Lent 2B - "The Fox and the Hen"

Saint Luke 13:31-15

In light of this morning’s gospel a friend suggested I read the children’s book, The Fox and the Hen.

It’s about a sly fox who spies a little red hen in her garden and decides that she would make a delicious dinner for he and his mother.  So, when she isn’t looking, he sneaks into her henhouse where frightened she flies up into the rafters and calls out, “You won’t catch me. Give up and go home.”

Instead, he sets about chasing his tail.  Round and round he goes and the hen, watching him, becomes dizzy, falls off her perch and into a sack the fox just happened to have to carry her home in.

Gradually, as he walks along, he discovers that she is one heavy hen and so sits down to rest and promptly falls asleep.  

The hen sees it as her chance to escape from the sack and replaces herself with heavy stones.  The fox never notices and lugs the bag the rest of the way home.

Here his mother is waiting with water boiling in a giant kettle and here is also where the story takes a very dark turn. 

The stones splash into the kettle and, instead of ending the story where I would have, with mother and son fox looking at a very wet floor and saying to each other, “That is sure one clever hen.”  The stones hit the water with such force that it splashes all over the two foxes and scalds them so severely that they die.1

This is a children’s book?  Why hasn’t stuff like this been banned?

Kidnapping. Violence. Murder.  This is one grim fairy tale sure to keep, if not the children, at least the adults who were read it to them up at night, scratching their heads, and sleeping with the light on.

But it is also a fairy tale.  A ghastly fairy tale but a fairy tale never-the-less. In the real-world hens rarely outsmart foxes.  In the real-world hens are not the outwitters they are the outwitted. More likely than not they wind up in the kettle with some carrots, potatoes, aromatic vegetables and find themselves the centre piece of the soup.  No, in a battle between a hen and the fox always bet on the fox.

This is exactly why Jesus' response to the Pharisees must have had everyone holding their breath because calling Herod a fox could land oneself in hot water indeed.

Scholars maintain the Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees is not as one sided as we see it. 

“Although,” we are told, “Jesus has conflicts with the Pharisees, in Luke he dines with Pharisees three times.  They represent a group with whom Jesus shares table fellowship and conversation as well as conflict.”2

That is why I see their warning to him as being sincere.  Disagreement does not always have to lead to harm and when they heard rumblings that Herod might be out to get their “worthy adversary” they may have sought to intervene. 

“Luke’s depiction of the complicated relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees renders their warning to Jesus all the more significant.”2

It is significant but it is not an above the fold headline to Jesus.

He must have heard the stories from his mother and father about their journey into Egypt when he was a young lad of two or three.  He must have wondered why they had to hightail it out of their own country for another land and asked for the details. So, he knew that when he was but a boy his father had been warned in a dream “‘Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,’ the angel said. ‘Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’”3

Warnings like that are not easily forgotten. So, Jesus must have known that from the very beginning Herod wanted desperately to do him in. 

The Pharisees were just issuing a warning and Jesus seems to be wanting to add fuel to the fire when he said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “You go tell that fox!” 

“Not a fox!” they must have thought or even whispered to one another.  “Oh no, not a fox.  Anything, rather than to be so foolish, than to call Herod ‘a fox.’”

In the Greco-Roman world, “fox” could symbolize deceit and maliciousness as well as intelligence and strength. Within rabbinic literature, foxes are regarded as unclean pests that should be avoided.

We might have tried to avoid a fox, especially a fox that wielded enormous political power at all costs, but Jesus is not done.  He has healing and teaching to do and a death threat is not going to stop him.  So, he replies: “Go tell that fox, ‘I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal.’”4

It is not long before this spirit of defiance turns into a lament.  “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killer of prophets, abuser of the messengers of God! How often I’ve longed to gather your children, gather your children like a hen, Her brood safe under her wings— but you refused and turned away!”5

At the First United Methodist church in Chicago there are two altars. The first is in the sanctuary on the main floor and features a carving called “If thou hadst known,” based on the quotation in Luke 19:42 when from the western slope of the Mount of Olives, Christ beheld the city of Jerusalem and wept over it, saying, “If you had known even you, especially in this your day, the things that make for your peace!  But now they are hidden from your eyes.”6

Since the church is located in a skyscraper completed by the United Methodists in 1924 some 400 feet above the city streets is what they affectionately refer to as “The Chapel in the Sky” where  there is another altar with another carving that was done in 1952.

[IMAGE #2] In order to reach this intimate little space you have to use two elevators and a set of stairs.  Once there you would see the “companion piece to the altar in the sanctuary but in the carving on this altar Jesus is shown weeping over the city of Chicago because people still do not know “the things that make for peace.”7

Paddy Bauler, saloon keeper and Alderman, after the 1955 election of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley may have summed up what Jesus was looking at best when uttered the now infamous line "Chicago ain't ready for reform yet!"  Nor does it appear is world and even our nation.

Jesus still laments.  Jesus still weeps.  He weeps at the images of war. 

He knows what is like to be a child ripped from home by a despotic ruler, so he weeps.

He knows what it is like to live in an occupied land surrounded by people who face the daily choice of either battling the occupier or capitulating to the occupation.

He weeps when politicians try to use any reference to words like equity and inclusion as a wedge issue to divide people because that is what his ministry was all about.

He weeps at racial divisions in our land are exploited by the Herods of our time.

He weeps because he knows that we do not know the “things that makes for peace” and that this world “ain’t ready for reform, yet.”

He weeps when “instead of being courageous we are content to be safe” and “allow the avoidance of evil to trump the pursuit of the good.  Our overwhelming fears need to be overwhelmed by bigger and better things.”8

As Lutheran pastor Jennifer Moland-Kovash wrote in a Christian Century article:

Fear is so very foxy, especially for chickens like us. As it stands there, pretty against the snow, powerful and destructive, we can feel our feathers quiver a bit. Fear doesn’t have to ransack the coop to bring havoc to our lives.

So, what do we do? We look to Jesus’ example. 

He doesn’t hide, even though he knows he will die. Go and tell that fox that I’m busy—bringing good news to those who need it, being the hands and feet of God in this world. Go and tell that fox that I’ve got better things to do in this world than huddle in the corner waiting to die.9

And what we find, says Barbara Brown Taylor in her book Bread of Angels is astounding.

Jesus likened himself to a brooding hen whose chief purpose in life is to protect her young.  She doesn’t have talons or much of a beak. All she can do is fluff herself up and sit on her chicks. She can also put herself between them and the fox, as ill equipped as she is. At the very least, she can hope that she satisfies his appetite so that he leaves her babies alone. . .. How do you like that image of God?10

I’m not sure you that I will or even can understand that image, but it is one that Jesus gave us.  It is love in Jesus, giving life away day after day until he reaches his goal and gives his life away on the cross. 

I’m not sure I understand this.  I’m not sure I comprehend this reforming love that keeps at work even when we might not be willing.

But I do know that apart from that sacrificial love, Christian faith is just another religion, another slogan among many slogans. 

I do know and believe that this one man going humbly to his cross is important to know.  I know and believe that this man who could have, but did not, claim the kind of power and privilege that the “foxes” of the world tell us we must have at any cost shapes my thoughts and my actions. 

I do know that this man is “the truest human being who ever lived and that insofar as you and I live like that, even occasionally, we approach something of the meaning and purpose and glory for which we were created.”11

So go and tell the foxes of the world we got better things to do than huddle in a corner waiting to die. 

Go and tell the foxes of the world that for now we are busy living – bringing good news to those who need it, being the hands of feet of God in the world.

Go and tell the foxes of the world that we know that when our time comes, we’ll be safe under the wings of Jesus.  

But until that time comes, I invite you to join Jesus, with the rest of us chickens, because we still have a lot of living to do.

________________

1. William Anthony and Silvia Nencini, The Fox and the Hen (Minneapolis,, MN: Bearport Publishing, 2023).  Paraphrased.

2.  Shively T.J. Smith, “Luke 13:31-35. Commentary 1: Connecting the Reading with Scripture,” Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, 2, no. Lent through Pentecost (Nashville: Westminister|John Knox Press,2018): 54–56.

3. Matthew 3:13. (NLT) [NLT=The New Living Translation. (Carol Steam, Il: Tyndale House Publishers, 2015)]

4. St.  Luke 14:21. (NIV) [NIV= The New International Version]

5. Luke 14:34. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene Peterson, The Message  (Carol Stream, Illinois: NavPress, 2016)]

6.    “The Altar Carving,” Self-Guided Tour of The Chicago Temple, August 24, 2011, https://tourchicagotemple.wordpress.com/altar-carving/.

7. “The Chicago Temple,” The Chicago Temple, accessed March 9, 2022, https://www.chicagotemple.org/about/history/.

8. Scott Bader-Saye, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear: Choosing Trust Over Safety in an Anxious Age (Grand Rapids,, MI: Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2020), 31, 60.

9. Jennifer Moland Kovash, “March 16, 2025: Second Sunday in Lent,” The Christian Century, February 23, 2022.

10. Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels: Feeding on the Word (Norwich, Connecticut: Canterbury Press, 2015).  p.  125.

11. John M. Buchanan, “A Strange New Power.” Sermon preached at the Morning Worship service of The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago, April 8, 2001.