Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“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!”
NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, March 16, 2025
by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff
Main Idea: We cannot interpret our lives to discern our standing with God. We have all fallen short and have an equal need for God’s mercy, which is why Jesus has come.
“No, I’d love to hear it. I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying.” This was the reply given by the husband of the historian Kate Bowler when their neighbor said of her Stage IV cancer diagnosis that “everything happens for a reason.” Kate Bowler would ultimately write a book occasioned by this interaction, exploring the lies we tell ourselves around suffering and loss.
As we approach these hard words from Jesus, it seems like Jesus is affirming this lie. Why did all these people die? It was God’s judgment. But this is not what Jesus is getting at. Quite the opposite, he’s attacking the way this lie makes us comfortable, the better to oust it from our way of thinking. We have a propensity to read God’s judgment into the misfortune of others, because that means that our good fortune is not mere happenstance but a sign of God’s pleasure. Even when we are suffering, we like the idea that our pain is the product of our own shortcomings, because that means we can escape it if we only amend our way of living.
Seen in this light, Jesus’s words are those of a physician performing surgery to treat an infection: painful, but necessary for our healing. When he speaks of the judgment of God, his point is that none of them should be breathing a sigh of relief. They were not spared because they were any better, nor can they expect to be spared from a similar fate. For, “unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
What results is a new narrative to the story of our wellbeing, one that balances the severity of God’s judgment with the possibility of mercy. Like the fig tree, we have been given another year, time to mend our ways and reconcile, lest the axe strike home. The good news is that God has a clear preference how things will go, as Jesus reveals in his lament over the city. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,” Jesus cries. Here we see the heart of God and that holds only one desire: to see us gathered close, protected from the harm we do one another, sheltered under her wings. Today we might not be willing to repent and roost with God, but the deadline has been extended. Ultimately, God in Christ will extend his arms on the cross, enduring the greatest pain to ensure to embrace a world that has rejected him, becoming its salvation. So too, we know that it will only be by God’s grace that we find ourselves restored. The love of God is the only reason why the cross happens, and that is our one and lasting hope.
