A Vulnerable Love

Some days it’s harder than others to believe that love will win.

When 50 people are shot to death while they are at prayer, it’s hard to believe that love will win.

When 50 people are shot to death because they are brown, because they are immigrants, because they are Muslim, it’s hard to believe that love will win.

When 50 people are shot to death in a city called “Christchurch,” it’s hard to believe that Christ is doing anything other than weeping.

Our world is in turmoil. The pain, the horror, the loss, the hate – it’s hard to see what advantage love could possibly have, at a time like this. Against white nationalism and all other forms of hate and fear, it’s hard to keep believing that people like us could do anything at all to make things change, to make things better.

It’s hard to believe that love can win, because fear, hate, and violence just have so much more power.

—

Jesus knew the force of those powers very well. On his way to Jerusalem, some Pharisees come to warn him of the danger that waits for him there. “Get away from here,” they urge him, “Herod wants to kill you.” Jesus is defiant. He knows he is doomed, but he is nobody’s victim. He knows he will die, as everyone must, but he intends for his death, like his life, to be part of God’s larger purpose. Herod does not get to determine Jesus’ future, even if he causes his death. By the world’s standards, Jesus is powerless. Nevertheless, he persists in his purpose, claiming an authority Herod cannot even begin to understand.

Jesus says to the Pharisees, “You tell that fox for me, ‘I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. So today, tomorrow, and the next day, I must be on my way….” Jesus is moving in the world with healing purpose and love, and, even in the face of Herod’s threats, he will not be deterred, slowed down, or turned around.

And then his defiance turns to lament. He cries out for Jerusalem, he cries out to Jerusalem, the city he loves, a city that seems determined to pursue its path of violence and destruction. He cries out to her, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

The longing and lament in his words tell the sad and terrible truth: things did not have to be the way they are. Humanity could have chosen better. We could have done better. We could have done so much differently.

Jesus himself does do differently. He lays his longing bare. He lets us see his pathos, his pain. He does not flinch from showing how much it can hurt to love – really love – in this world. He offers himself as a mother hen.

Living, as we do, in the world of foxes, a mother hen is not really the protector we are looking for. We know what foxes do to hens. If Jesus was going to compare himself to a farm animal, couldn’t it at least have been a rooster? They’ve got those razor-sharp spurs on the backs of their legs. Roosters are tough. Roosters can be scary. A few years ago, one of our sons once just lifted his arm and crowed at a rooster and that rooster came after him immediately, nearly scared him to death chasing him out of the yard.

When I was growing up, my family raised chickens. We would only have one rooster for the whole flock, because otherwise the roosters would fight each other rather than protecting the hens. One day, while we were gone, a pack of wild dogs got into the henhouse and killed every single hen. But not the rooster. When we got home, that old rooster was strutting around outside the fence – tail feathers gone, some of his skin gone, but he was alive. When the dogs had shown up and started slaughtering the chickens, the rooster had flown the coop. This is what roosters will do when danger threatens – they will fight, or they will fly, but they will not just stay there to die.

Not so with mother hen. When danger threatens, whether dog or fox or hawk, the first thing a hen does is call her little chicks. She has a very particular kind of clucking she does for her chicks, and when they hear it, they come running to take cover under her. And once they’re safely under her breast, she fluffs herself up so big, you can’t even see the baby chicks under her. She covers them up, almost sits on them just like before they were hatched. A rooster may fight to the death, but a hen will protect her chicks to the death. She will stay, no matter what comes. She will put her body between her chicks and predator, and she will die before she lets him get them.

When that sly fox Herod was on the prowl, Jesus called himself a mother hen. He made his own body, his own being, a shelter for us, for all. He wants us gathered, all of us, every last chick up under his sheltering love. But that isn’t the way we humans want it.

On the Mount of Olives, which overlooks Jerusalem, on the spot where Jesus wept over the city that rejected him, there stands a little Franciscan chapel called Dominus Flevit, which means, “The Lord wept.” The sanctuary of that chapel was built in the shape of a teardrop, and over the altar is an enormous arched picture window that looks out onto the holy city that he wept for. The front of the altar there is adorned with a mosaic medallion, depicting a white hen with a golden halo; her wings are spread wide, and underneath her are seven pale yellow chicks, with little black eyes and little orange beaks. It’s hard to tell whether they are running toward her, or away.

In a ring around the medallion, in red letters, are these words, in Latin: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under wings!” And under the little chicks’ feet, in a pool of red, are the final words of Jesus’ lament: “and you were not willing.”[i]

“Willing.” It’s a word that actually appears in this short passage three times, though it doesn’t sound that way in English. The Greek word is thelo, and it means “will, wish, want, desire.” Herod wishesto kill Jesus. Jesus desiresto gather the children of Jerusalem under his wing. The children do not will it. It’s very clear that what Herod wants and what Jesus wants and what the children of Jerusalem want are all in conflict and competition.[ii]And what about us? What do we want?

We might be willing to gather under him, if we got to say who else could be there, and who could not. Or we might be willing to gather under him, if we could be assured that his way really was the way of rescue and victory. If we could see any evidence at all that gathering under his wings would somehow disarm the foxes, save us from the powers that prowl and threaten. But we know that’s not how it works. We know that to listen and respond to his call is to allow ourselves to be gathered into the very heart of his vulnerability. And we already feel so vulnerable as it is.

—

On Friday, when the white supremacist terrorist in Christchurch, New Zealand, walked into the Al Noor Mosque to begin his rampage, one of the worshippers, a 71 year-old man, a refugee from Afghanistan, greeted him at the entrance, saying, “Hello, brother.” And then he was killed. The terrorist determined how the man would die, but not how he would live. The man’s last words were words of welcome, of embrace, of kindness, of peace, of love. “Hello, brother.”

There are people out there with their guns and their bombs and their manifestos. There are people out there ready to spew their hate and livestream their carnage. There are leaders who stoke our vilest, basest suspicion of other people.

The way of mother hen seems no match for any of that. Little acts of kindness and compassion, tiny efforts at understanding and embrace, small and simple words of welcome and love and hope – how can our small acts and words of love make any difference at all?

On their own, they don’t. On our own, we don’t.

But we aren’t on our own.

Mother hen is calling us, crying out with all her breath, calling us together. Longing to gather us all in. Crying for us to stand the way she does, with open hearts and outstretched arms. Calling for us to live her vulnerable, gathering love. To call out to each other, “Hello, brother,” “Hello, sister,” even when we’re scared, and even when we don’t think it can possibly be enough.

It is enough. Such vulnerable love is actually the only thing that will ever be enough.

In the end, the foxes did get Jesus, but they could not kill his love for us. And nothing can keep us from that love but our own unwillingness. He is still calling for us, beckoning us towards his great outstretched arms of his love. Yearning, dying, to gather us – all of us– in. Are you willing?

[i]I first read about this chapel and the mosaic on its altar here: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=638. A picture of the medallion can be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/redrosesinwinter/2987700740/

[ii]http://www.progressiveinvolvement.com/progressive_involvement/2010/02/lectionary-blogging-luke-13-3135.html