Is it possible to train a chicken? Some cursory internet searches suggest that it’s really not that difficult, but you can’t believe everything you read on the internet. According to a good friend of mine, chickens are tricky to train. It’s possible, but it takes great patience. My friend is an excellent dog trainer, and some years ago, she went to a training workshop where her primary task was to train a chicken. It sounds strange, but the point was that if you can train a chicken, you can definitely train a dog. Or probably more accurately, if you can train a chicken, you can train the owners of the dogs. That, according to my friend, is a large part of her task. The dogs are more receptive than the hard-headed owners usually are. Apparently, dog owners will spend good money on a trainer only to tell the trainer how things should be done.
It’s no surprise that Jesus frequently resorts to agrarian imagery when trying to make a point, and for many twenty-first century Americans, those images may ring hollow for us. But do you ever wonder whether Jesus was making a more biting point by using animals as examples when talking to humans? And maybe this is lost on those of us who spend more time in front of computers than milking cows or collecting eggs from chickens. To Jesus’s audience, it’s possible that the image of a hen gathering her delicate brood of chicks under her wings would have been both a beautiful image of maternal protection as well as a judgment of humanity.
Think about it. We sophisticated moderns have the benefit of Darwin’s theory of evolution, but we have the disadvantage of thinking we’re far superior in every way to lesser animals. If Jesus is using the image of a mother hen protecting her vulnerable brood of chicks as a metaphor for God’s boundless paternal and maternal love, then a first-century farmer would have understood just how tenacious the mother hen’s love was. And that farmer might have recoiled at an insinuation that we would miss. Though little chicks know exactly where to go for nourishment and protection, we humans often run in the opposite direction. We run away from God.
Now, imagine how further convicting Jesus’s image should be for those of us who have a far better understanding of genera and species. If we have so much more knowledge of how life works, then it’s even more tragic that we twenty-first humans are perhaps even more inclined to eschew the loving, protective arms of God than our forebears. And that realization hurts like a hen peck to our ego.
We forget how vulnerable we really are, or it may be that we choose not to recognize our vulnerability because it makes us seem less powerful. Little chicks, fresh out of their safe eggs, hardly know how to walk. They’re potential prey for any number of vicious creatures. They waddle around comically like their heads are cut off. But one thing they do know, quite naturally, is that the place of safety, comfort, nourishment, and love—if we want to call it that—is under the generous wings of their mother. And should a fox appear on the scene, the mother hen will become feisty with a natural sense of instinctual, maternal care. She’ll use her beak and wings to shield her chicks from harm. She’ll cluck them into safety. She’ll stand between the fox and the chicks, just like a good shepherd stands between the wolf and the sheep.
How complex Jesus’s lament over Jerusalem is! He’s steeped in that ancient Hebrew tradition, where plaintive songs of prayer arise in the face of disaster, such as the exile in Babylon. Jesus mourns over Jerusalem as a typical Middle Easterner would have wailed and still does wail loudly at a funeral, while we Americans hide our tears behind handkerchiefs.
And our risen Savior still laments both over Jerusalem and over our many cities. Surely, Jesus continues to mourn and weep, as he did at Lazarus’s tomb, at the senseless violence and seething hatred among us. He weeps because humanity, as enlightened as it may be, refuses to care for the stranger or provide for the least of these. Surely, he weeps at a global family that is rent apart by unhappy divisions. Surely, Jesus’s heart breaks at those who think they can live life without God, as if God somehow is responsible for the daily terrors of which we’re all too aware. Surely, Jesus is upset by Christians who rejoice in their own thanksgivings but fail to weep with those who are suffering terribly. Surely, Jesus weeps at our many gods, at our idolatrous bowings to corrupt worldly rulers, at our stubborn refusals to turn and see God’s great love. And perhaps most of all, surely Jesus laments when we, God’s adopted children, lack the courage to take responsibility for our own sins and turn back to God, who always waits for us as a mother hen. God is ready to spread his maternal wings over our frail bodies, to give us warmth from the cold, dead world, to sate us with the nourishment of eternal food, and to provide us with a place of safety and rest.
It’s as if at some point—was it at the Fall?—we failed to imprint on our heavenly Father, which a far less intelligent little chick knows how to do. It’s as if we thought ourselves too smart for school and could figure things out for ourselves, but when we wandered too far away from the nest, we found ourselves surrounded by foxes. We trusted those foxes at first, until we realized that they were just predators and were about to eat us alive. Maybe even now, we’re desperately wondering how we can return to the shelter of those widespread, warm, maternal wings.
Your house is forsaken, Jesus says. It’s judgment but not abandonment by God. As we’re probably wont to do, we make God into a superhuman bully, and we imagine Jesus’s words as an eternal censure of the human race, as if God has left us behind because we were so recalcitrant. But the forsaken house is a part of Jesus’s long lament. Our house is forsaken in the sense that our poor choices have confronted us with savage betrayals and grieving neighbors and starving children and cruel divisiveness. This is the self-judgment wrought on us by our willful wandering away from the nest.
But this powerful image of a protective mother hen that Jesus offers is nothing less than a glimpse into the heart of God. Here, we see God who is beyond human emotions and beyond our time and space. But lest we imagine God as a distant clock winder, St. Luke gives us a profound image into the heart of God in Jesus’s lament. In human time, we see the heart of God in turmoil over our stubborn refusal to admit the wrong we’ve done and left undone. Because if we could only admit that, we would be waddling right into the ample wings of God, the mother hen who calls us home.
In our seemingly infinite human sophistication, we’ve rejected God because we imagine God as a paternal or maternal figure gone wrong. God is like the father who was cold and absent, scolding, and harsh. God is like the mother who would protect but only with heavy strings attached. But precisely because God is not like us, in Jesus’s lament, we see the eternal nature of God revealed. Jesus laments not because God can’t control his children but because he won’t. God won’t force us under the shadow of his wings. The depth of God’s love isn’t revealed in smothering us with his wings but in the death and glorification of his Son on the cross. It seems no coincidence that we’re given Jesus’s tender lament before the agonies of the cross.
Jesus as the visible expression of God’s infinite love will be the mother hen on earth for the lost chicks, not by forcing the chicks under his wings but by going to the cross. Jesus will be the protective mother hen who stands between the Herods of this world, the foxes who don’t care for the chicks but will abuse, use, and neglect the chicks. Despite the Pharisees’ warning to him, Jesus won’t skip town because Herod the fox is after him. He’ll stay and continue his work of casting out demons and healing the sick. Jesus is so tenacious in his love, as a mother hen, that he goes to the cross rather than coercing the chicks into his care. On that cross the stubbornness of love defeats the stubbornness of human sin.
And on that day, a day we’ll celebrate just a few weeks from now, we’ll finally see who Jesus really is. We’ll welcome him into Jerusalem with a cry, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” We’ll truly see him as he is, dying and yet reigning from a cross. There, with arms outstretched, he will gather his little chicks—us—under the warmth and shelter of his wings. And then we’ll gain our own wings, fly away in freedom, and finally be at rest.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Second Sunday in Lent
March 16, 2025