Aug 23: “The Hen: Our Brooding, Sheltering God” (Birds of the Bible, Week 3)

Reflection by Rev. Sandra Nixon

Scripture: Luke 13: 31-35a

“Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem how often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Many of us have had the experience of pulling a small, fussing, and unhappy child into our laps and rocking them to sleep. Or perhaps we have a memory of that person in our family who had the ability to gather her clan over a meal and somehow in that attentive and loving space, there was comfort and a sense of identity and unity.

Just so Jesus yearns to pull the people of Jerusalem under his wings, as a hen gathers up her chicks and encompasses them in her love. But if we just stay with our memories and images, and this image of Jesus as nurturing mother hen, we miss the radical nature of what he is actually suggesting.

This image of Jesus as mother hen shows up twice in the New Testament. In the reading we heard today it is preceded by a story of Jesus performing a healing on the sabbath.

In that story, Luke tells us that Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues when he sees a crippled woman, and he calls her over and heals her. And he’s immediately questioned by the Pharasaic scribes who are indignant that Jesus has “worked” (ie healed) on the sabbath, which is forbidden.

Jesus retorts: “You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger and lead it to water? 16 And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?

It’s when some other pharisees (presumably the ones sympathetic to Jesus’ message) – it’s when they come and warn Jesus about Herod, that Jesus’ critique turns to lament.

As he compares himself to a brooding hen, he is drawing a sharp comparison between the kindom of God - one of gentle, self-sacrificing love - and the rule and reign of Herod. The symbol of imperial Rome was the eagle, a magnificent bird of beauty and strength, a soaring spirit of the sky and a powerful bird of prey. And here, Jesus casts himself as the opposite – a mother hen, vulnerable, earth bound, dowdy, scratching a living from the dust of the ground.

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When my mother moved out of the city (after I went to university) she kept chickens, and when I visited her I used to love going and collecting the eggs (think city girl getting her farm therapy). Except  Once she told me (as I got ready to go do the collection) – “Be careful, one of the hens is broody. Take a pair of gloves.”

So, you might know this: that when hens are brooding, sitting on their eggs, they become very – very - protective. They will lash out at anyone or anything that draws near, pecking ferociously at any intruder.

Such was my experience, and after that, being the city girl I am, if mum had a brooding hen in the coop, I would give it a wide berth when I did my egg collecting.

I didn’t know that a mother hen will also pluck out her feathers and put them around the eggs, laying down a protective layer. In pulling out her feathers, the hen also exposes parts of her body to bare patches. And these patches then also offer more warmth to the eggs.

Jesus does not turn away his opponents, or run from them, but instead he yearns to offer himself to a city lost in itself, in the most vulnerable way imaginable, to nestle them under his body and try to bring them to life.

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Jesus’ lament and desire to be like a mother hen shows up also in Matthew’s gospel. But not before he unleashes an even more volatile stream of invective towards the pharisaic scribes.

Here’s an excerpt from Matthew’s parallel account, in ch.23:

23 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’s seat; 3 therefore, do whatever they teach you and follow it, but do not do as they do, for they do not practice what they teach. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear,[a] and lay them on the shoulders of others, but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others…. 6 They love to have the place of honor at banquets and the best seats in the synagogues 7 and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to have people call them rabbi. 

…woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Blind fools!

You tithe mint, dill, and cumin and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. 

24 You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!

For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. 

28 So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. 

Now, “While insult was a fine and frequent art in antiquity, piling them up as Matthew tell us Jesus does, suggests things had gotten to the point of very serious conflict between Jesus and his opponents (or between Jesus’ followers in Matthews’s community and the opponents of that day.” (Social-Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, p. 115)

In the bigger context of this section in Matthew, Jesus has been under attack by the religious authorities and what we hear in this chapter (ch 23) is him turning back and basically giving it back as good as he got. 

And we do need to be very careful that we do not ascribe these negative attributes and behaviours to all Jewish leaders at the time of Jesus, and to remember actually that in writing this passage Matthew was writing to his own people. As a Jewish Christian he is allowing us to overhear an in house argument and not a rant by one Christian against all Jews.

As we hear, Jesus is accusing the religious leaders of many things that indeed many leaders – religious and otherwise - could be accused of today: not practicing what they preach; focusing on little bits of the law rather than the intention of the big picture; doing things to draw attention to how righteous they were; not distributing the wealth of the synagogue to those who needed it; reveling in their status as leaders rather than abandoning selfishness and humbling themselves to others.

Jesus goes on and on, longer than in Luke although the end verse are very similar, as Jesus finally seems to run out of rage and moves into wistful lament:

37 “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!

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The one time we see a prideful hen is when she lays her egg, when she gives birth to life. Then we witness the peculiar practice of the egg song.  This is also something I got to witness when my mom was keeping hens…

The “egg song” – perhaps you’re also familiar with it - is a hen’s noisy post-laying announcement—part victory anthem, part birth announcement, and part demand that everyone admire what she has just accomplished. And it’s not particularly “lilting” shall we say. But it certainly does get one’s attention!

In Genesis 1:2 we read “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

In Week 1 when we were reflecting on the dove, I mentioned that some rabbinic commentary suggested that this presence of God “hovering” was a dove. However, as we consider other translations that speak of  “brooding over the face of the deep”, bringing forth a new creation – we might just imagine the Christ, who is mother hen.

Just so, Jesus broods over us, in all vulnerability seeking to bring forward a new creation, a new unity of the people, in allegiance to the ways of love, not the ways of empire. And to offer comfort in the midst of the birthing.

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer.