God

‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!’ Matthew 23:37.

This image, in a different context, occurs in Luke 13:34. It is probably the gentlest image in the whole of the New Testament; it comes in an intriguing – not to say shocking – place, immediately after the seven inexorably severe ‘woes’ spoken by Jesus against the Scribes and Pharisees.

Jesus’s twofold messages of destruction and love are irreconcilable. This single verse, which speaks so eloquently of reconciliation and compassion, is immediately followed by ‘Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate. For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord.”’

So it is not as though one were left with a consoling thought at the end of the chapter. And yet the visual strength of the metaphor, as well as the love it conveys, are such that I find it stays with me for far longer than the numerous and powerful threats among which it is set.

Jesus was a countryman, and his use of a hen is in line with his other images: sheep, wheat, fig trees, flowers, sparrows and many more. All these are down-toearth and immediately comprehensible to any of his listeners, past or present.

The hen ties in with several psalms, showing God protecting us with his wings or pinions, where we can lie in comfort and security. In Deuteronomy 32.11, we have ‘Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bearing them on its pinions, the Lord alone did lead him’ – a magnificent representation of God the Father as an eagle.

Jesus is too modest and unpretentious a man to compare himself with the king of the birds, and chooses the much less frightening, and altogether warmer, hen.

And here we have the only incident in the New Testament which draws attention to the mother’s rather than the father’s care for children.

Jesus’s offers of love, in spite of his listeners’ initial enthusiasm for his teaching, have repeatedly been rejected, once it becomes clear that he is not the all-conquering Messiah they think they want. Their refusal to believe and follow him causes him the pain and anguish that unrequited love always carries with it.

Alas, this very low standard of human behaviour is very much part of the present. Few people really think through the obligations of the Christian life.