This past October, a teacher in New Jersey, Cathy Hurley, while leaving school, noticed a schoolyard fight of four against one and quickly, by reflex, found herself jumping in between the fight and crawling on top of the boy being hit. She used her body to shield him from harm. The others backed away, and the teacher was credited with stopping the violence.
In today’s gospel, Jesus compares himself to a mother hen, shielding her chicks from harm. And yet, he laments how often we turn away bringing harm to ourselves and one another. Jesus laments: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”
Jesus will be another prophet killed. Regarding the violence in Jerusalem and the Holy Land, the current official teaching of our church body reads: “only when justice prevails in the Holy Land can there be a true and lasting peace for all Palestinians and Israelis. … Together with our Lutheran companions, we accompany Palestinians and Israelis, and many other Jews, Christians and Muslims, in working to establish the justice required for peace.”
Jerusalem becomes every place where blood is shed, every city where violence tears apart communities. Like the psalm, we seek shelter in the day of trouble. We seek refuge in God’s wings. We cry out: The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear?
We lament violence, fighting, and the harm done to all. O God, where are you? Biblical scholar Walter Bruegemann praises a practice of lamenting hard things because laments arise because things are not as they should be. With lament, we will allow God to do a new thing in our world.
The themes of the text today are about power, violence, vulnerability, and protection. Jesus is clearly in danger from powerful people in high places. He is a threat, so Herod is after him. Herod is the sly and cunning fox with political and military might. Jesus is a mother hen. God as a chicken? Jesus, the mother hen who puts herself in harm’s way for the sake of her young. Jesus was later murdered on the cross in an act of violence.
You can hear the deep sadness in Jesus’ lament. We too have known sorrow and loss. We too lament a world that is not as it should be. All too often we feel helpless, unable to stop the harm.
Author Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “If you have ever loved someone you could not protect, then you understand the depth of Jesus’ lament. All you can do is open your arms. Given the number of animals available, it is curious that Jesus chose a hen.” She writes: “Where is the biblical precedent for that? What about the mighty eagle of Exodus or Hosea’s stealthy leopard? What about the proud lion of Judah, mowing down his enemies with a roar? Compared to any of those, a mother hen does not inspire much confidence. No wonder some of the chicks decided to go with the fox.”
Taylor continues: “But a hen is what Jesus chooses, which—if you think about it—is pretty typical of him. He is always turning things upside down so that children and peasants wind up on top while kings and scholars land on the bottom. He is always wrecking our expectations of how things should tum out by giving prizes to losers and paying the last first. So of course he chooses a chicken, which is about as far from a fox as you can get. That way the options become very clear: you can live by licking your chops or you can die protecting the chicks.”
According to The Happy Chicken Coop website about brooding hens: “Your hen is squawking whenever you approach her, and she won’t leave her nesting box. What’s wrong, is she ill? Far from it. Chances are she is just a broody and wants chicks. She will sit on top of her eggs all day long in an attempt to hatch them.”
Jesus is brooding; Jesus wants to hatch new life from us. The verb “brood” means to ponder moodily, to lament, to sulk. Perhaps Jesus is brooding over his future. Brooding over Jerusalem for its stubbornness. Maybe even brooding over the violence and evil that are part of the human story.
In the first reading from Genesis there is talk of animal sacrifices and when a covenant agreement is made with the two contracting parties pass between the two halves of the carcasses, symbolizing their willingness to suffer the fate of the animals if they broke the covenant. Here God, manifest in the fire of the flaming torch, is one of the two parties. God approaches Abram in a vision and declares, “I am your shield”—in other words, God affirms Abram’s dependence on God. Without children, Abram asks God to explain why he should trust in God as his “shield.” God turns Abram’s attention to the stars and promises that his offspring will be just as numerous. Abram believes God’s promise, and God “reckons” it to him as “righteousness”.
A mother hen is not the image we might first choose for Jesus — there is no Mother Hen Lutheran Church — it represents a vulnerable God. It is the image of a worried brooding mother, a grieving mother with a broken heart. A mother who would put herself in harm’s way to protect her young. Julian of Norwich, an anchoress of the church in the middle ages, wrote: “. A mother’s service is nearest, readiest, and surest. It is nearest because it is most natural. It is readiest because it is most loving. And it is surest because it is most true. We realize that all our mothers bear us for pain and for dying. But our true mother Jesus—all love—alone bears us for joy and for endless living, blessed may he be! He sustains us within himself in love and hard labor, until the fullness of time. Yet it is necessary for him to feed us, for the most precious love of motherhood had made him a debtor to us. A mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our precious mother Jesus can feed us with himself. He does so most courteously and most tenderly, with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life.”
In a world of harm and risk we do best to open ourselves to a prayer gesture of openness and vulnerability: outstretched arms – the same posture of Jesus on the cross.
It is a world of dangers, large and small. We are sent with Jesus’ mission: to protect the vulnerable, to put ourselves in harm’s way, to stand up for justice, to speak out against violence, and to embody mercy and compassion.
Wherever we go and in whatever we do, we are never far from God’s embrace—the mother hen’s wings spread around us. This love holds us in God’s safekeeping. And from the safety and warmth of God’s nest, giving us wings to fly.
