The Fox and the Hen

2  Lent C      March 17, 2019           

Gen.15:1-12,17-18   Ps. 27

Phil.3:17-4:1   Luke 13:22-35 

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  One of the ways that I I like to describe the Bible:  Inspired writings of people who are trying their best to give a narrative to the human experience of hope.

  Hope is a great seduction.  With hope we always are seeking a future, a better future.  And in the experience of trying to tell how hope came to human experience, people of faith have been inspired to write the Bible. 

  Hope is so great, it presents us with more than we can complete in our lifetime.  Hope is a great consolation for actual suffering and deprivation in life.  Therefore, hope also inspires evolution in what the future might look like.  The evolution of stories of hope eventually took people beyond this life to the afterlife.

  What would future hope look like for Abraham?  He was a childless man.  The most concrete way for Abraham to attain immortality was in having children.  If one's immortality is children, one's children must also have provision.  What was the most concrete provision available to Abraham?  Land.  So, God promised Abraham the immortality of having children and having land.  Land and children were concrete, objective immortality for Abraham.  The narratives of afterlife cannot be found in but in but a couple places in the Hebrew Scriptures.  Images of the afterlife developed in later Judaism after the future of having children and land was severely threatened because the very existence of the people of Israel and their land was threatened.  How could God's people be allowed to be so oppressed with their land invaded and when they were carried off into captivity?  How could their God be a great God of justice if they experienced such suffering?  This is when hope and justice inspired the stories of the future of judgment in the afterlife when the scores would be settled.  The apocalyptic figures of a Son of Man and a Messiah involved the future of justice and the afterlife.

  Fast forward to St. Paul and the early church.  The land of Israel as a future place had been given up.  The meaning of the innumerable children of Abraham had been changed.  St. Paul wrote not about his citizenship in Rome or Israel; he wrote about being a heavenly citizen.  Heaven was the new Promised Land.  Heaven was the new place of immortality.   And who was the posterity of Abraham?  According to St. Paul, Abraham was the father of faith even before Jacob and Israel existed; the posterity of Abraham was now seen as the spiritual children of faith, even the Gentiles who had become grafted into the family of faith.

  I hope that we can appreciate the evolution of the stories of hope in the Bible, as a movement from physical immortality (found in children and a promised land) to a spiritual and heavenly immortality.  And even though there is this new resurrection immortality, there is not a rejection of the physical world, in fact, it is an expansion of objective immortality.  Why?  Because immortality was no longer limited to the land of Israel and the genetic lineage of Abraham; now God's loving eternal life in Jesus Christ was to be offered to the entire world, all the lands of the earth and to all of earth's peoples.  Every place on earth could be a Promised Land.

  The Gospel story of the fox and the hen illustrates how hope expanded in a rather unexpected way.  The time of Jesus was presented in the Gospels as a time of competition between religious parties in Judaism.  The Pharisees wanted Jesus to move on and so they warned him about the King of the Jews, King Herod.  "Herod killed John the Baptist and now he's going to get you, Jesus, you better go off the grid and into hiding."

   Jerusalem is called a holy city, but it really has no long history as a really safe place for people.  The politics and infighting in Jerusalem have always meant that the prophets would be killed and stoned because they called for justice, love and peace for all.

  Jesus mourned the fact that Jerusalem could not live up to it name, "city of peace."    Jesus used the metaphor of the mother hen.  He wished that he could protect all the vulnerable chicks and take them under his wing, but it was not to be so.

  But what happened?  Jesus as the mother hen submitted himself to death by King Herod, and others.  And what happened?  All the little chicks fled but those little chicks became the eagles of the early church.  They were Christians who brought the message of the hope of Christ and eternal life to the ends of the earth.

  The fox did kill the hen, but the Risen Christ returned to spiritual children of faith to live on forever in this life and in the life to come.  This is how hope's story evolved.  And Hope still inspires stories for us today in our lives, in our families and in our parish.  But for hope to become our story, we need to act in faith so that Hope's story for our parish can be further written in the days ahead.  Amen.