Jay P. Rowland
Stand in the Promise
Luke 13:31-35
March 13, 2022
I’ve been watching Ukraine with a mixture of disbelief and despair. I can hardly believe, let alone process images I’ve been seeing and the reports I’ve been reading and listening to on the radio. That nations and leaders still choose to unleash war upon people is haunting to me. I keep thinking humanity will outgrow warfare given all of the suffering that continually comes upon all nations through disease and natural disaster, and pandemics, all of which demand our full attention and resources.
And so when Putin decided to invade Ukraine I decided I couldn’t handle any more large-scale human suffering and thought I might just ignore the situation. Only because there were no bullets whizzing past my head or shrieking bombs igniting my neighborhood. And only because where I live people are more or less bustling with activity--just like the people of Ukraine were only a few weeks ago. And only because where I live, the buildings are all intact: schools and hospitals, nurseries and jails and mental health facilities, ballparks and arenas, restaurants and grocery stores and businesses and houses.
I guess that’s when I realized that I had been expecting God to intervene. That God owed us that. After two-going-on-three years of this pandemic and all the other pressing socio-political, cultural and racial crises I wanted and expected God to prevent this damned war somehow. What the Ukrainian people are enduring right now is unacceptable. Violence and the trauma it inflicts is unacceptable to me. I think of all the doctors and nurses and good Samaritans tending to all the broken people, fighting to help them live to see a better day after all they’ve already been through, I want to scream.
It’s almost too much to take--no, it IS too much to take.
And so a couple weeks ago when I first read the passage from the gospel of Luke for today I was searching for encouragement or comfort or anything to help me navigate this latest mind-numbing crisis. But the first few times I read this passage I came away empty.
So I read the passage again. And again. And again.
But my mind was still drawing a blank.
And that ticked me off.
What in the world is Jesus talking about? I kept thinking. You don’t sound like you: “Go tell that fox for me that I’m casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow and on the third day I finish my work.”
What?
That’s right, Jesus says, “Yet today, tomorrow and the next day I must be on my way because it’s impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem …”
Excuse me?
“Jerusalem Jerusalem the city that kills … Oh Jerusalem how I’ve longed to gather your children like a hen gathers her brood under her wing, but you were not willing …”
“See your house is left to you …”
“ … and I’m telling you now, you won’t see me anymore until you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
I couldn’t make sense out of any of that. Not even the animal images Jesus uses:
King Herod the fox. Jesus the hen.
In the “real world” heck, according to the “laws of nature” the fox consumes the hen. Every time. Is that supposed to be comforting? Of course not. Jesus isn’t just throwing words around. He’s choosen his words and these images very carefully.
When Jesus spoke those words, human brutality was just as pervasive as it remains to this day. Violence then was actively devouring innocent people and families, just like it devoured George Floyd, and just like it devours women and girls and actively prowls and haunts life here in the year 2022.
And so this passage from Luke couldn’t deliver what I was demanding from it. But thank God there’s someone out there who could and did decipher it. Barbara Brown Taylor:
“If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus' lament. If you have ever loved someone you could not protect all you can do is open your arms. You cannot make anyone walk into them. Meanwhile, this is the most vulnerable posture in the world – wings spread, breast exposed — but if you mean what you say, then this is how you stand. Vulnerable.
“Given the number of animals available, it is curious that Jesus chooses a hen. Where is the biblical precedent for that? What about the mighty eagle of Exodus, or Hosea’s stealthy leopard? What about the proud lion of Judah, mowing down Israel’s enemies with a roar? Compared to any of those, a mother hen does not inspire much confidence. No wonder so many decide to run with the fox.
“But a hen is what Jesus chooses, which — if you think about it — is pretty typical of him. He is always turning things upside down, so that children and peasants wind up on top while kings and scholars fall to the bottom. He is always wrecking our expectations of how things should turn out by giving prizes to losers and paying the last first. So of course he chooses a chicken, which is about as far from a fox as you can get. That way the options become very clear: you can live by [devouring the innocent] or you can die protecting the chicks.
“Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between the chicks and those who mean to do them harm. She has no fangs, no claws, no rippling muscles. All she has is her willingness to shield her babies with her own body. If the fox is determined to devour those babies, he will have to kill her first.
“Which he does, as it turns out. He slips into the yard one night while all the babies are asleep. When her cry wakens them, they scatter. She dies the next day — wings spread, breast exposed — in full view of all the foxes and all the chickens, but without a single chick beneath her wings. It breaks her heart, but that does not change a thing. If you mean what you say, then this is how you stand.” [1]
Taylor reminds us that to love another person is to realize we cannot fully protect them from harm.
Most of history is the story of human violence devouring people. In all this time, it seems humanity has developed only two responses to violence: flight or fight. Jesus delivers a third way, a new way to be human as he leads us out of the never-ending cycle of violence. It is so shockingly different that Jesus knows he will be rejected, as BBT poetically notes. It seems that the only chance we have to understand and accept this shockingly different way of Jesus is for him to live it out on the cross.
But for most of the world, the cross is a bridge too far.
Perhaps Jesus is not who we think he is. Perhaps God is not how we think God is or how we think God should deal with the brutality of the world in its many guises. Because Jesus refuses to resort to violence not even to protect people nor in service to a higher moral purpose.
What Jesus will do is sacrifice himself to the violence. He will allow the fox to do what a fox does.
It takes incredible faith to believe in a God whose ultimate form of protection is to die at the hands of an enemy’s violence, even with the promise of resurrection life. It seems people have always preferred the Lion of Judah rather than the Lamb who is slain … or the mother hen.
Jesus seems to be showing us that all the ways we’ve trusted and turned to to conquer our enemies in the past merely keeps violence alive deep in the human psyche. The bad news, or perhaps the Good News is that we cannot defeat violence all by ourselves. Only God can do that. We only know how to make it worse.
In the end, your future and mine, the future of Ukraine, the future of this planet and every person we love is ultimately beyond our control. We cannot provide the fix or the cure all by ourselves. We cannot figure it out. Only God can be trusted to do that. And God has.
God has already shown us in Jesus how this all plays out.
In Jesus, God takes on our human suffering with inextinguishable love and care and healing surrender. Suffering is not eliminated nor defeated in a snap of God’s fingers. Betrayal and disappointment and utter despair remain. Darkness falls on a Thursday evening and stretches into Friday looking to all the world as though this all shall end badly.
And just when it seems like all is lost something happens early on the first day while it is still dark. We shall only experience it once in our lifetime. But one time is all the Lord needs.
Jesus won’t be king of the jungle in this or any other story. What he will be is a mother hen, who stands between her chicks and those who mean to do them harm.
Jesus stands between us and whatever harm comes our way.
For some that’s not good enough. But that’s who Jesus is. And so, for others, for me, and I hope for you too, that’s why Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
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[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, excerpted (with some adaptations from me) from her sermon “As a Hen Gathers Her Brood” appearing in Girardian Lectionary Reflections in “Reflections and Questions note 1.” http://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/lent2c/
