Scripture can be found here…
Jesus is on the road today. We meet him as he is moving towards Jerusalem, which means, towards the cross. He’s in an unnamed village. Throughout the journey, he has been telling stories and healing. He has been sharing parables… stories of yeast, and mustard seeds, and doors. There’s even a parable about a fig tree, which we’ll return to next week.
But then some worried Pharisees rush up to Jesus and tell him that his life is in danger, and it’s time to run, because Herod wants him dead.
[We interrupt this meditation for a message about Pharisees. Despite what most of us have been taught for most of our lives, despite some harsh words about them in the gospels themselves, Pharisees are not the bad guys in the Jesus story. There’s decent evidence right in the gospels that Jesus embraced most of what Pharisees stood for, including: belief in one God; belief in the divine inspiration of scripture, and in the resurrection of the dead, and in the sacredness of everyday life, not just what goes on in the Temple. Like Jesus, Pharisees believed that holy things ought to be in the hands of regular people rather than reserved for those in the Temple priesthood. Like Jesus, Pharisees believed that God so loved the world that God gave us everything we needed in order to find eternal life. And all those arguments Jesus seems to have with Pharisees? That was typical of the debates Pharisees carried on with one another. They believed that through debate, they could arrive at the truth. Here ends the message about Pharisees, who were not the bad guys. Case in point: here, they are trying to save Jesus’ life.]
The Pharisees warn Jesus that Herod is out to get him, so, he gives them a message to take back to the puppet-king. He says, Tell that fox I will be continuing to heal and cast out demons, because I answer to a higher authority than Herod. I’ll be doing it today, and I’ll be doing it tomorrow. If he wants, he can meet me in Jerusalem, because that’s where the prophets go to be killed.
For some reason, I’ve never fact-checked Jesus on this last one, so I did that. Some of our favorite prophets were indeed killed, and at least one of them in Jerusalem. Isaiah, met a terrible end there after criticizing King Manasseh. And the Judean prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel were also killed for their troubles, though not in Jerusalem proper.
What Jesus says stands to reason; the work of prophets is dangerous, because they call out the powerful, and the powerful usually don’t like that. Prophets are truth-tellers and, as we know, the powerful sometimes can’t handle the truth. And we already know the deadly outcome of John the Baptist’s truth-telling with Herod—John’s head on a platter in the middle of a birthday party. Foxes were considered particularly untrustworthy, conniving creatures, so Jesus meets the threat from Herod with a typically prophetic response: he calls Herod a fox.
But then, Jesus pauses to offer a lament about the city to which he is headed, this city that he loves. Jerusalem, he moans, Jerusalem. City that kills the prophets. But Jesus doesn’t call down a curse upon Jerusalem. He does just the opposite. He describes the inhabitants of the city as baby chicks, and refers to himself as a mother hen, longing to gather the people under his wings.
Jesus talks of how Jerusalem will be the death of him. But he wants to save her, save her people, and he wants to care for her the way a mother cares for her children.
It may seem counter-intuitive—by all accounts, Jesus presents to the world as a human male. But there is a strong tradition in the church of imaging Jesus as a mother. Probably the most well-known example of this comes from the 14th century mystic known as Julian of Norwich.
We don’t actually know her name. We call her Julian after the church of Saint Julian, in which she lived out her days, an anchoress who had taken a vow to remain in a small room attached to the church, for the remainder of her life. Before taking this vow, when she was 30 years old, Julian had been very ill. She was believed to be near death. A priest gave her the last rites, and held a cross over her face, so that she could gaze upon it as she died. As she did, she had a series of fifteen visions of Jesus over the course of a few hours, and one more vision the next day. Afterward, she recovered fully. After dedicating herself as an anchoress, in her cell at Saint Julian’s Church she wrote down these visions. She called them, “Shewings of Divine Love.”
In the tenth vision, Julian experienced the Motherhood of Jesus Christ. She writes,
The Mother’s service is nearest, readiest, and surest: nearest, for it is most of nature; readiest, for it is most of love; and surest, for it is most of truth. This office none might, nor could, nor ever should do to the full, but He alone. We know that all our mothers’ bearing is bearing us to pain and to dying: and what is this but that our Very Mother, Jesus, He—All-Love—beareth us to joy and to endless living?
Julian reasons that Christ undergoes labor to give us life, as a woman labors for the birth of her child. Christ feeds us with his own body, as a mother nurses her child. For Julian, this is the most natural, most understandable truth, one she gained from a vision of gazing at the wound in Jesus’ side.
Jesus doesn’t want to harm Jerusalem, even though he will come to harm there. He wants to heal its people, to nurture and protect them. Jesus wants them to find shelter under God’s wing.
That’s what God wants for all of us. God’s love is not up for discussion, it is not conditional on our doing well, or doing better, or doing anything at all. God sees us as we are, where we are, how we are, and wants nothing more than to gather us into a protective embrace, like that mother hen and her baby chicks.
So here it is, a biblical image of God as mother. There are others, but this is the one we have before us today. It’s not fancy. It’s not the kind of image we are likely to find on stained glass windows, though, heaven knows, I’ve tried. It is an image of love as a response to hate, gathering together as a response to hostility, and protection as a response to threat.
In short, it’s an image of the exact kind of love we need in a world that is so filled with hate, and hostility, and threats. It is the love that never fails. And it is for us, always.
Thanks be to God. Amen.