Words on the Word
Herod, that Fox
Some Pharisees came up to Jesus. ‘Go away’ they said. ‘Leave this place, because Herod means to kill you.’ He replied, ‘You may go and give that fox this message: Learn that today and tomorrow I cast out devils and on the third day attain my end. But for today and tomorrow and the next day I must go on, since it would not be right for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem. Jerusalem, you that kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to you! How often have I longed to gather your children, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you refused!’ Luke 13.31-35.
I love this passage.
While the Gospel texts do permit us to know many things about Jesus, we rarely get the sense of his temperament, of the sort of things that might have made him smile, the jokes he might have made.
For, surely, when the Church assures us that the Son of God was made fully man, that means he will also have had a sense of humour.
One can catch a twinkle in the Lord’s eye when he refers to Herod as ‘that fox’.
He, ‘who knew what was in man’ (John 2.25) had seen through this blustering kinglet, ambitious and lustful, yet not insensitive to matters of ultimate importance. After all, Herod had listened to John ‘gladly’ (Mark 6.20).
In Aesop’s Fables, the fox is a sly fellow, at times likeable, too; and time and again proven to be less clever, poor thing, than he holds himself to be, as in the tale that speaks of a fox’s intrigues against a cock and a dog, out of which he comes the loser, to prove the moral: ‘They who lay traps for others are often caught by their own bait’.
It is hard not to be struck, however, by the juxtaposition of the image of the fox with that of a brood of chickens in the simile that follows: ‘Jerusalem! How often have I longed to gather your children as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.’
An apparently amiable rogue is a rogue nonetheless, and can be dangerous. The king who flattered the Forerunner with friendly attention had John’s head chopped off in a trice when his own pride was at stake.
There’s a lesson in that.
Photograph: Wikimedia.