Aug 30: “The Eagle: Power and Vulnerability”

Reflection by Rev. Sandra Nixon

Scripture: Isaiah 40: 25-31; Psalm 91: 1-5, 11-12

So perhaps you are already anticipating that this reflection is going to be... complicated.

Last week, as we reflected on the mother hen, the eagle was mentioned - and not in a positive way. In Consider the Birds, Debbie Blue suggests that when Jesus longs to gather Jerusalem's children as a hen gathers her brood, he is offering an intentional contrast: Jerusalem could follow the vulnerable, sheltering way of God, or remain in the grip of Rome, whose armies marched beneath the sign of the eagle.

It is not surprising that the eagle became an imperial symbol. This powerful predator has been mythologized for centuries. Medieval texts claimed that when an eagle grew old, its wings became heavy and its eyes clouded. It would fly towards the sun, then plunge three times into a spring, and emerge young and strong again.

It is the kind of story people - and nations - want to align themselves with: invincibility, renewal and power that never has to admit defeat.

THE EAGLE WE IMAGINE

Even where eagles are familiar, they provoke a response in us. An eagle circles high above the river, perches at the top of a tree, or suddenly reaches for a fish, and someone inevitably says, "Look - an eagle!" and we watch, captivated by this majestic bird.

The eagle’s physical capacities are extraordinary. A bald eagle's eye is almost as large as a human eye, but its vision is at least four times sharper. It can spot small prey from as far as two miles away. Golden eagles have been clocked at close to 200 miles an hour in a hunting dive. Harpy Eagles hunt monkeys and sloths; Philippine Eagles hunt animals that include flying lemurs; and the enormous Martial Eagles in Africa take prey ranging from hares and birds to cobras and young antelope.

It is a creature living as it evolved to live, within a wider ecosystem. The eagle is not a supernatural creature, nor a nationalist or an imperialist. Those are meanings human beings have projected onto it.

The eagle as Thunderbird is a powerful supernatural being in many Indigenous traditions, with different meanings in different nations. In some Northwest Coast art and stories, Thunderbird is portrayed with raptor-like features, sometimes grasping a whale. These are living sacred traditions some of which portray it as the vigilant, intelligent servant of the Great Spirit.

In Greek mythology, the eagle was associated with Zeus. In one version of the story, Zeus took the form of an eagle to carry away Ganymede, a young shepherd boy who Zeus made cupbearer to the Gods; in another, he sent an eagle to do it. Across cultures, people have repeatedly looked at the eagle and seen something more than a bird: authority, divine favour, freedom or fearsome strength and raw power.

THE EAGLE AS SYMBOL

Debbie Blue observes that, although a living eagle may still fill us with awe, its image has in recent times become burdened with cliche. It appears on flags, sports merchandise, motorcycles, tattoos, money (US quarters & dollar bills), corporate logos and military equipment. It has come to represent freedom, killer instinct, massive power and fierce nationalism.

The Roman legions carried the aquila, their eagle standard. Historically, not just the Roman Empire but also the Babylonian, Assyrian and Spanish empires used the eagle as a symbol for their power.

Napoleon adopted the eagle as an emblem of empire. Nazi Germany used a stylized eagle extensively, and on August 13, 1940, launched Adler Tag - "Eagle Day" - the main Luftwaffe assault against the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain.

A google search will also tell you that no less that 15 countries use the eagle on their flag or coat of arms or as a national emblem.

Russia displays a golden double-headed eagle on its official state coat of arms.

On the Great Seal of the United States, the bald eagle holds thirteen arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other: war and peace. Its head faces the olive branch, signalling a stated preference for peace while retaining the power to wage war.

The image has also been taken up by Christian nationalism which has fused an imperialist Christian identity with national identity and treats the nation's power, culture and destiny as divinely favoured. It suggests that God belongs especially to us and not only authorizes but aids us in our dominance of others who are different.

The eagle slips easily into that imagination: high above everyone else, fierce, triumphant and armed. But when the cross is used to bless the eagle's arrows, Christian faith is distorted. Jesus did not call the church to make any nation sacred. He called us to love our neighbours, seek justice and stand with those pushed to the margins.

THE BIRD IN THE BIBLE

So the eagle as a symbol for God or Christ is complicated. It becomes even more complicated when we notice that some memorable biblical references may not point neatly to the bird we call an eagle. The Hebrew word nesher is traditionally translated "eagle," but some scholars argue that it refers to the Griffon Vulture. At the very least, this ancient word does not map tidily onto a single modern English species name.

That does not diminish Isaiah's poetry – one of the readings we heard read today. In fact, it may actually deepen it. Isaiah speaks to a displaced and exhausted people, not to an empire seeking conquest. The promise is not that the already powerful will become more powerful. Instead, Isaiah assures his audience, God "gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless."

The great soaring bird is not a war machine here. Eagle or vulture, it rises by opening its wings to currents it did not create. Its strength includes dependence. And notice where Isaiah finally lands: those who hope in God will soar, run, and walk without fainting. Sometimes the miracle is not soaring above everything. Sometimes it is finding enough strength to keep walking.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF POWER

The church has often emphasized God as "Almighty" and "Ruler of All." That longing is understandable. When life feels fragile and random, we want to believe that someone powerful is in control.

Yet Christians believe that God is most fully revealed in Jesus. What we meet in Jesus is power, but not coercive power. It is the power of humble, self-giving and vulnerable love - an image that may seem to fit the mother hen Jesus referred to himself as, more readily than the eagle.

Jewish hopes for a messiah in Jesus' time were diverse. Some people did hope for a leader who would deliver Israel from Roman rule. Yet Jesus did not reproduce Rome's methods in the name of God. He healed, fed and welcomed. He touched people others avoided. He entered Jerusalem on a donkey rather than a warhorse. When his disciples reached for violence, he told them to put the sword away.

In A Gentler God, Doug Frank suggests that Jesus' mother-hen image challenges our allegiance to a big, strong and distant eagle God. The hen's wings are not armour. When she gathers her chicks, she makes her own body their shelter. This is not weakness. It is courageous, costly love.

Throughout his ministry, Jesus invited people to imagine God and God’s power through images of sowers and seeds, shepherds and bread, lost coins and searching love. Jesus calls God comforter and advocate.

In Jesus, divine power is not power over others. It is power with and for others: power that calls rather than controls, accompanies rather than abandons, heals rather than humiliates, and draws new possibilities from within relationship.

Does that mean the eagle has no value as a symbol for faith? Well  perhaps we need to look again.

THE EAGLE REVISITED: RESURRECTION

By the middle of the twentieth century, bald eagles had disappeared from much of their former range in the contiguous United States. Habitat loss and shooting had taken a toll. So had DDT. Its persistent breakdown product, DDE, caused severe eggshell thinning, and many eggs broke during incubation (so fragile they’d break when the parents went to sit on them to keep them warm).

Whereas at one time there were hundreds of thousands of bald eagles in North America, by 1963 there were less than 500 nesting pairs in the US.

In June 1962, The New Yorker began publishing excerpts from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Carson showed how synthetic pesticides moved through food webs and silenced birdsong. Later that year, the work appeared as a book and helped awaken the modern environmental movement.

There is an ancient echo here. In Virgil's Aeneid, Lake Avernus is the entrance to the underworld. Its name was traditionally associated with the Greek for "birdless." A place without birds was imagined as the threshold of death.

With the publishing of the book Silent Spring, public awareness was heightened. DDT was restricted and banned. Legal protections were strengthened. Habitats were protected, nests monitored and birds reintroduced. In 2007, the bald eagle was removed from the (United States) list of threatened and endangered species.

As Debbie Blue writes, "We did not revile the eagle for its emerging vulnerability. Instead, we came together to protect and nurture it."

This recovery did not happen because an eagle flew into the sun and magically renewed itself. It happened through scientists, writers, Indigenous and community advocates, lawmakers, conservation workers and many ordinary people. Resurrection did not drop from the sky as a rescue. New life emerged through relationship, knowledge, changed behaviour and collective action.

For Christians who are attracted to Jesus’ images of God, to the God he enfleshed for us, what an image of divine power this story of the eagle can represent: God present within the world's suffering, calling and luring us towards life; God working in, among and through us as we respond.

RECLAIMING THE EAGLE

Perhaps we can reclaim the eagle, then - not as a symbol of invulnerability or power over others, but as a sign of vulnerable majesty and communal hope.

At the beginning of Consider the Birds, Debbie Blue says that every bird she studied impressed her with its vulnerability. Flight is astonishing, but it depends on light, intricately structured bodies, healthy habitats and a whole web of life. Birds can be resilient, and they can disappear with frightening speed.

A major study found that Canada and the United States had nearly three billion fewer breeding birds in 2017 than in 1970. That is a devastating loss. Yet the eagle's recovery keeps us from surrendering to despair. It shows that when vulnerability awakens compassion, knowledge and solidarity, damaged life can return.

Isaiah does not promise that faithful people will never become tired. The passage says exactly the opposite: even the young grow weary. Hope is not pretending that we are invincible. Hope is trusting that exhaustion does not have the final word, and opening ourselves to strength we do not manufacture alone.

So perhaps we can let the eagle remind us not of a God who swoops down to crush our enemies, but of the currents of grace that can hold us when our strength gives out. Perhaps it can remind us that real power protects life, that vulnerability can call forth community, and that resurrection becomes possible when we join one another in the work of restoration.

If hope is the thing with feathers, let us be passionate about keeping it alive.

PRAYER

Loving, self-giving God,

so often we want to make you mighty and powerful,

and then pull you into our corner

so that we can feel mighty and powerful too.

Question our assumptions about power.

Teach us to honour the vulnerability we carry

and to meet the vulnerability of others with care.

Renew our imagination,

and show us how hope may take wing

within our lives and within our world.

May we become willing partners

in your work of healing, justice and restoration.

Amen.