There’s a Fox in the Henhouse

Deuteronomy 26:1-11, Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b-13, Luke 4:1-13

How often, Jesus said, how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, stopping in various towns along the way, teaching and healing. One day, in some unknown town, after Jesus has been teaching in the synagogue, the Pharisees of that town come up to Jesus and warn him: You’re in danger here, Herod is trying to kill you. You’d better move along.

Now, perhaps they were annoyed with Jesus and were just looking for an excuse to get him out of town. But Martin Luther taught us that the Eighth Commandment isn’t just a prohibition on telling lies about our neighbor, it actually commands us to give our neighbors the benefit of the doubt, to think of them in the best possible light and not jump to negative conclusions about them. So I’ll take the Pharisees at their word and assume that they were genuinely concerned about Jesus’s safety. That they were, in good faith, letting him know that he was in danger, that Herod was out to get him, that he needed to be careful.

But, perhaps surprisingly, Jesus has no interest in being careful. “Go tell that fox for me, Jesus said. “Go tell that fox that I’m busy right now, healing, casting out demons, and I’ll move on when my work is complete. And when I move on, it will be to head towards Jerusalem – and Jerusalem is where prophets confront the foxes that threaten God’s henhouse, not where they hide from them.

And then, with all this talk of foxes and henhouses on his mind, Jesus says something truly remarkable. Jesus says, How often have I desired to gather together the children of Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

How often I have desired to gather you, the children of God, the people of God, how often I have desired to gather you like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings, to protect them from the fox. Think about how a mother hen defends her chicks from the predator. The mother hen has no claws to fight back against the fox. She has no sharp teeth that the fox needs to fear. She has only two things to defend the chicks from the fox: her fierce determination to protect the chicks at all costs, and her willingness to put her own body between the fox and the chicks. If the fox wants to get to the chicks, it’s going to have to kill the mother hen first. That’s how a mother hen defends her chicks from the fox. That’s how Jesus says he desires to defend us.

But, to be honest, that’s usually not how we want to be defended. We would rather fight the fox ourselves, or try to. Or find somebody else able to fight the fox with what seem to us to be better weapons – sharper claws, bigger teeth, maybe a shotgun. Isn’t that a more effective way of keeping the fox at bay? I mean, the mother hen’s willingness to sacrifice herself is noble, she is ferocious in her determination. But most of us would prefer to take a more aggressive approach to a deadly fox.

Or, perhaps, like the Pharisees in today’s gospel reading, we might advise hiding from the fox until it passes. Of course, as Jesus points out, that would mean leaving behind the sick people he came to heal and make whole – but you can’t save everyone, after all, especially if you don’t save yourself. So maybe we‘d prefer to hide from the fox if we can, and wish the best of luck to those who can’t.

But these options are not appealing to Jesus. How often, Jesus says, have I wanted to be a mother hen for you children of God, but you were not willing! How often I have wanted to be this for you, how often I have wanted to protect you from the fox with my own body, but you were the one who didn’t want it.

This desire of Jesus, this desire of God, not just to save us from the fox but to do it the way a mother hen protects her flock – this is something that goes back to the beginning. Our first reading today shows this desire of God already in Genesis.

Abraham is the first person God calls to to begin a family, a people, to be God’s own. Abraham responds, but he and Sarah have no children and they are getting on in years, so Abraham begins to doubt whether God can keep the promise. God repeats the promise, Abraham repeats his acceptance of the promise, but still Abraham asks: But how can I know?

And so, we read, that God asks Abraham to gather several specific animals. Abraham trusts God enough to get the animals, then Abraham sacrifices the animals, cuts most of the bodies in half, arranges them in two lines facing each other, and then sits to wait for God to accept the sacrifice. Chasing the vultures away and waiting for God to acknowledge the sacrifice that Abraham has made.

If you were paying close attention to the text, you may have noticed that God never told Abraham to sacrifice the animals. That was what Abraham assumed God wanted the animals for, but God never actually asked for it. Abraham was just coming to know the God of the Bible, Abraham assumed that this new God was just like all the other gods Abraham had known, that God needed to be fed and that Abraham would be rewarded for doing it.

But then, Abraham falls asleep, and a deep and terrifying darkness descends, and God performs a ritual – one that is quite foreign to us but that would have been very familiar to someone of Abraham’s time and place. To make a vow while passing between sacrificed animals, in that culture, was to say: If I don’t keep my promise, may I become like these animals. Today, we might put out hand over our heart and say, “Swear to God and hope to die.” Much less bloody, but the same general idea. God enacts this ritual to tell Abraham: I’d die before I abandon you or the promise that I’ve made to you.

God was trying to show Abraham – God does not desire our sacrifice, God does not desire us to kill things for God. God desires to be our sacrifice, God desires to become the sacrifice for our sakes. God desires to be a mother hen protecting the chicks not with deadly tooth and claw, but with her own body and her own life. Abraham assumed God wanted Abraham to sacrifice the animals and give them to God; but what God was trying to teach Abraham and is still trying to teach God’s people is that God wants us to gather the creation together with us under the shelter of God’s wings and let God be the sacrifice for us.

This is hard for us to accept, especially when there are foxes still loose in the world, when we are painfully aware that the chicks are still in great danger. One particular fox is especially alarming right now, bombing escaping refugees, shelling maternity wards, ratcheting up the terror and fear by killing the innocent until he gets what he wants. When the fox has more nuclear weapons than moral scruples, we may not be comforted by the thought of sheltering under the wings of a toothless, clawless mother hen.

There are other foxes lurking out there, too. And there are many voices telling us, as there were voices who told Jesus: Run away, save yourself, leave the sick and heavily burdened behind, and if they don’t get away you can feel sorry for them later. There are many voices telling us, as there were in the days of Jesus, you can only fight a fox by getting a bigger and stronger predator on your side.

Instead Jesus says: How often have I desired to gather together the children of Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings! This has always been the way, this is who I have always wanted to be for you. But you were not willing. You always want to try another way, and even though when you do, it always ends badly, you still are not willing to let me gather you under my wings.

And yet, with faith in the power of God to bring resurrection and new life, Jesus insists that the way to safety and peace is to shelter under the wings of a God who would rather die than let us have to face the fox on our own. And to learn from him how to have the faith to ourselves confront foxes and take risks to protect the vulnerable, not alone but with the help of the Spirit. This is who God desires to be for us, this is who God has always desired to be for us. If only we would be willing to accept it.