“When Jesus Suggested Henpecking ”

• Scriptural Reference: Luke 13:31-35
• March 4, 2007
• (Revised from “Like a Mother Hen” on March 12, 1995)

A recent "Dennis the Menace" cartoon made me chuckle. Dennis and Joey are pictured playing underneath a backyard tree. Dennis says to Joey: "My mother says she can't get a part time job because I'm a full time kid." Many of you laugh at that because you know from experience how Mrs. Mitchell feels. And many of you laugh because even though you have full time kids, Mrs. Mitchell notwithstanding, financial developments at your house make a full time job non-optional. Indeed, even when they aren't filling our time because we're at work, our kids do fill our thoughts – full time. They fill our hopes and our deliberations for the future. And we frequently feel the deep down desire to draw them in and hug them, tell them what's going through our minds, hug them and never let them go. I think it's that kind of longing lying behind Jesus' comment in Luke 13: "Oh, how I've longed to gather you in like a hen gathers her chicks under her wings." Welling up from vast depths in his heart comes a parental longing to see his children practice the wisdom he knows they should – and at the same time realizes that if the love will be genuine, it cannot be coerced.

Many of you will remember the sixties movie about the life of Christ, "King of Kings." The producers cast Jeffery Hunter as Jesus because he had such beautiful blonde hair and piercing blue eyes. They should have named the movie, "Jesus of Stockholm," but in my opinion, that wasn't the only thing wrong with the flick. While all the other actors in the film spoke vernacular English and acted in rather casual manners, Jesus always spoke in King James English and moved in slow motion, with exaggerated hand movements, never laughing, never frowning, indeed, never smiling. Now, I don't have a thing against King James English. It's probably the most beautiful and expressive form of English we've ever had in the history of the language. But the fact of the matter is that Jesus spoke the same language as everyone around him. He used their expressions, used their metaphors, dressed in their dress, and, I am convinced by passages such as this one in Luke 13, he felt strong emotions and desires. So, not only did the producers of "King of Kings" miss the point that Jesus was from Palestine, not Sweden, they failed to convey something essential about Jesus: he felt some things passionately. He was a man with some strong desires.
Now, you may have a hard time thinking Jesus experienced longings but pay attention to the text in Luke only a few verses before this emotive statement in which he compares himself to a mother bird. Sometime during the week after the triumphal entry, according to the Gospels, Jesus utters startling statements. Jesus calls the Pharisees a brood of vipers. He calls them sons of snakes. Those are not stoical statements. They're passionate insults. And then he looks on the city of Jerusalem and the Greek text does something it rarely does unless it's extremely important: it utters a redundancy, uses up expensive ink, paper, and space to write a word twice. But it was important to do so because it was essential to convey the fact that Jesus was feeling something very deeply here. "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, How often I've wanted to gather you to me as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings." His desire to embrace his children wells up from his gut like a wooden knot in his throat.

While pastor in Muldraugh, Kentucky (some of you may remember me mentioning this phase of my life once or twice) I met with a group of area pastors in Brandenburg at a fish house on the Ohio River. We told stories to one another while eating greasy onion rings and quaffing various drinks, soft and otherwise depending upon the denomination. Ted Ellison, the local Episcopalian had imbibed a quantity of a non-Pepsi product sufficient to blur the edge of his normally high church façade. Ted has a daughter who at the time was about five years old and frequently created circumstances in the house that violated Ted’s usual sense of order and decorum.

About 11:00 the evening prior to our meeting, Ted had climbed the stairs of the parsonage, tired from the day and feeling worn out because he and his wife had had another evening of challenging parenting. He paused by his daughter’s room and gently cracked the door in order to peer in at her. In the dim, yellow glow of the night light he saw the little hump under the quilt in the middle of that huge bed. He pushed the door open and quietly walked over and looked down on the face, turned to her right as she lay on her belly. He listened to the breathing in and out and watched the quilt over her back rise and fall. He saw where the hair lay across the mound of her cheek. She looked so fragile and innocent.

She whined all through supper and wouldn't eat a bite of what was set before her and she got downright sassy and called him a name she learned from some uncouth kid at kindergarten and he ended up yelling and getting his stomach all twisted up in knots so that neither he nor his wife enjoyed their supper. Then, she locked herself in the bathroom and he ended up screaming and threatening and pounding on the door -- but she didn't hear him because she was laughing at the top of her lungs while she made a whirlpool in the bathtub by pushing herself around in a circle with such force that a quarter inch of water sloshed out and stood around the toilet before he could find a nail to unlock the door and get in and saw that the pajamas she was supposed to put on which his wife had laid out carefully on a towel on the floor were sopping wet -- not to mention the towel.

But as he looked at that face, all the mischief of the day faded. Gratitude welled up inside, and not a little guilt. An overwhelming urge swelled up to wrap his arms around that slight little body and squeeze it for all it was worth. But he didn’t want to wake her up, so he just leaned down, brushed a little errant hair away from the cheek and kissed her. And he whispered a prayer: "Oh, Lord, help me to do better tomorrow. Help me to be a better daddy. Help me to be what she needs and forgive me for how I mess up." It all welled up from his gut and felt like a wooden knot in his throat.

Where does all that come from? I'm not sure it can be analyzed, but it's there. It wells up from depths too deep to plumb. It's there from the beginning of the race. We have a powerful desire to see our kids go the right way and avoid the dumb things we did. But at the same time, we know that we can't get into our kids brains and make them make the right decisions. Even if we could, we know it wouldn't be the right thing to do even though sometimes they make choices that tear our hearts out. Indeed, sometimes we want to gather them in, and they refuse the embrace and when they do, we live with that pain. Even through all of that and even though we never do it perfectly, we never stop wanting the best for them.

That's what it's like for parents. We've had some experience with life and we feel like we know the kinds of things that make for an orderly life, a good life, and we tell our kids. Of course, the kids don't always see our wisdom for the great gift to them that it is. And that's another reason why I love this passionate statement by Jesus. "You were unwilling to accept my embrace and now look! Your house is desolate!" When we see the mess our children sometimes make of their lives and feel the pain, then perhaps we should stop for a moment and think about how our heavenly father might feel about the current "desolate house" we his not-so-heavenly children occupy.

Where I come from, chicks are called biddies. And to tell you the truth, they're pretty stupid. My sister used to get them for Easter. They'd come with their feathers dyed pink or blue and the biddies would run around and chirp and look cute -- but the fact remained that they still could make a smelly mess. Plus, you couldn't train them. You couldn't name them. They never knew who you were. And one day, if they'd ever live long enough, I always pointed out, they'd become hens or roosters. All they were good for was for frying. Any time I said that, it made my sister cry, which made me say it all the more. But they were -- let's face it -- bird brains. And if a mother hen ever did manage to get a brood of those kinds of birds under her wings, it was after an awful lot of hectic gathering.

I wonder if that's why Jesus picked the metaphor -- God being like a mother hen. Might it be that the "children" he was referring to, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, had indeed acted just like a bunch of stupid biddies. They'd never responded to Jesus' training. They'd never known themselves the way Jesus knew them, and they certainly didn't know who he was. And to gather them in appeared just about as futile as the efforts of an old mother hen. When Jesus encountered their stubbornness, though, he didn't utter a sophisticated, theological "oh well." It's almost as if Jesus stamps his feet and sighs out loud in exasperation, clenching his fists and wrapping his arms in the air since no one else seems to value his embrace. It's as if he says, "I love you so much. And I can see so clearly the path you're on and where it leads, and Oh God! How I want to save you from it. Please listen to me. Please, let me hug you. Won't you listen?" And all he hears in answer is silence at best, derision at worst. Why? Because we're like a bunch of loose little birds, poking around looking for our own worms, heedless of the kind of things God values.

What do you think? When God sees that in Henrico County, Virginia a starting teacher with a master’s degree earns 37,000 dollars a year and then sees that a baseball player that didn't even attend college gets paid around 37,000 dollars a day, do you think maybe He looks at St. Peter in his heavenly office and scratches his head? When he sees Americans spend over a billion dollars in a given week on films, do you think maybe God looks at the angels and says, "No wonder their reality is getting worse. They spend so much money pumping in fantasy.” And just maybe God looks on our culture and says, "They're so weird. They do their best to take bad books out of school, but allow a television six to seven hours of daily access to their children's brains. They'll cry out for law and order and consistently exceed the speed limit. Also, scads of pastors preach compassion for the poor yet grow impatient when an indigent shows up in the office foyer. They'll talk about family values and then spend 60 - 80 hours a week at their jobs away from their families trying to pay for commodities most of which they don't need. They're like a bunch of biddies, St. Peter, running around, making all sorts of noises, and totally unaware of what's going on right over their heads -- and, OH! How I love 'em. I just wish for once, they'd slow down long enough to let me hold them to myself. They'd see just how good it is to accept my embrace!"

Honestly, I can't think of any other way to put it. God has a strong desire to embrace us. If I trust the story Jesus used to describe God, God is like a father straining his eyes looking down the driveway to see if the moving human form in the distance is his son returning home. And when the profile takes on that familiar shape, the father bolts off the front porch clearing the shrubbery and flower bed in one leap as he tears off down the road with his jacket flapping in the breeze behind him to fling his arms around the startled boy. And the father's tears make tracks down the dust on the boy's neck.

There were nights years ago as you lay in your bed asleep and your mother came into your room and wanted to squeeze you, but instead bent down and kissed you on your cheek and you didn't know it, until now. And now, you hug her back, and it thrills her soul. That's what it's like with God. Even though we might not have known it, God has been ready to throw an embrace around us, ready to gather us in, ready to still our circular staggering when we are willing. And when we are willing, and wake up to his love, we discover a love that has sustained us all along -- and we thrill not only our own souls, but God's as well. And you know what? It sets our house in order.