March 16, 2025 – Second Sunday of Lent
Jack Belsom
If we are going to follow Jesus, the journey will involve confronting those powers that oppose the reign of God that Jesus proclaimed and lived. Jesus knew where he was going, knew who thought they were in power, and knew what would happen if he took on those powers where they lived. Luke gives us a Jesus who is strong in his determination and tender in showing God’s love for all as he confronts Herod Antipas and his messengers:
“Go and tell that fox for me,[a] ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33 Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ (Lk 13:32–33)
In Galilee, where Jesus was from, Herod Antipas was a petty tyrant, who served at the pleasureand profit of the Roman Empire. This Herod is a descendant of the one we remember from the Christmas stories, and he is just as ineffective in hindering God’s plans. Herod wants power and security, and his vision of how things should be clashes with the things Jesus is saying and doing even as Jesus travels around Herod’s home turf. Leslie Hoppe puts it this way: “Jesus came to call the people to repentance and faith. He called them to renew their commitment to their ancestral religious traditions. Herod and his supporters also wished to lead the people of Galilee to a new world—a world whose center was Rome and whose values were opposed to the values of the gospel” [Feasting on the Word Commentary, Year C, Vol. 3]
Jesus brushes aside the warning about Herod’s evil scheming. They are only words—futile threats. In the larger picture of Jesus’ mission, they are not significant. The plan of God has power. God’s word has power. Herod’s words are useless. Jesus turns toward Jerusalem fully aware of the danger that lies ahead.
Surely those powers did not care for Jesus’ talk about the first being last and the last being first. And that’s what Jesus was talking about before the scene in today’s gospel lesson. None of that sounded like good news to those who thought they had a firm grasp on all the prestige and power.
That brings us to Jesus’ use of the image of a mother hen and the protection of her wings. We find those images in the bible, and they are not unique to Jesus. That language would have called to mind the ancient promises of God’s tender care for God’s people, and, at the same time, it would have reminded them that God was holding Israel to a high standard of faithfulness—to a covenant that was carved on their hearts. Jesus’ anguished cry over Jerusalem’s history of rejecting those whom God sent to them would have been painfully familiar to those who first heard Jesus’ lament.
It’s a strange image—Jesus’ reminding all that Jerusalem would reject him and still wanting togather them as a mother hen gathers her chicks for protection.
Walter Brueggemann says, “Jesus is a lover of a city who grieves its death wish,” a city that “refuses what makes for shalom.” And so, Jesus “warns against the oppressive acquisitiveness of urban style that we call ‘coveting’ that in turn produces endless anxiety” [Brueggemann, Mandate to Difference]. When all you want is more and more, there is never enough, and there can never be any real security.
What Jesus is doing is lamenting. More than moaning and groaning, it recognizes the true condition of the city and what its future would be, and it is reaches out with compassion. In that wesee both the strong and tender love of God that we know in Jesus. As Timothy Shapiro puts it, “He’s the mother hen who will pursue her child through thick and thin, through good school days and bad, through stupid moves and violent outbursts; he’s the mother hen who folds the covers down on the bed and puffs up the pillow, at the same time saying, ‘Don’t ever let me catch you doing that again” [New Proclamation 2007]. What a beautiful way to describe both judgment (accountability) and mercy!
Bishop N.T. Wright—famous British New Testament scholar—draws on the image of a “farmyard fire” as the threat to the hen’s babies, when “those cleaning up have found a dead hen, scorched and blackened, and live chicks sheltering under her wings. She has quite literally given her life to save them. It is a vivid and violent image of what Jesus declared he longed to do for Jerusalem, and, by implication for all Israel. But, at the moment, all he could see was chicks scurrying off in the opposite direction, taking no notice of the smoke and flames indicating the approach of danger nor the urgent warnings of the one who alone could give them safety” [Luke for Everyone].
Jesus’ surprising words help us see even those who threaten him in a new light. Herod, theplotting Pharisees, the power players in Jerusalem, all those who want to be first, then and now—they want to see themselves as masters of the universe, invulnerable and imperial behind their relentless, foxy maneuvering.
Jesus calls their death-dealing by name, yet he also sees them as barnyard chicks lost in a storm, too afraid and too stubborn to find shelter under the shadow of a mother hen’s wings. What these overlords want to be heard as a fearsome canine growl emerges as an almost comic cheeping [Feasting on the Word Commentary, Year C, vol. 3].
Richard Swanson reminds us that “Lent is a time to take seriously the ways we live as signs of death rather than of life, the ways we steal from the earth rather than sprout from it.” In this story about Jesus’ firm determination to face what lies ahead in Jerusalem—for our sake, not only for the sake of his people, in his own time, we hear the call to stand firm ourselves, no matter what, when faced with risk for the sake of the Gospel. Jesus doesn’t back down or run away not because he knows that he is safe from the cross but because he knows who God is, and what “the plan” is. This is the Jesus who accompanies us on our Lenten journey, and on every path of risk and faithfulness, no matter what we encounter along the way.
Barbara Brown Taylor has preached on this text. She holds together both the strength and tenderness of God’s love in Jesus. “At the risk of his own life, Jesus has brought the precious kingdom of God within the reach of the beloved city of God, but the city of God is not interested. Jerusalem has better things to do than to hide under the shelter of this mother hen’s wings.” She then describes the meager resources of a mother hen attempting to protect her brood against a vicious and well-armed predator, with “nothing much in the way of a beak and nothing at all in the way of talons…At the very least, she can hope that she satisfies his appetite so that he leaves her babies alone.” Taylor doesn’t stop with the tragedy of Jesus’ impending death; she goes on to the resurrection which she describes as the “cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother’s love for her chicks. And God bet the farm on her.”
Taylor remembers that victory this way: “Having loved her own who were in the world, she loved them to the end. She died a mother hen, and afterwards she came back to them with teeth marks on her body to make sure they got the point; that the power of foxes could not kill her love for them, nor could it steal them away from her. They might have to go through what she went through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on the other side, with love stronger than death.” She then suggests the lovely image of the “church of Christ as a big fluffed up brooding hen, offering warmth and shelter to all kinds of chicks, including orphans, runts, and maybe even a couple of ducks. The church of Christ planting herself between the foxes of this world and the fragile-boned chicks offering herself up to be eaten before she will sacrifice one of her brood.” We often refer to “Mother Church,” and perhaps that is apt: “It is where we come to be fed and sheltered, but it is also where we come to stand firm with those who need the same things from us [“Chickens and Foxes,” in Bread of Angels].
Let that be the image of the church for us this Lent: a big, fluffed up brooding hen! Amen.