How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!

How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 

With these words, Jesus speaks of the endless love God has for his people.
The imagery of wings comes straight from the psalms and the prophets.
Nothing new is being said about God.
What is different is the context it is being said in and to.
What is different is the person who is saying it,
and what he is about to do to show how much God means it.


It is important to understand what Jesus is saying here.
It is likely he is quoting a lament, one which was likely uttered by God.
It sounds ancient, like a long lost refrain of lament,
one that has been repeated and repeated over centuries.
It aches with yearning, it hangs like a heavy cloud with sorrow.
When Jesus says it, the past times it references become tangible,
all the sorrow felt by God is present.
It has broken through into the now.
Now that it is present, now Jesus must act.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! 

God sends his prophets to turn his people back to him.
When the people err, God does not punish,
but gently sends someone to tell them how to get back with God

We read in the Second book of Chronicles that the people had become unfaithful, following the ways of other nations. But:

The LORD, the God of their ancestors, sent persistently to them by his messengers, because he had compassion on his people and on his dwelling place; but they kept mocking the messengers of God, despising his words,
and scoffing at his prophets, 

And the Book of Nehemiah:

Nevertheless they were disobedient and rebelled against you and cast your law behind their backs and killed your prophets, who had warned them in order to turn them back to you, and they committed great blasphemies. 

But even with such responses, such rejection of his ways, God does not give up.

Jesus follows his lament of what has been,
with a lament of what God,
what He has longed to do,
what he wishes he could.
What he will do, and do that very thing in Jerusalem

How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 

This is a remarkable image. Jesus uses feminine imagery to describe the love and unrelenting forgiveness of God.

as a hen gathers her brood under her wings

The Prophet Isaiah expressed God in feminine terms.

For the LORD has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.
Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. (49:13-16)

Both Jesus and Isaiah use feminine imagery when describing the overwhelming compassion of God for his people.

Imagery of God as a bird, with wings protecting is quite common in the Old Testament:

Throughout the psalms we hear this:

Let me abide in your tent forever, find refuge under the shelter of your wings. (61:4)

And the prophet Isaiah:

Like birds hovering overhead, so the LORD of hosts will protect Jerusalem; he will protect and deliver it, he will spare and rescue it. (31:5)

And in Deuteronomy:

As an eagle stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions (32:11-12)

Jesus uses these two images: that of the feminine, and that of a bird,
and he combines them into one of motherly love and protection.
The image of the wings stretching to gather rather shielding works when we think what will happen to Jesus when he finally goes to Jerusalem.

How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! 

But the wings will become arms.
They will be stretched to gather,
but they will be stretched and nailed onto a cross.
It is in this that he will gather his people.
It is in this that God will show his endless love.
Not in protection by wings, but in the outstretched arms of Jesus upon the cross. Not soaring high above, but lifted up from the earth,
drawing all men to himself, gathering all people to God.

It is in Jesus arms stretched in the ultimate sacrifice that God will show how a hen gathers her brood. It is in Jesus arms wide open upon the cross that God will show his unrelenting love for his people.