Progressive reflections on the lectionary #57

Monday 10th March 2025

Luke 13:31-35 Jesus gets all theo-political in Luke's story of foxes and chickens

I often find myself referring to this passage, when I talk about the role that Herod Antipas plays as ‘chief villain’ in the gospels. This is the point where, with more than a hint of verisimilitude, the evangelist has Jesus refer to Antipas (the ambitious and vengeful ‘quarter King’) as ‘that fox’. I love that. I often find the gospel writers, including Luke, unreliable narrators - but here (perhaps because of my own biases) I sense a genuine saying coming through to the surface from 2000 years ago.

Part of the reason for my thinking this is Jesus’ relationship with the Pharisees in this passage, which is far from the antagonistic one depicted elsewhere. I am unconvinced that Jesus and the Pharisees were pitched against each other in the way that is sometimes portrayed. Perhaps some Pharisees were set against him, but I don’t really see why many of them would have been.

It suited the early church, however, to see their own difficulties with Jewish communities and their leaders reflected in the gospel stories, and for that reason such story telling was arguably legitimate. We should not, though, draw a bigger conclusion that Jesus and the Jews were so separate. On the contrary, Jesus was Jewish and his status as putative Messiah (liberator) was not one that would have necessarily upset the Pharisees who had no love for the Herods - there were other Pharisee Messiah claimants too, after all. The collaborating Sadducees, on the other hand, were a different question.

So here the Pharisees warn Jesus that their common enemy, Herod Antipas is trying to catch him, and Jesus responds with a sneering put down. “That fox…”

The language after that gets a bit confusing, the triadic phrase ‘today, tomorrow, and the third/next day” is repeated, and then we get three ‘Jerusalems’ together too.

Conventional scholarly wisdom is that this is a not too subtle join of two textual fragments, a join which takes place after the first ‘Jerusalem’ at the end of verse 33. The next few lines, again taken to be a legitimate saying, forms another fragmentary piece of recorded speech known as ‘the Jerusalem Word/Lament’ which appears in both Matthew and Luke, and which Luke places here, in the context of his longer ‘journey to Jerusalem’ passage.

Why does Luke join these two passages? In part this may be because ‘Jerusalem’ is just so very important in Luke’s gospel - as the centre of the Jewish world it has profound theological significance. We might note that he uses the Hebrew word for the city 26 times, whereas Matthew uses it only once. The mention of the city at the end of the first saying makes this an easy link to make, then.

Quick note: One of the neat things that this does for us is that it juxtaposes Jesus’ image of Antipas as ‘the fox’ and himself as ‘the hen’. This is a handy, and colourful, contrast for anyone seeking to develop on the theme of the differing approach of the quarter King and this alternative ‘King of the Jews’. You could make a very neat sermon out of that should you wish to do so.

Back to the issue of why Luke joins these passages, and we can say secondly that it looks like, here, Luke is identifying Jesus with the tradition of prophets being sent to Jerusalem, and thus with the impetus for that sending. That is where things get, arguably, much more interesting.

That’s because it seems that in this short passage the writer may be putting Jesus in the place of ‘divine wisdom’ - an aspect of the divine which is traditionally given female attributes. Compare what Jesus says here with what Luke has him saying in 11:49: “For this reason the Wisdom of God said, ‘I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute’…”

Some scholars, then, see this particular passage as an instance of Jesus being situated as a ‘supra-historical’ agent. In plainer English, what they are saying is that here the evangelist is identifying Jesus with the divine.

This would also be a way of reading the saying about gathering the children of Jerusalem under the hen’s wings - the sort of thing that in one sense only God can do.

Now there are various issues with all of this, for one thing its far from definite that Luke is deliberately placing God imagery in Jesus’ words - it’s implied at best. Nor is it immediately clear what it means for Luke to identify Jesus as the personification of divine wisdom (which is something Matthew does more vigorously by the way) - is this simply Luke saying that Jesus is a wisdom teacher? Or does his theology extend to a sense that ‘wisdom’ is an aspect of the divine, a persona, even?

Such a short passage, so many questions.

What I think we can say about it with some clarity is that here we have two sayings of Jesus, which the evangelist situates in the wider context of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. The join of the two passages is, arguably, somewhat clumsy, but whether it’s deliberate or not it leaves us with the opportunity to reflect on the idea of Jesus as the personification of the divine character of wisdom. That in turn leaves us with room to think about what divine wisdom ‘means’ - and in turn what it ‘means’ for us to talk about Jesus in those terms…

Confused? Stick with the comparison between the hen and the fox then.

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Image: Photo of mother hen with chicks by Esperanza Doronila on Unsplash