Tonight we are in the season of Lent, 2 Sundays and 10 days in. A quarter of the way through 40 days. There are a bunch of ways of conceiving of seasons in church year and one of those I’m thinking about tonight is as journeys. We can imagine Advent, the weeks leading up to Christmas, as “the journey to Bethlehem.” We walk the road and travel with the Holy family, Jesus’ bio family of Mary and her kin, but also his chosen family which is everyone else: Joseph, the shepherds, the sheep, the wise men, even that fabled little drummer boy. Everyone is making their way to Bethlehem to meet Jesus, to witness his arrival, to welcome him, to be in his presence. In the church, we imagine ourselves along that road, journeying with them.
Lent is a journey too, but to a different destination. In Lent Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem. He’s not alone, he has his disciples, his family, bio- and chosen, including non-human creation like donkeys and fig trees and perfumed oil. The journey to Jerusalem is a little more solemn. Jesus knows he is journeying towards his death. He has told his followers, but they don’t always seem to get it. The ones who will line the road when he finally reaches Jerusalem, in fact, are still in celebratory mode, hailing him King, shouting joyfully as he passes through the gates. But Jesus knows. He presses on, steely-eyed and focused, walking towards the cross. He still eats with his friends, heals the sick, and, I imagine, still soaks up the goodness of all the life he is living and giving to others. In the church, Lent is a time when we imagine ourselves too, with focused determination and joy, journeying to Jerusalem.
Our story tonight at the end of Luke chapter 13 shows Jesus working his way down the road. He is teaching, driving out demons, healing people day by day. He is sending his disciples out on their own, helping them to do his work. He is making trouble, because that’s what he does, doling out woes to the experts in the law, issuing warnings and encouragements.
He is making enough trouble that the Pharisees come to him with a warning of their own. “Leave this place and go somewhere else. Herod wants to kill you” (13:31). Herod was the ruler of Galilee and Perea, king of this “client state,” one of many colonies subordinate to the Roman empire. Herod has already killed Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, so the news that he has Jesus in his sights isn’t surprising. The Pharisees, whether out of genuine concern for Jesus or a measure of self interest, have come from Jerusalem to tell him “turn back and get out of town. You are walking into trouble!”
But Jesus seems to have a nose for trouble and he isn’t about to back down now. Instead, he doubles down. “Go tell that fox [Herod],” he spits back to the Pharisees, “I will keep on driving out demons and healing people today and tomorrow and on the third day I will reach my goal.” Jesus doesn’t shy away from Herod despite all Herod’s power, despite the threat to his own life. He calls Herod out for what he is, “a fox,” a generalist predator, with a penchant for poultry, known for its cunning, a hunter who crouches and stays hidden until pouncing suddenly atop its prey to tear it apart. Jesus lists off all the things he is going to keep doing. He doesn’t water down his objectives to make them more palatable to the state. Jesus tells the Pharisees that he is going to do this work “today and tomorrow,” day after day after day. And he doesn’t alter the end he has in mind. “On the third day I will reach my goal” (13:32). Jesus knows who he is and what he is doing and he isn’t backing down.
“In any case,” a wave of his hand, “I must press on. Today and tomorrow and the next day.” Day after day after day. Step after step. He even makes a joke of the threat, the suggestion that he should turn back. “Surely no prophet can die outside of Jerusalem!” (13:33)
And then Jesus turns his attention back to Jerusalem itself. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (13:34). He calls to the city, to its children. He pours out his longing to gather the people to himself like a hen gathers her chicks.
Jesus calls himself a hen. He names himself a source of warmth, safety, protection, refuge. Jesus pulls up a distinctly familial image. A brood is a family of young, hatched and cared for. Broody hens will hatch eggs laid by other hens, so the family she raises and draws back to herself is broader than our usual definitions of “mother.” A brood is the children of a familial community, the vulnerable gathered together for care. The hen is the one who keeps them.
There are other references in the Bible where God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are equated with birds. The Holy Spirit is quite literally at times a dove. Psalm 91 also pictures God as a bird creating a refuge and fortress under the feathers of God’s wings.
There are stouter, sturdier birds in the Bible, God mounting us up on the wings of eagles and such. But when God is actually a bird the images are a little more fragile and a little weirder. Hens and doves, not exactly the top of any food chain. Psalm 91’s feather refuge isn’t about tucking under God’s muscular shoulder joint. The psalm specifically talks about the pinions, the lightweight flight feathers at the outer edges of the wing. God as a bird is awfully delicate, soft, and vulnerable herself, yet somehow effective in her defence and protection.
Jesus calling himself a hen is remarkable for lots of reasons, one of course being that he calls himself a female. Luke 13 is one of the references we like to grab onto since we don’t have as many feminine images and metaphors for God as we perhaps would like. As Christians we have our work cut out for us when we try to counter patriarchal theology, history, biblical interpretation, and culture. Try as we might, our imaginations of God are so, so male. And while our Biblical texts bear some of the blame, because they are indeed loaded with male images of God, we also have historically had a tendency to overlook the nonbinary and feminine images of God, and that’s on us to correct. Here we get our chance to claim and delve deep. In the midst of the “Our Fathers” of it all it feels good to have Jesus literally calling himself our mother.
A Hen! A Mother! A Warm and Loving Picture of God! And so we jump on this domesticated nurturer, nesting and tending, warming and hatching, foraging and feeding and encouraging, keeping safe with her body and instinct, covering us with her wings.
And all of this is true. Jesus does all of these things. The Triune God prepares a place for us in the world, births and tends us, feeds us (even with her own body), nurtures us, teaches us, sends us out into the world, and provides a shelter under the surprisingly effective refuge of the counter-culturally “soft” wings of, I don’t know, a commitment to nonviolence and peace?
But if we stop there, I don’t think we are going far enough. What’s more, I think we are making exegetical mistakes, of the text and of the world..
Because if we aren’t careful we can make even animals the victims of the same patriarchal assumptions of sexism and misogyny as humans.
There is a lot more to a hen.
Years ago I was visiting the beloved John Soehner’s farm to pick some strawberries out in White Cross, just west of Chapel Hill. John and I chatted as I got out of my car, he pointed to good spots for picking, and then he waved his hand towards the barn and field in the other direction, “Just don’t go back that way. We have a pregnant sow and she needs some space.” Amidst his casual demeanor I heard the sober tone of warning. A neophyte among farm animals, it’s a good thing I took note. At the time I would have rather ignorantly imagined a mother pig as something along the lines of a cute, cuddly potbellied pet, a little larger of course, but all still smiles and wallows awaiting a clutch of cute, cuddly little piglets gathering around her. It did not occur to me that sows can be notoriously fierce and aggressive. I needed the explicit warning that mothers are not all sweetness and light. A mother pig can be a 250 pound force of nature hell bent on protecting their litter and you best…watch…out.
Not long after this began a phase of my life where, if I had ever had a social media presence, I might have created a series called, “Adventures of Catherine: the well-intended, idealistic, and rather naive farm hand.” I had some years where I helped out regularly on another farm. We had a CSA there and I became friends with one of the owners. Somehow I became Ben’s listening ear (this is a professional hazard) and he would regale me with weekly stories of whatever drama was unfolding on the farm. There was always new drama. Often it involved the farm apprentices who came and went. When you employ well-intentioned, idealistic, and usually somewhat naive young people there is nearly always going to be drama. Ben needed someone who would listen, and laugh, and then hug him before he went back to digging through freezer cuts. I loved small farms and sustainable agriculture so I started to go out occasionally as a volunteer. During a time when the drama got more intense than usual Ben was short-staffed and he asked if I’d come out some days as an hourly worker. (A friend pointed out to me that since I was paid, I would now forever, alas, be disqualified from the farmworker Olympics).
So while I haven’t, like some of you, spent a lot of time farming, I’ve had enough experience to collect a few stories.
I have talked from this pulpit about the day I found myself with my shoulder wedged into the back end of a sheep as we tried to herd the flock onto a trailer. Some of you have heard about the time I farmed in sandals and stepped into a nest of fire ants (Dr. Bradley King may have given me a too-late phone consult on the very bad reaction to my poor feet). (And yes I always farm in tall black work boots now, no matter how hot it gets). There was the day I, who have worked in a burn ICU and am married Mr. Safety Michael Lee, helped Ben burn stumps down in a field, me twitching the whole time as the flames towered higher and all I could think about was the response time for EMS to rural Orange county. And the time when Brian, the kindest farm manager you will ever meet, took me out to move a bull across pasture. When we got out of the truck he side-glanced to my 5’4” ignorant-around-animals posture, sort of shivered with a “wait, what are we even doing here” pause, then began carefully to tell me how to avoid being gored on a lovely spring afternoon.
Which is all to say that while eager and willing to help, I didn’t know much about what I was doing, or how to handle all the living beings on a farm.
There were lots of laying hens, ranging free around different parts of the farm rotationally, taking care of pests and leaving behind manure, building nutrients and carbon into soil later used for planting. They produced a lot of eggs. The first day I went out for egg collection duty I got a little education about hens.
I received my instructions about where to hunt, and to check all of the nesting boxes including the ones where hens might be hanging around. “Just shoo them out of the way as you reach in…and wear gloves in case some of them are a little…cranky.”
Well, I don’t know if you know this, but hens, like sows, aren’t all sweetness and light.
Mostly things were fine, and unlike the fire ants no harm was done. But I had a few encounters that broadened my associations with hens.
Many of the ladies I encountered were none too pleased with my efforts to disrupt their repose. Many of those hens were not about to just let me shoo them away or reach under their bellies to grab the eggs beneath them. They shook their wings in my face and pecked at my hands and I was glad for the work gloves because some of those “pecks” were to the point. Hen beaks are hard.
And there was this one look from a particular bird, right before she pounced on my outstretched fingers, that I will never forget. That hen turned her neck and stared me straight in the eye with a glare that could wither your soul.
There is a lot more to a hen.
Hens, it turns out, can be mean. Hens are scrappy and nervous and vigilant, which is a wild combination. Our own use of language is telling–we have phrases about pecking order, chicken fights, cackling (the laugh associated with witches), and being henpecked. Hens can be skittish and moody. Broody hens, especially, can be aggressive.
There are websites dedicated to dealing with aggressive chickens. Chickens recognize other individual animals and humans and do indeed operate with a hierarchical “pecking order.” If they don’t recognize a specific being’s sway, they will come for you. One somber nugget of internet advice: “don’t send your kids out to gather eggs or feed until they are old enough to be the dominant force…children have been blinded by chicken attacks.”
When Jesus calls himself a hen, longing to gather chicks under his wings, we would be remiss to imagine him only as a soft place of refuge, or as a meek retreating defence. Jesus the hen god longs to cover and protect her brood. And a hen will fight you.
When I picture Jesus staring down “that fox” Herod and the whole of the Roman empire, I imagine that hen on the farm locking eyes with me in cold, steely determination right before she pounced. Perhaps Jesus’ hen gaze of longing to gather his children looks more like that: a withering challenge.
In fact I wonder if we should retitle this section of Luke. Most Bibles have subheadings like “Jesus’ sorrow for Jerusalem” and “lament over Jerusalem.” But what if Jesus’ longing isn’t only of lament? What if Jesus’ longing is also a word of warning, a word of woe?
The Pharisees have just warned Jesus that his own life is in danger, but he is rather nonplussed about that. Instead his focus turns to Jerusalem and its children. Despite their indifference and even violence to the prophets sent to save them, despite the indifference and even violence he knows he will soon face, Jesus declares that he will continue his work day after day after day. Jesus hears the distress calls from his chicks, and when a chick makes a distress call, the mother hen immediately starts to look for it (which also sounds a lot like the parable of the Lost Coin). Jesus calls out to Jerusalem like a hen clucking to gather the brood under her wings for protection.
And Jesus does not back down.
In the hierarchy of the chicken world, some hens will engage in submissive behavior to other dominating birds. Jesus, not so much. Jesus is always subverting the authorities around him with his teaching and his healing, with his protection of the vulnerable.
And the usual advice for dealing with aggressive hens? It varies depending on results with escalation from “be on your guard at all times” to “establish dominance” to “get rid of it.” Which is what the authorities did to Jesus: they kept on their guard and watched him closely. Then they tried to undermine and contain him. And when that didn’t work–they killed him.
So when we imagine Jesus, and when we imagine him as the hen gathering us unto herself–with care, with warmth, with longing–I want us also to remember that hens, they are fierce. They listen for the cries of their children. They protect their family with their bodies. They do not back down.
And in these times of fear and uncertainty, let’s remember that Jesus calls us to be like him. Like her best hen self. Full, some days, of some mean chicken energy.
May it be so.