WELCOME to many new subscribers!
Sunday Musings at The Cottage provide a break from the news, starting each week with short and surprising reflections on scripture passages, poems, or quotes from books. This Lent, I’m focusing on readings from the Gospels on the life of Jesus. Sunday Musings go to the entire community of both free and paid subscribers.
The Gospel story for the second Sunday of Lent is a favorite of feminist scholars, one often preached at ordinations of clergywomen. The rendering of Jesus as a mother hen opens the imagination toward tender images that the church has often ignored.
Luke 13:31-35
Some Pharisees came and said to Jesus, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 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.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"
I confess: I’m thinking less of the hen and chicks right now than I am of the fox. That’s where this story starts — with Jesus calling Herod, the Roman collaborator ruler of Galilee, “that fox.” And thus, Luke pits the fox against the mother hen.
Before she retired, my neighbor was a preschool teacher. One spring, she decided to raise chickens with the children. She had a chicken coop and brooder built at the school, and bought a flat of newly-hatched baby chicks which she introduced to the students. The children loved this, adopting the babies as their own, naming them and tending to them. Each morning, the preschoolers ran excitedly to the hen house to check on and care for their avian charges.
On one such day, the class went out to the coop to discover a fox had broken in. It was a horrible scene — every bird was dead. A dozen traumatized preschoolers howling in grief, my neighbor hurried them away from the scene of the massacre. She spent the rest of the day comforting the children and, during nap time, tended to the destruction left by the fox. She called the entire episode “The Great Chicken Slaughter.”
And there were never baby chicks at the preschool again.
Although Jesus is still in Galilee, he is thinking about Jerusalem. He laments how often the City of Peace is a place of violence. God’s own dwelling is also a habitation of rebellion and conflict. Jerusalem’s destiny is riven between history’s foxes, like Herod, and the prophets, like Jesus, who embrace the vulnerable with compassion and justice.
This story is a poetic description of the cosmic contest between Herod’s toxic masculinity and God’s motherly care. Fox or hen? Murder or maternity? What is the foundation of the holy city? What shall its future be? Jesus laments how the earthly city so often submits to vulpine schemes instead of surrendering to the tender protection of the Mother God.
And this text reminds us that Jesus throws his lot with the vulnerable. Jesus’ snarky reply to Herod’s threat reveals no temptation to saving himself at the expense of others. Instead, he extends spiritual shelter toward all threatened by the imperial fox. The deluded, the outcast, the oppressed, even the obstinate — these are Jesus’s brood.
Lament is caught up in vulnerability. Jesus isn’t considering political violence from afar. Instead, Jesus becomes part of the lament, sides with the weak, and embraces their vulnerability by making himself vulnerable. We all know that foxes kill hens and chicks alike. The mother hen may try to save her brood, but she will probably die in the attempt. We’re all vulnerable in this particular coop. Jesus isn’t above us; Jesus is fully with us in the threat. Yes, this text speaks of a maternal God, the divine feminine. Even more, however, it speaks of a profoundly human — and humane — Jesus. The endangered God, the weak One.
The poet David Whyte writes:
Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others.
Whyte insists that we humans have no choice other than to be vulnerable. We are vulnerable. Everything else is a delusion of power. “Our choice,” he says, “is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.”
And that’s where Luke leads me today — this story of a vulnerable Jesus, a “generous citizen of loss,” who walks bravely and fully through the door of risk. And there, as Jesus promised, we dwell in blessing.
INSPIRATION
The LORD found Jacob in a desert land,
and in the howling waste of the wilderness;
The LORD encircled him, cared for him,
and kept him as the apple of his eye.
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest,
that flutters over its young,
spreading out its wings, catching them,
bearing them on its pinions,
the LORD alone guided him.
— Deut. 32:10-12
Jesus is a figure of the weakness of God — of forgiveness, not retaliation; of peace, not war; of preferring the poor, not the wealthy; of lambs among wolves, etc. But if Jesus, then also God — that is the Christian premise. Weakness all the way down to the root radically — that is radical Christianity. If Jesus is the icon, then the mark of God is not omnipotence, not triumphant power, but persecution; not retaliation, but forgiveness.
The kingdom is about the “weak force” of forgiveness, about the “powerless power” of non-violence, about living like the lilies of the field. It is a force, a true force, but it is weak or non-violent force. It is a power, a true power, but a powerless power, not power as the world knows power, not retaliatory power in this life or the next.
— John Caputo
The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance.
— David Whyte, “Vulnerability,” Read the entire prose poem and listen to Whyte read it.
Now in Paperback!
ORDER YOUR COPY HERE: Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence.
A 2021 best of the year in Spirituality and Practice, Englewood Review, and So What Faith. The book that Christian Century called “Diana Butler Bass’ Love Letter to Jesus.”
Holy God,
Hear our prayers for all those who will die today because of war in Ukraine and other war-torn countries all over this world. Grant them an end to the suffering of this world and eternal peace that is only found in You.
We pray for the people of Ukraine, Russia, and all nations — that war and bloodshed can be avoided and a new, just peace can be forged out of this crisis. We ask God grant wisdom to the leaders of nations, calling them to end provocation on all sides and invest instead in “the things that make for peace” as called for in all our faith traditions (Luke 19:41-2).
— from the United Church of Christ, the entire prayer is HERE
Because of the Canadian time change, and not doing our usual annual preparation of changing our clocks, we missed church yesterday. I wish I had remembered your Column, Diana. That would have been comfort indeed. Thank you for not forgetting your readers. I’ll pray for you, Nora. Joy is a wonderful place ❤️
Thank you for assuring us that we all are indeed vulnerable - none more so than the people of Ukraine. I couldn't help but assign the fox metaphor to Putin. Praying that the key to his vulnerability may be found sooner than later.