COMMENTING on the opening section of this Gospel passage, Rudolf Bultmann confessed: “I have no explanation to offer of this singular item.” This is demoralising. What chance do we stand, if a theologian of such distinction admits defeat?
Jesus has been warned by some Pharisees to leave his present location because of Herod’s intention to kill him. I cannot recall ever having heard Luke 13.31-32 explored in a sermon. I have never tackled it myself. This makes it more of a challenge; but novelty when it comes to Bible readings is — well, novel. Perhaps the freshness of the topic will make up for its oddity.
Jesus does not condemn those Pharisees, or even criticise them, which makes me think that their warning comes from a genuine concern for his safety. He directs contempt, though, at the man he calls “that fox”. In European literature, the fox is a character who stands for crafty self-interest.
One example that I remember from infant-school days had exactly the kind of life-lesson effect that I imagine such tales exist for: the story of Chicken-Licken. As a folk tale, it is of the type in which excessive anxiety leads, eventually, to destruction. Chicken-Licken, having been hit on the head by an acorn, fears that the sky is falling down, and encourages other animals to join him in a search for safety. Foxy-Loxy is the arch-opportunist who invites the animals to take shelter with him. Of course, he eats them all.
Being an opportunist is not necessarily a bad thing, but in moral fables it almost always features as a negative. Perhaps this is because we associate it with taking advantage of the misfortunes of others. In any case, if we assume that such European folk-tale types apply straightforwardly to Herod — “that fox” — we will be leading ourselves astray. There is no evidence in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament of foxes’ being symbols of wiliness and cunning. Apart from this passage, scriptural references to foxes carry with them implications of weakness and skulking, which are equally uncomplimentary, but in a different moral register.
A verse from Nehemiah exemplifies the nature of the scriptural fox: “Tobiah the Ammonite . . . said, ‘That stone wall they are building — any fox going up on it would break it down!’”(4.3). This reference confirms that scriptural foxes stand for feebleness and lack of power. They are certainly beta-mammals, not alphas. An obvious contrast-creature is the huge, muscular, lethally beweaponed lion. There are a surprising number of those in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Biblical lions can be sneaky predators, too (Psalm 10.9; 17.12), but no one apart from Samson (Judges 14.6) would consider them feeble.
How might Herod be an authentically biblical “fox”? If the reference in Nehemiah is anything to go by, he is a lightweight, ineffectual, powerless. This does yield a meaning that is true to biblical tradition, and corresponds to the political reality of Herod’s position as a puppet-king.
What flummoxed Bultmann about this Gospel passage, however, was not the scriptural significance of the “fox”, but the lack of other examples of Jesus’s uttering such a response to Herod in reaction to being warned about him. At first glance, I thought there could be interesting things to say about the wording “tell that fox for me”, but unfortunately NRSV has invented those italicised words. Not that I was optimistic. I had already noticed the perfectly comprehensible Greek word for “Look!” being pointlessly mistranslated as “Listen!”
Matthew’s Jesus utters almost exactly the same lament over Jerusalem as Luke’s (23.37-39), but his version follows after a reflection on the prophets. Luke’s unique “message to Herod”, if we can call it that, still stands alone. Jesus’s treating some Pharisees as his messengers would be intriguing, but only if we imagine that Jesus really expected them to deliver his message, which is doubtful.
Jesus’s words are not really a message for Herod at all. As a fox, Herod may have been a person of no real power, as per Nehemiah. Or he may have been a sneaking creature, like Ezekiel’s (13.4), “O Israel, thy prophets are like the foxes [AV; “jackals” in NRSV] in the deserts.” Jesus is not interested in Herod’s malicious intent, whereas addressing Jerusalem as his destination — both loving and lamenting it — is of critical importance.
A trivial, silly part of me still wishes that Chicken-Licken-Jesus might somehow have triumphed over Foxy-Loxy-Herod at last.