God’s All-Embracing Love
By The Rev. Stephen Elkins-Williams
God’s All-Embracing Love
“Go up to a land flowing with milk and honey; but I will not go up among you, or I would consume you on the way, for you are a stiff-necked people.”
The Lenten readings reveal to us the unfathomable depth and generosity of God’s love for human beings. In today’s reading from Exodus, God reiterates to Moses the promise of a new land for the Hebrew people “flowing with milk and honey.” God even goes further, declaring, “I will drive out the Canaanites, the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites,” in order for the Israelites to inhabit it. All this, even though God acknowledges that they “are a stiff-necked people.”
How surprising and unexpected! How Divine and un-humanlike! If we had made such a promise, we would revoke it in the face of the Israelites’ rebelliousness and lack of gratitude. “They do not deserve it! They must pay for what they have done.”
God is not like us. God not only pours out on us “infinitely more than we can ask or imagine”—or deserve(!), but God also persists in that lavish generosity even when we are stubborn and resistant! We simply cannot grasp the depth of the Divine love for what God has created.
This mystery is also reflected in the Gospel from this past Sunday. Jesus laments from the depth of his heart, “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!”
What a poignant comparison of the faithful, forgiving love of God: like a “broody hen” gathering her newly hatched chicks to her breast. How tenderly she nudges each little stray back to her bosom; how gently her wings enfold the baby chicks! Jesus chose this specific compassionate image to portray the Divine love. He could have chosen another simile: “How often would I have reined you in like a commander disciplines his rebellious soldiers,” or “like a teacher scolds her unresponsive students.” But these images would have fallen so short in communicating the depth and compassion of the Divine love!
When our now grown sons were in pre-school, my wife, Betsy, was teaching the three-year-old Church School class. The curriculum was based on the lectionary scripture readings, and the lesson for that Sunday suggested using a game. The children milled around the room like little chicks, pretending to peck and saying, “Cheep, cheep!” The teacher stood in the middle, holding a blanket about her shoulders and over her arms. When she opened her arms and said, “Cluck, cluck,” the chicks ran under her wings and pressed in on her as quickly and as closely as possible!
As adults, we too easily dismiss the tender image that Jesus intentionally chose. Experientially for these young children (whom Jesus said we must become like to enter the kingdom), the point was made that God’s love is as welcoming and as encompassing and as compelling as a mother hen welcoming and embracing and protecting her brood.
As we hear in the coming weeks the dramatic Lenten stories about God’s constant and unrequited love for us, let us allow God’s all-embracing love to enfold us and, in the words of Sunday’s collect, to enable us “to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of [God’s] Word, Jesus Christ.”
