, humility, and faith makes us uncomfortable? Our world wants to fight injustice with injustice, the tools of the empire. Our world would have us respond to hate and disrespect with hate and disrespect. Vulnerability and love look weak to those who put their faith in the perceived power of cruelty and violence. While the foxes may appear to have the advantage, allowing their own greed and hunger for power to cause harm to the vulnerable, Jesus, our mother hen, has another way. We are to follow the way of the hen, returning good for evil.
Hold the image of this divine hen who spreads its wings over you, who longs to gather you in love and even give you its own life so that you may truly live. How are we called to live and exhibit that kind of love and what is Christ asking of you now?
As I have reminded us before, you are first a follower of Jesus Christ, a sojourner yourselves in this world. The Jesus of the gospels proposes no political program, but instead something far more strenuous, something much more demanding. No state or political party can indulge in the self-sacrifice that Jesus demands when he calls us to lovingly serve the least and the lost. But self-sacrificing love for our neighbor is precisely the message of the Lenten season.
Magdalena's Musings 