Lent 2 C 19 Luke 13:31-35
Reflection The power of the sly fox and the vulnerable hen.
1. In our reading today, Luke’s Jesus is approaching the congested intersection of competing, capricious and autocratic power. The Pharisees surprisingly warn Jesus of Herod’s murderous intent. Jesus journeys toward Jerusalem, the place where the religious and political establishment serve to maintain its organisation, killing off prophets who remind them of their true mission. Roman colonial rule remains an implicit brutal presence, threatening people who destabilise their colonies by the fear of death. Jesus draws ever nearer to growing danger and threat.
2. Why is Jesus becoming a visible threat? The answer lies in the response of Jesus. His focus, work and teaching engage any power that oppresses people and institutions. As William Loader writes:
[Jesus] has been engaging in acts of compassion and caring which restore dignity to people. Why should Herod worry about such a ‘nice person’? Because Jesus’ vision went beyond the individual to a transformed society. That had social and political implications. Both dimensions matter: the individual, personal and the social, communal.
Roman power becomes anxious when social instability surfaces and the religious and political Jewish class in Jerusalem seek to quell any form of unrest that destabilises their Temple establishment.
3. The fragility and intense vulnerabilities that Jesus faced are unimaginable to our democratic existence.
The situation of Jesus is more like living in the former Soviet Union. Orlando Figes in his book The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia shares the story of Antonina Golovina. After her family returned from Siberia in the 1930s, being exiled as a “class enemy”, they were initially shunned and excluded from every activity of life. This created social inferiority and deep fear. To survive, Antonina concealed her background, constructed another identity, became a member of the Communist party, “not because she believed in the ideology … but to divert suspicion”. She married, but for 40 years, with her two husbands, never spoke of her past, not even as whispers in secret.
“The real power of the Stalinist system … [was that it] entered into all [of the people]. … Millions of ordinary people … silently accepted and internalised the system’s basic values, conformed to it public rules and perhaps collaborated in the perpetuation of its crimes.”
4. Jesus recognised similar dynamics of oppression operating in his own world, and defied systemic power to set people free.
Yet, he does this openly and paradoxically. He seems to further antagonise an already escalating clash of powers and values. Or is it that he engages in fierce conversations that we must have but repress? Using inflammatory imagery, he identifies Herod as a small animal, a fox, exposing his cruelty, craftiness and blood-thirsty power. Jesus creates a competing, yet entangled image, identifying himself, or is it herself, as a mother hen. Ever since Aesop’s fables (a Greek Slave, 620-564 BCE), the fox and the hen have been tragically interwoven. Jesus identifies himself as the mother hen, with all her powerlessness and vulnerabilities, who in her love for her chicks will love, care and protect them even unto death. In this, Jesus suggests God is the compassionate Mother Hen, the feminine aspect of God’s being, who will give part of herself, Jesus Christ, for us, finite human beings who seek our own power.
Rev Vladimir Korotkov