Matthew 23
37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 38 See, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
Diana Butler Bass once told this story:
Before she retired, my neighbor was a preschool teacher. One spring, she decided to raise chickens with the children. She had a chicken coop and brooder built at the school, and bought a flat of newly-hatched baby chicks which she introduced to the students. The children loved this, adopting the babies as their own, naming them and tending to them. Each morning, the preschoolers ran excitedly to the hen house to check on and care for their avian charges.
On one such day, the class went out to the coop to discover a fox had broken in. It was a horrible scene — every bird was dead. A dozen traumatized preschoolers howling in grief, my neighbor hurried them away from the scene of the massacre. She spent the rest of the day comforting the children and, during nap time, tended to the destruction left by the fox. She called the entire episode “The Great Chicken Slaughter.”
And there were never baby chicks at the preschool again.[1]
It is a dangerous world for baby chicks. A good momma hen will do all she can to protect them and under her wings and close to her heart is the safest place the chicks can be.
This is a simple image, a beautiful image, a powerful image: a hen protecting her chicks under her wings from the coming danger. And it is precisely the image Jesus uses at the end of Matthew 23.
The sin.
We begin with a verse filled with feeling and with pain. Jesus cries out:
37a-c “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!”
First, we can positively feel the emotion of Jesus in his repetition of the word “Jerusalem.” Frederick Dale Bruner notes that this repetition “shows Jesus’ love, like his ‘Martha, Martha’ in Luke 10, his ‘Saul, Saul’ in Acts 9, and the angel’s ‘Abraham, Abraham’ in Genesis 22.”[2]
Nor should we see this emotion as a kind of insecure act intended by Jesus to make Him appear more human. No, we see in the scriptures a picture of Jesus as fully human and fully divine. He grieves sincerely and deeply over Jerusalem’s rebellion just as He grieved sincerely and deeply over Lazarus’ death.
He grieves over their sin. He grieves over their rejection of Him. He grieves over the coming judgment. The church father John Chrysostom saw in this cry the pain of rejected love. He likens this scene to “a woman who is much beloved and forever loved, yet who had despised the one who loved her.”[3] Jerusalem, the beloved, rejects the love of Christ, the groom. It is a tragedy indeed!
Specifically, Jesus laments over Jerusalem’s murder of the prophets and “those who are sent to it.” These words are consistent with Elijah’s response to God in 1 Kings 19.
9 There he came to a cave and lodged in it. And behold, the word of the Lord came to him, and he said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” 10 He said, “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts. For the people of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and killed your prophets with the sword, and I, even I only, am left, and they seek my life, to take it away.”
In Nehemiah 9, the Levites cried out the same condemnation.
26 “Nevertheless, they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their back and killed your prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies.”
Paul levels the same charge in 1 Thessalonians 2.
14 For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind
And we recalled Stephen’s acknowledgment of the same crimes in Acts 7 when we considered the seven woes against the scribes and Pharisees that immediately precede this text.
Yes, the shame of Jerusalem’s violence had condemned them, and Jesus grieves over this. Jesus is expressing here the same feeling voiced by the Lord in Ezekiel 33:
11 Say to them, As I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live; turn back, turn back from your evil ways, for why will you die, O house of Israel?
The offer of mercy.
Jesus’ grief is compounded by the fact that the coming judgment was avoidable, that salvation had been offered to Jerusalem, but that they had chosen divine wrath instead. In communicating His offer of mercy and their rejection of it, Jesus used a beautiful image.
37d-f How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!
Jesus depicts Himself as a mother hen wanting to protect her chicks from coming danger. It is actually an image with deep attestation in scripture.
In Ruth 2, Boaz says to Ruth:
12 The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge!”
Here, righteous Ruth is depicted as resting in the safety of God’s sheltering wings. This is the safety that Jesus offered the Jews and offers the whole world as well! The image is used many times in the book of Psalms. Psalm 17 is one such example.
8 Keep me as the apple of your eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings, 9 from the wicked who do me violence, my deadly enemies who surround me.
You will find similar imagery in Psalm 36:7; 57:1; 61:4; 63:7; 91:4.
Interestingly, in Job 39, we find a contrasting picture of showy and flamboyant wings that actually fail to offer any protection.
13 “The wings of the ostrich wave proudly, but are they the pinions and plumage of love? 14 For she leaves her eggs to the earth and lets them be warmed on the ground, 15 forgetting that a foot may crush them and that the wild beast may trample them. 16 She deals cruelly with her young, as if they were not hers; though her labor be in vain, yet she has no fear, 17 because God has made her forget wisdom and given her no share in understanding. 18 When she rouses herself to flee, she laughs at the horse and his rider.”
In this text, the wings of the ostrich are condemned as not being wings of “love.” This, again, is in contrast to the wings of God. Sheltering wings that protect are wings of love. Some wings make a great show but they are the wings of the ostrich: there is no love in them. But the “wings” of God (to continue the metaphor) are wings of love!
One powerful implication of Jesus’ utilization of these numerous Old Testament images of the loving, sheltering wings of God is that, Jesus is claiming deity. How else to explain His appropriation of divine imagery? The wings of Jesus are the wings of God.
The same can be said of Jesus’ language: “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” This “I” is provocative, to say the least! Frederick Dale Bruner writes:
Jesus does audaciously take the part of God in this sentence: “How often I wanted to gather…”…What prophet would say this of himself?[4]
True! The prophets would say, “Thus says the Lord…” But Jesus says, “I.” When Jesus speaks, the Lord has spoken!
This image of sheltering beneath the wings of Jesus is beautiful and tender. It is an amazing picture of the love of God.
On July 22, 1888, Spurgeon preached on this text and said:
What a cabin, what a palace it is for the young chicks to get there under the mother’s wings! The snow may fall, or the rain may come pelting down, but the wings of the hen protect the chicks, and you, dear friend, if you come to Christ, shall not only have safety, but comfort.
I speak what I have experienced. There is a deep, sweet comfort about hiding yourself away in God, for when troubles come, wave upon wave, blessed is the man who has a God to give him mercy upon mercy. When affliction comes, or bereavement comes, when loss of property comes, when sickness comes in your own body, there is nothing wanted but your God. Ten thousand things, apart from Him, cannot satisfy you, or give you comfort. There, let them all go, but if God be yours and you hide away under His wings, you are as happy in Him as the chickens are beneath the hen.[5]
To this we say, “Amen!”
The consequence of rejection.
But Jerusalem, the people of God, had rejected the loving, sheltering wings of the God who made them and loved them. They turned from God. They killed the prophets. And, ultimately, they would kill the Son of God Himself. They would have Jesus nailed to a cross. So judgment would come. Jesus’ description of this judgment follows.
38 See, your house is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’”
The church father Apollinaris wrote of these verses that Jesus “was soon to rain calamitous blows on Jerusalem because of its bloodthirsty nature.”[6] Sadly, this is true. But there is a note here also of the universal recognition of the Lordship of Jesus Christ with his second coming. This assertion that all will say “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord” reminds us of Paul’s words at the end of the Carmen Christi in Philippians 2:
9 Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, 10 so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Paul, then, in Philippians 2, is simply saying what Jesus says over Jerusalem.
For I tell you, you will not see me again, until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Matthew 23:39)
so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:10–11)
What are we to make of this? Is this universalism, the idea that all will ultimately be saved? No, for the picture is not one of saving faith but one of begrudging and shocked acknowledgment of a truth that can no longer be denied. When Christ comes again, the lost will say “Jesus is Lord!” because they will be unable to deny it any longer. Why? Because Christ the Judge will be before them to execute His judgment. At this point, this will not be a saving confession but rather a terrifying acknowledgment.
Now is the time to bend the knee! Now is the time to say “Jesus is Lord!” Now is the time to repent and believe.
For the saved, “Jesus is Lord!” is the joy and hope of our hearts!
For the lost, it is condemnation…for they have rejected the Lord. And the great tragedy is that in rejecting Jesus they were rejecting the saving, sheltering, tender, loving wings of God. They turned away from refuge and embraced instead wrath. How heartbreaking!
The words of Peter from 2 Peter 3 are apropos here, and they stand in harmony with the words of Jesus over Jerusalem.
9 The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance. 10 But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
He does not wish that any should perish. Come beneath the wings of the God who loves you. Jesus is the way!
[1] https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/sunday-musings-a79
[2] Bruner, Frederick Dale. Matthew. Volume 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990), p.458.
[3] Simonetti, Manlio, ed. Matthew 14–28. Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture. Gen. ed. Thomas C. Oden. New Testament Ib (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002), p.183–84.
[4] Bruner, Frederick, p.459.
[5] https://www.spurgeongems.org/sermon/chs2381.pdf
[6] Simonetti, Manlio, p.184.