The Brave Chicken of God--March 26, 2024

The Brave Chicken of God--March 26, 2024

[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]

You know the old joke:  Why did the chicken cross the road? The punch line is built on its utter obviousness: To get to the other side, of course!

The emotional punch of Jesus' image for himself as a chicken is supposed to be obvious, too, although perhaps those of us who don't live near a chicken coop might miss it.  When Jesus describes himself as a mother hen, gathering her brood under her wings, it begs the question: Why would a mother hen gather her chicks under her wings in the first place?  And the answer, simply, is to put her life between her children and the danger.

Jesus pictures himself as the Mama Hen, offering to put his life between his people and the powers of death and violence, knowing full well that means laying his life down in the exchange.  Mother hens might shelter their brood as protection against any number of dangers--to keep them from freezing if a snowstorm or deep plunge in temperatures would have killed the peeps, or to become an insulating barrier in case there's a fire, or even to offer her body to protect from predators, hoping that her own life will satisfy the fox's hunger or at least buy her chicks some time.  But whatever the specific danger, the mother hen knows the bargain she is making--she is offering her life in exchange for the lives of her children, and she is willing to do it for her sake.  I don't know much about the internal emotional life of domesticated birds, but that sure seems like self-giving love to me.

And that's why it is such a powerful image to find on Jesus' lips here in this scene from early in Holy Week.  Jesus knows full well where his story is headed, and he offers his own life for the city and people of Jerusalem anyhow.  He weeps over the city where prophets spoke and kings ruled, this place where God's presence was specially experienced and where Jesus himself had been brought since he was an infant.  But more than merely lamenting over a lost cause, he offers to lay down his life for them all.  This is the depth of Jesus' love for people who have a track record of killing the prophets and running the truth-tellers out of town.  This is what Jesus offers us as well.  Jesus is willing to be the Mama Hen for the sake of the world.

So often, loud voices of Respectable Religion have talked about the events of Holy Week and the cross as if Jesus dies in order to satiate the untamed rage of God, as though Jesus has to die in order to make God no longer want to kill us or punish us or zap us.  But if you actually listen to how Jesus himself describes what he has in mind, he's not trying to appease a bloodthirsty deity, but to lay down his life to protect us from the powers of death that hunt us like a fox in a henhouse.  Jesus says, in effect, to the powers of death, "You'll have to go through me to get to my people," and he offers himself like a divine-and-human shield.  Or, rather like a chicken, like the bravest mother hen you ever saw.  This is what we are about to witness in the coming days of retelling the Passion of Jesus.

And while we're on that subject, that's why we take the time each year in this week to retrace the story of the cross and resurrection.  It's not that God needs to be pacified with our performance each Holy Week, or that new prospective church members need to see the biggest spectacle we can put on.  But rather, we need to let the sheer depth and breadth and magnitude of Jesus' audacious love get through to us, and we need as many different windows on understanding it as possible.  So we keep hearing these different ways that the Scriptures talk about the meaning of the cross--it's like the pulling power of a magnet that draws us in close, or the snake on the pole from the wilderness story, or it's like the sacrifice of a mother hen who puts herself between her beloved and the trouble.  And with each image, each picture, each facet of the cross, we are told, "Pay attention.  This is how you are loved."

Even in the final few days before the arrest in the garden and the cross that looms before the week is out, Jesus is giving us one more way to understand what he is offering: Jesus gives us here the most compelling image of bravery I think you'll find in the Bible, and of all things, it turns out to be a chicken.  He is so utterly willingly to lay down his life that he will be willing to play the role of mama hen for a world of lost chicks who are at risk.  And he does it because, quite simply, that is what love does.

This is how we are loved.  Jesus gives his life away, not to change God's mind about us or merely to inspire us to be better and kinder good little girls and boys, but like a courageous chicken, offering her life for ours, and well aware of the cost of that bargain.  Jesus would rather have you than his own life.

Do we dare to let him love us?  Do we dare to tell someone else that this love is for them, too?

Lord Jesus, let your love cover us, and let us pause in awesome appreciation of the depth of that love that enfolds us in the protection of your wings.