An Episcopal priest and a Baptist minister from the local churches are standing by the side of a heavily traveled road pounding a sign into the ground, which reads in large, bold letters “The End Is Near! Turn Yourself Around Now!”
“Leave us alone, you crazy fanatics!” a driver yelled as he sped past. From the curve ahead, came the screeching of tires and a huge splash. The priest turned to the minister and asked, “Do you think maybe the sign should just say ‘Bridge Washed Out’?”
Was that sign a prophetic voice? Prophetic voices are meant to wake us up, shake us up, to tell the deeper meaning behind what is going on around us. They carry messages of truth, often ones we don’t want to hear. But prophets tell the truth no matter how badly it hurts for others to hear it. Jesus was such a prophetic voice as were the Hebrew prophets.
Today we find Jesus casting out demons, healing, and teaching. Some Pharisees come to him and warn him that King Herod wants to kill him. Jesus responds by insulting Herod, calling him a sly crafty fox and instructing the messengers to go tell him about the work Jesus is doing.
The Pharisees aren’t interested. Jerusalem isn’t interested. They would prefer to be a society that rests on property, profit, and power as the pillars of their existence, a people drawn to violence and destruction rather than peace-making and building with Jesus the new creation of God’s Kingdom.
Jerusalem rejects the new life to which God in Jesus is calling them, afraid to lose what they have to take a chance on what Jesus has to offer.
Why was Jerusalem resistant to the teaching and healing miracles that so captivated the common folk of the time? Why did they reject Jesus? Perhaps the citizens of Jerusalem were afraid of losing what they already “had”—a magnificent city endowed by Herod the Great with two palace-fortresses and the new temple, not to mention amazing gardens and an enormous amphitheater.
What Jesus offered required a new way of thinking. It required a willingness to be vulnerable enough to receive God’s gift of new life and to be willing to let God take them under her wings like a loving mother hen.
And this is the second part of the text and contains a beautiful, yet sad lament by Jesus because of the penchant of Jerusalem throughout its history to hurt God’s messengers, the prophets. We find here a most tender expression of Jesus’ desire to be able to gather God’s people as a hen gathers her chicks for protection and warmth.
What a beautiful maternal image of a God that loves humanity so deeply that God would gather us up and tuck us under God’s wings, a mother that would do anything and give anything for them, even her own life. Jesus loves Jerusalem for all that it has been and all that it could be.
Jesus sees beyond the destructiveness of the city’s evil power holders and weeps in advance of the cataclysmic destruction of the temple that would come years later.
In the mother hen—in the image of God that Jesus teaches us today—we find a new way of power and leadership, the servant leader, the one whose unconditional, bountiful love considers the safety of her children, a mother hen who does not survive a fox’s violent attack, gathering those who belong to her into a community protected by her love, giving her life for them, loving them to the bitter end—even from a cross.
We chicks are very vulnerable. We can be easily wounded. We can even be under assault. Our lives often prove to be very fragile. As self-sufficient as we’d like to believe we are, we are a needy lot. John Stanford, author of The Kingdom Within, writes that “It is those who have recognized that they have been injured or hurt in some way in life who are most able to come into the kingdom of God.”
God’s promise for the New Jerusalem is one of healing and salvation for the world. And it is our community identity as the church and our mandate to proclaim that promise of salvation—of healing and wholeness—for all of God’s chickens—no matter who they are or where they may find themselves on their faith journey.
Author and Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that we think of church as a “big fluffed up brooding hen, offering warmth and shelter to all kinds of chicks, including orphans, runts, and maybe even a couple of ducks.”
“It is where we come to stand firm, “she says, “with those who need the same things from us. It is where we grow from chicks to chickens, by giving what we have received, by teaching what we have learned, and by loving the way we ourselves have been loved—by a mother hen who would give his life to gather us under his wings.”
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