Jesus,
the Hen
© by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, March 11, 2000; Second
Sunday in Lent, Year C;
Holy Communion; Women's History
Month)
Sirach
1:1, 14–15; 24:1, 9–11; Luke
13:31–35 (NT, p. 78)
The
barnyard hen with a brood of chicks is, in our Western world, largely a part of our past, a sight preserved only in
children’s zoos. Today’s baby
chicks are hatched artificially, in incubators, and are fattened up under
crowded, miserable conditions. There’s
no nest, and no mothering hen anywhere to be seen—only the expressionless,
baggy-eyed face of Frank Perdue. And
as for egg-laying hens, they certainly aren’t allowed to run free any more.
No, in this day and age they’re confined to quarters so they can get on
with their job, producing eggs, not mothering chicks.
But
in the still largely agricultural world of the 19th
Century the hen and her chicks populated almost every barnyard in the world, and
the sight of them was vivid in the imagination not only of rural folk but of
many newly industrialized urbanites as well.
Perhaps that explains the great popularity in those days of a nursery
rhyme that today has been long-forgotten:
“Hickety pickety, my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
Gentlemen come every day
To see what my black hen doth lay.”
My
father was born on a farm in Indiana, just after the 19th
Century came to its end—his 100th birthday would have been this
year. And chickens were an everyday
part of Dad’s formative years. He
would awaken each morning to the crow of the cock, and soon thereafter his
mother would send him out to the hen yard to gather eggs for breakfast.
Well,
Dad the farm boy went on to become Dad the preacher.
And maybe that progression to his life was why he never tired of
reciting to his two children what seemed to us at the time a quite nonsensical
limerick about a hen and some preacher. Do
you know it? It goes like this:
“There
once was in Brooklyn a world-famous preacher
Who
thought that the hen was a wonderful creature.
The hen just for that
Laid an egg in his hat,
And
thus … did the hen reward Beecher.”
Lately, I’ve come to believe that that limerick, which was so cheerfully and innocently chanted by my father, was originally meant to be anything but cheerful and innocent. I’ve come to believe that whoever coined that limerick intended for it to be a scathing parody of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher. For in the 19th Century, from the 1840s to the 1870s, Beecher used the pulpit of Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn Heights for advocating such wildly liberal causes as the theory of evolution and woman’s suffrage. So the linking of Henry to a hen was, I think, meant to burlesque both of those causes of his—both evolution and woman’s suffrage:
“There
once was in Brooklyn a world-famous preacher
Who thought that the hen was a wonderful creature.
The hen just for that
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus … did the hen reward Beecher.”
Today,
some 115 years after Beecher’s death, we might imagine that the fundamentalist
assault on Darwin’s theory and on women’s rights would have faded away in
failure, but such is hardly the case. If
anything, that assault is gathering new energy, fueled by the resurgence of
fundamentalist, patriarchal versions of Christianity across the country.
And some of the astounding achievements of this renewed assault can be
seen in recent statements by the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest
Protestant denomination in our nation, statements that endorse creationism and
the submission of women to men’s authority, statements that, of course, reject
the ordination of women. But we
Presbyterians have little reason to feel smug, for our denomination, too, is
experiencing a resurgent fundamentalism and patriarchy that has succeeded in
virtually dismantling our national Women’s Ministries Unit.
That unit, you see, had dared to promote the full equality of women in
the church and had dared to begin re-imagining God in feminine images as well as
in masculine.
Few
events in recent church history have created so much controversy as the
Re-imagining Conference held in Minneapolis in 1993 and attended by persons from
many different Christian denominations. There
women and men lifted up for celebration a variety of feminine images for God,
many of them biblical and traditional, a few of them novel and innovative.
The image that most aggravated the patriarchal right wing of our
denomination was actually one of the most biblical and traditional images of
all—the invocation of God and of Christ by using the feminine title “Sophia.”
You see, Sophia is the feminine
word meaning “Wisdom” that was used in the Greek translations of the Old
Testament read by early Christians and that was also used in the New Testament
itself.
Now,
as long ago as the Old Testament, Wisdom came to be personified as a feminine
aspect of God’s creative power and of God’s ongoing presence in the world.
Such personification is found in the books of Job [ch.
28]
and Proverbs [chs.
1, 8, 9].
In Proverbs 8, for example, Woman Wisdom addresses humankind with a kind
of speech, a style of language, used elsewhere in the Bible only by God—speech
that delivers authoritative teaching and includes self-praise.
There,
in Proverbs 8 [vss.
32, 34–35a],
Woman Wisdom proclaims:
“And now, my children, listen to me:
happy
are those who keep my ways.…
Happy is the one who listens to me,
watching
daily at my gates,
waiting
beside my doors.
For whoever finds me finds life…”
Well,
this kind of speech, in an Old Testament context, is unmistakable God-talk.
Quite clearly, it is God who is speaking here, God personified as Woman
Wisdom—for which the Hebrew word is Chokmah;
the Greek, Sophia.
In
Proverbs, Sophia is God turning toward
us and summoning us through the phenomena of creation and our experiences of
insight—God turning toward us and summoning us to enjoy her nurture and succor
all the days of our lives.
This
feminine personification of God that is begun in the Old Testament is continued
in the ancient Jewish literature written between the time of the Old Testament
and the days of Jesus.
These
books were considered by the early Christians, including Luke, to be biblical,
although most Protestants deem them apocryphal. One of the most brilliant of these writings is the Wisdom of
Ben Sira, the source of this morning’s First Lesson.
In
Ben Sira, as in Proverbs, it is God’s feminine aspect as Wisdom that is both
the means by which God becomes present to humankind and the means by which
humankind can seek and find God. And
Ben Sira stresses that, more than any other place on earth, it is Jerusalem that
is Wisdom’s resting place and the seat of her authority. (24:11)
Ben
Sira highlights God’s care for humankind through Wisdom in the following vivid
image that’s found in our First Lesson (1:15):
“She [i.e., Wisdom] has built a nest among humankind …, and she will be
entrusted with their offspring.”
That
is to say, God has sent Wisdom to earth to offer humankind her maternal love and
protection, to harbor us in her nest and shelter us under her wings.
The
image of Wisdom-Come-Down-to-Earth to offer love and protection and to make
Jerusalem the seat of her authority—this image commended itself to the early
followers of Jesus as a way to communicate the meaning of Jesus for the world.
Jesus was the representative, indeed the embodiment, of Holy Wisdom, of hagia
sophia, of God-Come-Down-to-Earth to harbor us in her nest and shelter us
under her wings. So strong and
central was this understanding of Jesus that the great church built to the glory
of Christ in 6th-century Constantinople, the capital of
the Byzantine Empire, was given the name Hagia
Sophia, Holy Wisdom—Christ, Come Down to Earth.
The
author of the Gospel of Luke makes explicit in today’s Second Lesson this
identification of Jesus as the Wisdom of God, who offers humankind her maternal
love and protection (13:31–34).
Here,
Jesus is warned that an evil fox by the name of Herod Antipas poses a danger to
Jesus and his ministry. And to that
news of this threat from a cunning fox, Jesus responds in the voice of Sophia,
in the voice of Wisdom, in the voice of a mother hen who expresses no fear for
her own safety but rather offers up a lament for the brood of her nest, her
young, her chicks, the people of Jerusalem, who, though also exposed to this
danger, will not accept their mother’s protection, the shelter of her wings.
Jesus, Sophia, Heaven-sent
Wisdom, the hen, Mother God, Mothering Christ, lamenting those of her children
who refuse her care.
Despite
what those who would enforce patriarchy in the church like to pretend, the
truths of the Bible cannot for long be hidden.
Still today, the Risen Christ is Sophia,
Heaven-sent Wisdom, our Mother, God-Come-Down-to Earth to offer us love and
protection. And here’s the good
news for us on this Second Sunday in Lent.
As we confront all the cunning foxes of our world, Jesus upholds us with
these words of assurance: “I desire to gather my children together just as a
hen gathers her brood under her wings.”
Let
us pray:
O
Christ, You come to us in ways that startle and surprise us. Today, You come as a mother hen.
Some
of us pray regularly in words You taught us: “Father, Abba,
Papa, holy is Your name.” These
words are not only our strong rock, but also as dear to us as our own breath.
Yet some among us have sought other words for addressing God—not out of
self-centeredness, but out of deep need and faithful yearning.
We thank You that, based on Your own life and ministry, we know that we
may also pray: “Mother, Sophia,
Dearest Wisdom, holy is Your name.”
And
we rejoice, O Christ, that whenever we draw near You in prayer, whatever our
words may be—whenever we draw near You in prayer, You gather us into the
shelter of Your wings. Amen.
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