Second Sunday in Lent
February 28, 2010
Jesus’ Lament
Luke 13:31-35
God is like a Mother Hen
God is Like a Mother Hen
It is said, “A picture is worth a 1,000 words.” And that certainly can be said of Jesus.
Jesus often painted pictures to get his point across—especially pictures right off the farm.
“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
The love of God. The passionate and personal love of God. What is that love it like? Just look at this picture. It is like a mother hen, who, when the fox comes and threatens the brood, gathers her chicks under her wings to save them and protect them.
The Decoy
I’ve never spent much time around chickens, but I did see this parable happen once.
I was canoeing up in the Minnesota Boundary Waters—which is paradise itself. And I saw a mother duck with a bunch of little ducklings all spread out. And they were so cute and cuddly that I had to paddle over to take a closer look.
And first this mother duck swept them under her wings and pushed them to the shore under some brush. And then she flew away and left them by a couple of dozen yards so that I would go after her instead of them.
She was the decoy drawing me away. She would rather have me come after her to die herself than have me mess with her little chicks.
The Love of Almost Any Mom
And who needs to be around chickens or ducks to get the picture? You see it in almost every mom—that passionate desire to love and protect her children with her own wings.
That is the maternal instinct that God has put into every mom. It’s in their genes. It’s in their DNA. God has programmed them that way.
And that is precisely what the love of God is like. It is like that passionate, self-sacrificing maternal instinct that we can see in any mom anywhere in nature.
Love Spurned & Rejected
But just because this mothering God loves us and protects us doesn’t mean we like it.
When I paddled up to those ducklings, a lot of quacking was going on. And although I am not particularly fluent in “duck,” I can easily guess what they were saying.
“Quack! Quack! Henry, get back here. I told you not to swim so far away. You shouldn’t get anywhere near to strangers.”
“O mom, stop hyperventilating. It’s only just a couple of tourists in a canoe. They will not harm me.”
And that is part of our programming too. To take parental love… and to spurn it…and reject it, because parents tend to clip our wings and tie us down.
Time and time again Mother-Hen-God sent prophets to tell her children just how much she loves them. How much she passionately loves them. And to warn them of the terrible danger they are in when they wander too far away from God’s protecting arms.
But, by and large, God’s people just dismissed them as a bunch of noisy quacks, hyperventilating over nothing.
We Kill Any Challenge to Our Status Quo
We Kill Jesus, Too
And Herod is not the only one who tried to kill Jesus because Jesus was a challenge and a threat to his self-indulgent way of life. His power and his control.
We kill Jesus too, each time we reject God’s love and try to live our life on our own apart from God’s provision and protection.
We kill Jesus each time we stonewall him and block him out of our lives because his way of life is too restrictive and confining.
O sure, we like to hear the Gospel word that God loves us.
But don’t let that love make any demands on us. Don’t let it meddle in our affairs. Don’t let it change the course on which we are swimming.
For we are big kids after all. What need have we of a mothering smothering God?
Christ’s Passionate, Persistent Love
Well, our need is great. For in a world of sin and death, we are as vulnerable as a tiny, little chick in an outside yard. We are in great danger. Grave danger.
But just because we reject our parents’ love, does not mean that our parents stop loving us. At least not true parents, although some human parents can let us down.
Within our Lord’s lament over Jerusalem there is a heavy sigh—the sigh of love rejected. But more than that, there is the passionate desire to keep on loving still no matter what the cost.
“Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. …I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.”
Jesus was leaving. He was leaving Herod’s Galilee and going on to Jerusalem. NOT because he was scared and running away from Herod, but in order to face a greater foe and a greater danger for us—the death we to die because of our lovelessness and hate…and our desire to rebel and live apart form the love of God.
The mission and the ministry of Jesus Christ continues. And even a powerful ruler like Herod cannot stop it. Until it takes Jesus to Jerusalem and to the cross.
And there an odd maneuver takes place. Jesus flies away from his brood of disciples. Why?
For the same reason that the mother duck flew away from her ducklings. To be the decoy. To be the prey. If any danger must come to my children, Jesus says, then let that danger fall on me.
Pictured in the Pelican
Christ's Love Pictured in a Pelican
On the bottom panel of our stained glass window entitled “crucifixion,” there is another female bird, a mother pelican, surrounding her young with her love.
Why there? Why on that panel?
It is because in medieval piety, people thought that the mother pelican would pick at her own breast until it bled to feed her young with her own blood.
They were wrong, of course. She was not picking at her breast, she was just mashing fish against it. And that gooey mess just looked like blood.
But they were not wrong in using it as a way to picture what it is that Jesus Christ has done for us. He has poured out his own blood so that we can live.
It is no accident that we call the death that Jesus died his “passion” for that is what it is all about—God’s passionate love for us. A love which never stops. Even when it is rejected.
And how can we ever picture it? How can we ever picture the great intensity of a love like that? Well, picture it like this—the love of any mom.
© 2010 Pastor Paul Jaster