Luke 13:31-35
Ferocious Love
March 13, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Image: Hen and chicks mosaic in the Church of Dominus Flevit on the Mount of Olives overlooking Jerusalem
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://youtu.be/Tx6OAaCtNrY
How often did Jesus get angry? There was that one time, when he seemed to blow his stack, turning over the tables in the Temple. I tend to think of that as a one-time kind of thing, but I wonder.
I shared a meme this week that says “My alone time is for your safety.” I remember that Jesus was always going off alone to pray. I mean, if I had to explain the same things over and over again to twelve guys who never seemed to get it, my mood might occasionally rise to a boil. Maybe Jesus’ alone time was for prayer and for their safety.
How often did Jesus get angry? We don’t really know. Maybe we like to think it was just the one time, with the tables in the Temple. And maybe we like to think that he wasn’t even angry that day, maybe he was calmly carrying out a planned piece of civil disobedience. That might be true. But it might be that we don’t like to imagine Jesus as angry, because we think that anger is inappropriate or sinful.
I’m here to say that I believe Jesus is angry in today’s text.
Some people come to warn him about Herod Antipas. This Herod is the son of Herod the Great. Herod the Great reigned when Jesus was born. It was for fear of him that Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt with baby Jesus. Herod Antipas is one of Herod the Great’s younger sons. He wasn’t the first choice as heir, but since Herod the Great executed three of his older sons, Antipas inherited a part of Herod the Great’s kingdom and become the ruler of Galilee. Israel was a client state, subservient to Rome, which meant that Antipas only held his position as long as he was pleasing to the Roman emperor.
Antipas came from a dysfunctional, violent family. He may have had an inferiority complex, may have felt a little diminished with a territory much smaller than his father’s. Being under the emperor’s thumb, he might have felt a need to prove himself. People who have power and a need to prove themselves can be dangerous.
Antipas has already beheaded John the Baptist. This is a credible threat. So the people say “Jesus, get out of here. Herod Antipas is after you. He wants you dead.”
But Jesus says, “No, you get out of here. And you can tell that fox something for me.”
Jesus is angry. “Go tell that fox” means “go tell that so-and-so.” “Go tell that no-good murderer.”
One scholar suggests that in the world of Palestinian metaphors, lions and foxes can be contrasted with each other. To call a ruler a lion is to suggest that they are great and purposeful and principled, but to call them a fox implies that they are worthless and degenerate.[1] Especially given Antipas’ background, we might hear Jesus saying, “Go tell that insignificant poser, go tell that pompous pretender, that I don’t have time for him. Not today, Herod, not today!”
Maybe there is a scenario in which Jesus might have said that without anger, but I don’t think so.
Four chapters earlier, Luke reported that Jesus had set his face to go to Jerusalem. He has already told his followers twice that he expects to die there, but they don’t understand. Jesus’ mission, to free people from illness and evil, is urgent and has a time limit. He is going to Jerusalem, like the ancient prophets before him. He expects to be killed there, as many of them were.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “the prophet is a person who holds God’s love as well as God’s anger in his soul.” [2] Love and anger. Isn’t that interesting? I tend to think of the prophets as angry, always ranting about injustice. Maybe the prophets were loving. I tend to think of Jesus as loving. Maybe Jesus is angry. Maybe love and anger go together more often than we usually acknowledge.
Andrew Lester was a professor of pastoral care at my seminary. In his book, The Angry Christian, he said that there’s a common notion that anger is always sinful and that spiritually mature people never get angry. He says the opposite is true, arguing that “in many situations, anger is the most loving and, therefore, the most Christian response. Rather than squelching our anger,” he suggests “the commandment to ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ should often motivate us to be angry.”[3]
Being angry can be holy, but our expression of it can be destructive. What we do with our anger is often sinful, and that is why, we may prefer to think of Jesus as never angry.
Many psychologists describe anger as a secondary emotion. Some other emotion triggers anger. A teenager stays out past curfew and the parent worries about their safety. The parent is afraid, but when the teenager comes breezing in, the parent is angry. They are angry because they were afraid. They were afraid because they love the child. Their anger is secondary to fear and to love.
What underlies Jesus’ anger here? It seems to be profound sadness. He says to Jerusalem, “how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings and you were not willing.” Jesus has work to do, work that would gather God’s children closer and closer together in safety and peace, but his time is running out and the children are not cooperating. His anger comes because he loves Jerusalem and he is unbearably sad. When he reaches Jerusalem, he will weep loudly over it. He will ugly cry for the city and its people.
Herod Antipas, and others like him, endanger the chicks that Jesus would protect. When a fox gets loose in a henhouse, it is often kills more prey than it can consume, leaving wanton destruction behind. Herod, that fox, represents the dangerous, predatory evil of empire.
Jesus is angry at that destruction, just as you and I are angry when we see people taking shelter in their basements night after night or children walking across borders with tears running down their faces. Jesus lets his anger show, but he doesn’t let it carry him away. In fact, his anger seems to become fuel to continue to energize his mission. “Go tell that fox that I am working here – casting out demons and curing people.” He is proclaiming the reign of God fully, all the way to the end. He proclaims it on his own terms, with anger and with love, but never with violence.
Jesus does not approach Jerusalem like a fox, but like a mother hen, whose chicks will not come home to her.
The mother hen puts her body between her chicks and danger. She will give her life to protect them from destruction.
Jesus the mother hen is determined to go to Jerusalem, where he will take up his cross. About the cross, preacher Barbara Brown Taylor says, “It may have looked like a minor skirmish to those who were there, but that contest between the chicken and the fox turned out to be the cosmic battle of all time, in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother’s love for her chicks. And God bet the farm on the hen.”
“Depending on who you believe,” Taylor says, “she won. It did not look that way at first, with feathers all over the place and chicks running for cover. But as time went on, it became clear what she had done. She had refused to run from the foxes, and she had refused to become one of them. Having loved her own who were in the world, she loved them to the end. She died a mother hen, and afterwards, she came back to them with teeth marks on her body to make sure they got the point: that the power of foxes could not kill her love for them . . . They might have to go through what she went through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on the other side, with love stronger than death.” [4]
Angry at oppression and evil, loving of all God’s children, even those who wanted to stone and kill him, Jesus the mother hen gave his own body, his own life. Even from the cross, he would gather us under wing.
Beloved ones, this is the Christ we follow. May God’s love dwell so deep in our hearts that it makes us angry when the world that God loves is threatened. May that anger empower us to speak and act to make that love known. In the name of Jesus, who longs to gather us and all God’s children to himself. Amen.
[1] https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/2667/
[2] Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: HarperCollins, 1962), p. 400
[3] Andrew D. Lester, The Angry Christian: A Theology for Care and Counseling, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003) p. 206
[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, “Chickens and Foxes “ in Bread of Angels (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997), p.126.