You see, I had just visited many of the most holy places in the world. I had met wonderful people on all sides of the Middle East conflict who were negotiating life together in this complex city. But the constant signs of entrenched violence were what overwhelmed me: the ever-present Israeli soldiers in full army gear on the street corners; barbed-wire spread around buildings like deadly Christmas garlands; the ancient gate where the apostle Stephen was stoned, now pock-marked with centuries of bullet holes; the Palestinian kindergartners lined up at armed check points to get to school on the other side of the horrifying concrete Wall. Everywhere I looked, there were signs of killing and stoning, guns and terrorist bombs, wars and curses. O Jerusalem, Jerusalem. You are but a symbol for the human violence that fills our world. Even today, you still reflect back to us Jesus’ painful longing to save us from ourselves. What a fitting Gospel reading for us today, as the horrible violence of war once again rages in Europe. How Jesus must weep over the bombs falling on hospitals, the women and children fleeing by the millions, the lives broken and ended on both sides by the invasion of Ukraine.
Even over here, in the relative safety of the United States, I can picture myself as one of those defenseless chicks, clueless and peeping. How easy it is for me to superimpose the face of Vladimir Putin on the face of that despotic fox, Herod Antipas: Crafty and sly, hungry and greedy, using power and self-interest to achieve his ends. I have to ask: With such powerful foxes prowling around us, why did you have to choose a hen, Jesus? Innocent people are shot in our grocery stores, and fires burn down whole neighborhoods, and war tears apart a whole country. I’m all for using feminine images and highlighting the powerful devotion of a mother …. But why aren’t you a mother lion, Jesus? Or a mother grizzly bear? Or a mother wolf? Why not something with some teeth and some claws? As Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “When the foxes of this world start prowling really close to home, when you can hear them snuffling right outside the door, then it would be nice to have a little bigger defense budget for the hen house.”[1]
Always a city girl, I myself don’t really know much about the lives of farm animals, including mother hens. I do know about mother ducks, though. Last spring, right outside our kitchen window, a mother mallard duck crept behind our juniper bushes to lay her eggs. She was so well-camouflaged in the brown mulch that a quick glance would miss her entirely. With her bill tucked down in her feathers and her body flat with the ground, she spent most of her time peacefully asleep, covering her brood. Mother Mallard was always there at her post, the epitome of faithfulness, and I wondered how she got enough food and water to sustain herself. Having been a single mom, I identified with this mother duck, alone minding her babies as their father flitted around the pond, flying free. During a cold snap, I became filled with even more compassion for her, for she stayed on her nest all day while icy rain slid off her back. “What a good mother,” I thought to myself, and sighed.
After several weeks had passed, though, the weather had warmed enough for the HOA lawn service to come by. Hearing the loud mowers, I worried right away how the mother duck would bear all this noise. I looked out my window to check on her … but she was gone. There were twelve eggs in her well-padded nest, made soft with fluffy pieces of her own down. “She’ll be back soon,” I reasoned. “She must have been startled and has gone to find food.” But that night, she still wasn’t back. The next morning, the eggs sat unprotected in their cozy nest, and a few were broken. “Predators!” I gasped. Shaken, I got out my trusty iPhone and read with growing dread and dismay all about the nesting behavior of ducks. I learned that, when frightened, the mother duck runs away and never returns to her nest. She simply leaves her eggs to die and starts over later with another brood. I was devastated. I understood that, in the case of danger, having the mother die with her young would not propagate the species, but still …. It was a long time before I was ready to cover the remains of those abandoned eggs with soil. It was hard for me to give up on mama duck.
I’m afraid that, when danger lurks, I have about as much trust in God as I now have in mother ducks. Not that God would get scared and run off, exactly, but sometimes, I just don’t trust God to turn up. Just saying: it does look like there are an awful lot of unprotected nests out there in this world … And I sometimes feel like a defenseless little egg in the face of the world’s troubles, uncovered and thin-shelled. I decide that I need to take care of things myself, that the survival of the nest is up to me. But of course, it’s not.
Did you know that real chickens can actually communicate with the clucking sounds that they make? They have a special happy cluck and a special “hunger” cluck. They also have a special “danger” cluck. When the little chicks hear their mother cry danger, they are wired to come running, to run toward the one who calls them, and to hunker down under her wings.[2] The image of creatures taking shelter under the wings of the Almighty, too, is all over the psalms. As the psalmist writes, “How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.”[3] But we chicks facing Herod the Fox don’t seem to get it. We don’t run home to our loving Protector. When we don’t heed the call of our prophets, or even the call of our mothering Savior, then something is wrong. We are acting against our created nature.[4] And Jesus weeps.
O Jesus, our Mother Hen, you are so unlike my Mother Mallard, and so unlike me. When danger descends upon you, you don’t run and hide. You walk straight into the violence of Jerusalem, straight into the den of the fox. You stay with us there. You don’t give up on the world to try again somewhere else. You stretch out your fragile wings so wide that they cover the whole world. You stretch them out “on the hard wood of the cross,” as the collect says, “that we all might come within the reach of your saving embrace.”[5] No wonder the window of Dominus Flevit in Jerusalem frames the city’s violence and suffering with a cross and with a chalice and host raised high. In the eucharist, Jesus continues to call us to himself every Sunday. And, as Lauren Winner points out, this time we go.[6] We come forward; we’re gathered in, and we take shelter in Jesus’ body—a body broken and shared, yet more powerful than the evil of all this world’s foxes.
[1] Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1997), 128.
[2] Lauren Winner, “Luke 13 Sermon, Goodson Chapel,” unpublished manuscript. I am indebted to this sermon for many insights into this text.
[3] Psalm 36:7.
[4] Winner, 2.
[5] Collect for Mission, Morning Prayer Rite II, Book of Common Prayer, 101.
[6] Winner, 6.
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