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February 28th, 2010
Luke 13:31-35

This week as I read and thought and prayed about what to say to you about this text, I came to the conclusion that Jesus would have made a really good mother. 

No, you heard me right.  I said mother not father.  Here’s why. 

He’s got just enough boldness and sass to get the job done. 

“Tell that fox for me that I’ve got work to do,” he says to the Pharisees. 

Jesus didn’t have the time, energy, or desire to worry about Herod and his shenanigans.  I imagine Jesus waving his finger in the air and putting his hand on his hip as he continues with, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today, tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work.”  By the way, the use of the phrase, “the third day” most likely refers to God, and we all know God’s work is never done, just like a mother’s.  It sounds a lot like, “Don’t bug me, I’ve got a carpool to drive, dinner to cook, a meeting to run, laundry to do, and squirrely children to raise into responsible adulthood.” 

Boldness, sass, determination, and focus.  Yep, Jesus would have made a good mother.

Mother Jesus knows his boldness is going to get him into trouble eventually, but he doesn’t try to hide from it.  He knows Jerusalem’s reputation where prophets are concerned.  He knows his message of love that trades the status quo of power, wealth, and the establishment for the new kingdom of humility, covenant living, and the new creation in God will not go over well with the powers-that-be.  

Luke’s Jesus speaks politically charged words, challenging leaders and proclaiming God’s kingdom and “release for the captives,” “freedom for the oppressed,” and “good news to the poor.”  Luke’s writer is convinced that Jesus knows he is stirring things up and marching on to his death, and still, he turns up the volume and marches on with determination.  Mothers need resolve and commitment too, right?

At the end of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus’ sass is tempered a bit as he shows another side of his mother’s heart:
 “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”  

Rev. Michael Curry writes: “[Here] Jesus speaks in tones of abject disappointment and utter heartbreak at the refusal of his own people to hear and heed the summons of God to draw near, to gather, and to come home.”  Jesus must know what it’s like to reach for your fourth grader’s hand and have them yank it away.  He must know the pain of watching your teenager walk a path you wouldn’t have chosen for them, a path that brings heartache instead of happiness.  He must know what it means to be estranged from an adult child who was once the baby that slept peacefully in the warmth of your arms. 

Abject disappointment and utter heartbreak—unfortunately those are a part of Jesus’ motherhood as well.

And finally, as Lisa Schoenwetter said at Scripture and Scones on Wednesday morning, “Jesus is the ultimate Jewish mother.” 

“I tried to tell you,” he says, ‘but did you listen?  No!  You’ve made your bed, lie in it.  One day you’ll appreciate what I’m trying to tell you, and I will try not to say ‘I told you so.’” 

Jesus’ heartbreak and disappointment are not the last word.  He knows, like a good mother, that there’s only so much he can do.  He can give his teenagers an I-pod, but he cannot make them listen to classical music.  He can fix his kids a healthy dinner, but he cannot stop them from eating junk at the next door neighbors house.  He can stand there, arms outstretched, welcome sign lit up, and pie in the oven, but he cannot make God’s children draw near and come home to love.     

Here is Jesus, the sassy and bold, disappointed and heart-broken Jewish mother.  Here is Jesus, the mother hen brooding over her chicks, brooding like God did over the waters of chaos at the creation.  Jesus was there in the beginning with God, and here he is again, brooding over the new creation and it’s refusal to turn to God’s goodness and mercy and love. 

Yet, brooding implies that the mother hen knows that things can and will be different with her chicks.  She rustles about, gathering them in again and again, grooming their fluffy and immature feathers, chasing them around to meet their needs and keep them safe until they finally decide to settle in under her warm and strong wings. 

“You will not see me,” Jesus says, “until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’”  Jesus knows that a different time is coming, a time when the people will truly be God’s people, when they can name Jesus as Love and claim his message and his path towards a new creation as their own.  
   
Jesus is not writing off the people despite their unwillingness to turn to God and join in the new creation.  His lament is less judgment and more a call to repentance.  He is a persistent mama.  In the end, he is not predicting Jerusalem’s destruction but it’s salvation.  He is joining in the tradition of the prophets and using the image of the scattered people of God being gathered together to speak of God’s unwavering love for Israel, for God’s people.

The Gospel of Luke is also full of these kinds of snapshots of God’s persistent, tender, and merciful love for the lost and wandering children of God, whether this is by choice or otherwise.  One of the most well-known is the story of the prodigal son, which is also the story of the persistent father.  The father’s extravagant compassion and reckless love mirror Mother Jesus’ words and actions in our passage for today.  The father stands waiting for the prodigal son and showers him with a lavish party and gifts when he returns. 

The people of Jerusalem have turned away again and again, yet Jesus stands with arms open and prophesies about their eventual coming home to salvation in God.  The prodigal son has disappointed the father, yet the father risks relationship with him again and opens his home and his possessions to this rascal.  Jerusalem is hazardous to a prophet’s health, yet Jesus risks everything, including his own life, to stay on his path there and to keep his message of love and welcome and a new way broadcasting loud and clear.
 
The trick?  The son had to come home to be saved.  The people of Jerusalem must choose to turn, to repent, to participate in and choose the salvation that Jesus is offering them.  They have to stop acting like rebellious teenagers and listen to Mother Jesus, even if he does need a haircut and a new pair of sandals and he’s always embarrassing them in public.
 
Writer Julie Atkins has this to say about adolescent Jerusalem and its refusal to turn to God.  See if you can’t hear in this passage echoes of your own journey.

"Resistant, rebellious Jerusalem… knowing itself to be the child of God, yet insistent on finding its own way, marching to its own drum, making its own mistakes, some of them rather impressive.  Like, killing the prophets and all that.  And, as with rebellious children… you cry over them, tears of frustration and fear for their future and your powerlessness to save them… and at the same time you want to shake them, and say, 'Stop!  You’re killing yourself!'  Yet, it’s difficult to condemn Jerusalem outright… and rightly so.  Because to look at Jerusalem is a little like looking in a mirror.”

We’ve all resisted God in some way, consciously or unconsciously, actively or passively.  But maybe that’s because like Jerusalem, we turned our backs before we took a good look at what God was offering us. 

Jesus is calling for repentance, for turning to God, but he isn’t framing that with judgment.  His call for repentance comes covered in grace.  Jerusalem doesn’t want, and we often don’t want to be gathered in, sheltered, and cared for by God.  We turn down the grace, the full, abundant life God is trying to coax us into before we even dip our toes in to test the waters. 

Why is that?  Could it be we suspect God has an ulterior motive?  We humans often work that way.  I do something nice for you to keep that pump primed for the next time I need something.  We even try it with God.  “Okay, God.  I’m going to pray a LOT this week so you’ll forgive that really awful thing I did last week.”  Or, “God, I promise to increase my pledge by half and join a committee if you’ll never again ask me to teach Sunday School!” 

What we miss is that God doesn’t work that way.  Mama Jesus isn’t brooding over Jerusalem and God isn’t pursuing us because they need a missionary to Africa or a youth group sponsor or a contribution to disaster relief (though, those are all needed).  God isn’t offering us grace, because God is being sneaky and wants something from us.  God is wanting to do the giving.  Still, we resist.

Or, our resistance may consist of more foot stomping and eye rolling and deep, exasperated sighs at God.  The teenager that lives somewhere deep inside of us is saying to God, “I’ll do it myself!  I don’t need your help!  I’m tired of doing things your way!  I want to do them my way for a change!” 

We may feel we want or need to make our own way, prove that we can do it alone, find ourselves along the way.  But, God’s offer of grace, guidance and shelter isn’t meant to limit us or our options.  God wants to hold and love us so we can have the strength and care and wisdom we need to live full, independent, unique, and satisfying lives.  God wants to partner with us— not hem us in.  Turning to God isn’t turning away from our own self.  It isn’t admitting weakness.  It’s knowing ourselves more deeply and opening our lives to hope and possibility.

Finally, we may resist Mother Jesus’ call to receive God’s grace because we’ve absorbed enough of this world’s noise and mental pollution to believe that we don’t deserve it.   Lent, a time of introspection, can be dangerous in this vein if self-discovery ends in running from God instead of returning to God, which is what repentance is all about in the end.  That is the purpose of these 40 days of wilderness journeying.  It’s a time to take stock, to evaluate the state of our lives and our connection to God and others, so that we can live, as Barbara Brown Taylor says, “our real lives—the live[s] we long to be living.” 

That is exactly what Mother Jesus is after in this passage.  He wants to gather his rebellious teenage children, those in Israel, and those in Fitchburg, those who are teenagers by birth date, and those are teenagers in their stubborn, rebellious hearts.  He is saying to all of us, “Come, gather under my wings.  Return to my warmth and care.  Let my love fill you and uphold you, so that you can be your best self, live your real life.  Return to me, and leave behind all that drags you down and fills you with emptiness.” 

Friends, let us listen to our Mother this morning.  Let us be gathered in love.  Let us return to God and be the new creation that Mama Jesus says is coming. 

May it find its beginnings in us today.  Amen.