The Foolishness of Divine Love--October 24, 2023

The Foolishness of Divine Love--October 24, 2023

[Jesus said:] "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!" [Matthew 23:37]

I suppose one of the costs of genuinely enduring love is that you keep running the risk of looking like a fool.  The commitment to keep offering yourself in love, only to have the beloved turn away, well, that starts to look pretty pitiful before long.

And here's my hunch: if it were anybody other than Jesus weeping over Jerusalem in this tender moment from Matthew's Gospel (echoed by a similar scene in Luke's gospel, too), we would write this guy off and say he was just too naive. You know we would.  You can hear the complaints now:  "This guy--what a loser!  He keeps expecting these hard-hearted people to listen to him, or to turn their hearts toward his offer of a new beginning, and they keep saying NO!  When will he get a clue?"  "Look, I know he means well, but I just can't imagine that a city full of people who have stoned and killed the prophets who were sent to it would ever change their minds!"  "Poor schlub... his intentions might be good, but he's just not being realistic!  There's no way people who have been so evil before as to kill the messengers who were sent to them would ever turn over a new leaf and start to listen. This guy is just out of touch with the REAL WORLD, you know?"  If it were anyone other than Jesus, we would write off this show of resilient love as a damn shame, and we'd shake our heads in frustration that the one weeping over the city didn't have the common sense to give up.

But that's the thing about Jesus: he just doesn't have the common sense to give up on us.  We would declare the folks with a track record of violence and cruelty to be irredeemable; we would say, "I just don't think it's realistic to imagine they could ever change," giving up on the possibility they could ever see the light or have their stony hearts crumble into good soil. And Jesus just doesn't. Divine love endures even when everyone else says it's hopeless, pointless, and futile.

But that's a hard posture to take in this life.  We live in a world of limited resources and limited energy.  We can just get exhausted with giving second, third, or fourth chances to people in our lives, and usually we're not dealing with situations that could cost us our lives.  Jesus knows that continuing to extend the offer of peace to city he's weeping over will cost him everything--all the way to a cross.  And on top of that, we're afraid, aren't we?  We're afraid of looking foolish, of being called naive, of being taken advantage of, or <gasp!> being called "weak" or "losers."  We all know the saying, right? "Fool me once, shame on you--fool me twice, shame on ME."  We don't want to be scorned and shamed, so we would rather give up on people.  Jesus, however, keeps on making the offer of himself, even when he knows where the story is headed, both for him and for the city before him.  But he offers anyway.

It's interesting--in the parallel version of this episode that Luke tells, Jesus laments in particular that the people have missed out on recognizing "the things that make for peace," and that the people are bent instead on their own agendas.  And then here in Matthew's telling, he offers himself as a mother hen who puts her chicks under her wing in order to put herself between the danger and her brood.  Jesus has been relentless in offering a way that leads to life, and yet the people keep rejecting that divine offer, even when Jesus has been willing all along to risk his life to give it to them.  It has never stopped Jesus, though, because that's how he loves.  He just won't give up on us; even when we have shown no interest in what he is offering.

And I suppose that sets us up for a bigger question: in the end, does God's determination to love, redeem, and mend all of creation win out over our stubborn rejection?  Is God's victory in love assured, or will our hard-hearted "no" be the last word?  In a sense, all our lives are lived out in the tension of that question, waiting to be answered.  But in another sense, the resurrection at the heart of our faith is exactly the evidence we need that ultimately God's enduring love is able to overcome even the worst we humans can do and even our most insistent "no." In the end, our hope as Christians is that God's relentless love wins.

That's a hope worth staking our lives on.

Lord Jesus, let your persistent love wear down the stone of our hearts to shape us into people capable of receiving your goodness.