Daily Devotional • November 8
A Reading from Luke 13:31-35
31 At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” 32 He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. 33 Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ 34 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! 35 See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
Meditation
Undergirding the judgment in this lament of Jesus over Jerusalem, there is something central being expressed. This is the love which, when rejected, manifests as grief. Jesus uses the image of a hen gathering her chicks under her wings in protection to describe his own compassion and love for the people here. This is a precious image drawn from the Old Testament. What tenderness! What love.
Jesus compares himself to a hen. Chickens can be fierce indeed. One very quickly learns to put on strong boots when feeding them, because they can and do draw blood when they seem threatened. A mother bird is defensive, protective.
Herod is called a fox just moments before (albeit in a mocking way). A hen, even the most powerfully maternal protective one of all, is still putting herself into harm’s way, into the jaws of death, if contending with a fox. Jesus knows exactly what he’s talking about.
I do not know what it is to be a parent and see a beloved and vulnerable child turning away from their own best interests and relationships. But I have been a child, and I can recall my own mother’s laments at my selfish and short-sighted rejections of familial love and responsibility. I still feel these laments – I still ache for the pain caused. I feel the same way in the knowledge of the gaze of Jesus on my own faithlessness.
Lament has to do with love — of compassion and concern for the other. You cannot lament over someone you do not love. So Jesus can’t be said to be lamenting over the fact that he’s going to be killed in Jerusalem except insofar as the actions of those who fail to recognise him are distancing themselves from God. They are losing an opportunity for the relationship with God for which they have been created and called.
This is our Lord’s judgment: a love that seeks us, weeps for us, and yearns for us to choose what is good and true.
The Reverend Cara Greenham Hancock is a deacon serving in the Anglican Church of Australia, as a curate at the parish of St Stephen and St Mary, Mount Waverley.
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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
The Diocese of Kebbi – The Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion)
Church of the Good Shepherd, Corpus Christi, Texas