Rev. Cn. Richard R. Hogue Jr.
Cathedral Day, 2025/01/26
“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” I love this phrase, because it is deeply uncomfortable for us as Christians to contemplate and forces us to shed some of our assumptions. Why would Jesus compare anyone to a snake, let alone laud their virtues? I, perhaps like some of you, fall into the same category as Indiana Jones: “Snakes, I hate snakes.” I get that God created them, and that they play a vital role in the ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean I want them anywhere near me. Except for little baby pine snakes and the like that I would catch as a kid, I am not big on our friends who crawl on their belly. Yet Jesus, with two ecological examples, puts forth the idea of the world his followers will be in and how they ought to operate.
“See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves,” clearly he is referencing the idyllic setting of Isaiah11.6 and 65.25
“The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.”
and
“The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.”
There is an important distinction for Jesus, as he is speaking here. It is that we are not yet in the place Isaiah hopes we can be. Instead, in the current state of the world, the interaction between sheep and wolves is one of predation, of natural violence. What’s funny about this to me is that I absolutely love wolves, I admire their spirit, being a community that accomplishes tasks as a pack that benefits the whole. Their violence serves a singular purpose: survival. And, nostalgically, I loved hearing their howls, especially on cold winter nights in the north woods of Wisconsin growing up. Wolves play, hunt, and sing as a group. Wolves, to me, hold far more wisdom at work and at play than sheep do. And yet, Jesus sends us as sheep into the midst of wolves, essentially promising hardship, pain, and loss. If you walked to St. Paul’s this morning, and saw the crude graffiti outside, this is an unfortunate reality born anew in our congregation’s life: the world is indeed hostile to Jesus’ message. While I cannot prove anything, I would be dumbfounded if this act of hate wasn’t connected to the events of the past week. More on those events a little later.
But then we come to my favorite part of this: “so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” Nowhere else in Scripture do these two animals appear together in a phrase, and as far as I am aware they appear together only once in rabbinical literature, but as antitheses. In his midrash on the Song of Songs, Rabbi Rabbah recounted a comment of God’s: “For me, Israel is like an innocent dove; however, for the nations of the world they are cunning like a snake.”[1] The midrash for the Song of Songs was collected in its current fullness around 700 CE, and there is no way to know exactly when this line was first written down or spoken. So, until further notice I think it’s safe to say, that “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” is entirely original to Jesus.
It seems odd that Jesus would invoke snakes, the serpent, as an example for Christians to follow. Many theologians are understandably afraid to endorse a sense of cunning in the church, rife with abuse as it is all too often. Harder still is imagining the cunning of a snake in the form of a sheep or a dove. It’s like Jesus is asking us to be something out of The Island of Dr. Moreau, part sheep, part dove, part snake, fully human. While no one can honestly tell you exactly what Jesus meant by this phrase, I like it for this reason: it says to me that we are allowed as sheep to understand the mind of our predators. To be clear, in no way do I believe Jesus is telling us to be predatory, but instead to understand those who may come after us for preaching in his name.
These two pieces taken together means that Jesus is aware of the harsh realities of the world’s current condition, it’s lack of mercy and abject cruelty to those who don’t conform to the powers that be. But Jesus also expects us to use our heads, is how I read this, to be aware of our surroundings, to be organized, prepared in the face of violence, responding innocently in the face of fear, just as he did in the week of his passion and death, just as our St. Paul did before kings and governors. Our experience with the graffiti this morning is no real exception in light of this.
I can think of no better contemporary example of living into innocence and wisdom than the Diocese of Washington’s Bishop Marianne Budde, who at a prayer service for the nation on Tuesday, January 21st preached the following in her sermon while addressing the President of the United States:
In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country. We’re scared now. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes, and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurdwara, and temples. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.
She said nothing partisan, she said nothing offensive. She preached on the value of mercy in that moment, as if referencing Jesus’ Beatitudes: “Blessed are the merciful.” She was as wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove, using her platform and privilege to preach to speak a word of mercy. But as you can see the reactions rolling on throughout the rest of the week that followed, and the marks on our walls, the world is indeed hostile to Jesus’ message. It seems the further we get from Jesus’ time, the farther we think we’ve come, the more the world reminds us it is just the same as it ever was. It was true for Jesus, it was true our own St. Paul, who went from persecutor to persecuted. So, I encourage us in the same way Christ encouraged the Apostles and our patron Paul: Be wise as serpents, and innocent as doves. Even as times and leaders change, the mission of Jesus has not changed at all. For those who endure to the end will be saved. Keep enduring, my dear people of St. Paul’s Cathedral, San Diego. We may yet see wolves and sheep eat together. Amen.
[1] Midrash Canticles, Shir Hasharim Rabbah 2.14, https://www.sefaria.org/Shir_HaShirim_Rabbah.2.14.1?lang=bi&lookup=the%20rock%E2%80%9D%3F&with=Lexicon&lang2=en, accessed 2025/01/24. Adapted with language from Hermeneia Biblical Commentary Matthew 8-20, Ulrich Luz, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2001 (p88).
