Lent 2

We journey down many roads in a lifetime - some repeatedly. I don’t mean roads like Rt. 99 or I79. I’m speaking of the roads of life such as the "Road to Truth" and the "Road Of Longing". Many of these roads lead us through or even into the wilderness. Today, we take the Road of Longing.

We may long for an event - graduation, a homecoming, or, if we are in pain, even death. Most often though, we long for a person or people. We long for a loved one to come home from war, for the visit of a close friend, for someone who has rejected us.

Longing is painful. It pulls at our hearts. It robs us of sleep as we yearn for the presence of the other. It makes hours seem like days and days like months.

But, longing, especially as it relates to a person, does have a positive side. We can only long for someone we love. We can’t long for someone we dislike and with whom we want no relationship or someone toward whom we feel indifferent. We can only long for someone whose presence we desire, whose absence makes the world incomplete. Longing hurts, but only because the one longed for is so important to us that we make ourselves vulnerable to the pain of separation.

Jesus traveled through the wilderness, not just the wilderness of Sinai and not just for 40 days. Jesus traveled through the wilderness of birth through death on the cross because God had an excruciating and on-gong longing. He longed for reunion with His people - with all people.

God’s longing began with Adam and Eve deciding to reject God. Oh, I don’t think they meant initially to reject God. It was just that they were feeling grown up and desirous of autonomy. They wanted to claim their own power, their own lives. They had gotten to a point where they were taking God and their relationship with God for granted.

It didn’t seem necessary to live by God’s childish rules. It wasn’t necessary to consult God for ever little decision. It wasn’t good to have their knowledge limited anymore. It was time to strike out on their own. Only in striking out, they struck out. And when they struck out, the relationship with God was pushed aside.

Adam and Eve probably didn’t have the maturity to even realize it, but for God to be God He had to be their only God and a living presence in their lives. God didn’t intend to stultify them or keeping them from growing. He wanted them to develop as His children, but far better than human fathers, God knew best about that development and how to live it out.

Unfortunately, like rebellious teenagers, Adam and Eve acted impulsively. They had a chance to show how grown up they were and the devil convinced them that deciding for themselves and choosing contrary to God’s wishes would prove it. God then, had no choice. To maintain His integrity He had to send them off. They had broken the relationship and God would suffer consequences as surely as they.

Thus, began eons of God’s longing that culminates in His taking on human flesh to die at the hands of humans for the sake of humans. God’s love was so deep and His longing so strong that He would die to give the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve a chance to be reunited with Him.

This is what is behind Jesus’ words, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. How I have desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not."

God had tried so many times to draw His people back to Him. He had sent them men from their own people to carry His message, but they continued their rebellion and killed them.

Jesus paints this wonderful word picture of God’s yearning. He wanted to be like a mother bird who protects and nurtures her young by gathering them under herself. She then fluffs her feathers to hide them from all harm.

I’m reminded of an old urban legend. According to the story, there is a forest fire in a national park. When the fire is over a ranger is walking down a burned out trail when he sees a bird sitting on a nest on the ground. Wondering why she would have stayed there and burned to death, he gently lifts her charred body. There beneath her are her babies, still alive. They had been too immature to fly away with her so she gave her life to give them life.

What a perfect picture of Jesus, the Son of God. He loves God’s children so much that He chooses to die a terrible death to give us life.

We mustn’t get comfortable, thinking that this story is about those bad Jews, those terrible Pharisees and priests and scribes. Nor is this a road of longing that ended a bit over 2000 years ago. Nor was God longing only for people who openly disobeyed and rejected Him.

There is always something new to learn from Scripture and I learned something startling (and in a way obvious) in my reading of this story this week. God wasn’t yearning for gross sinners - thieves, adulterers, murderers only. He had taken this road of longing for the sake of good, believing people too - and perhaps primarily.

When Jesus speaks these words about Jerusalem, He is also referring to His contemporaries. He is speaking of and too people of His own faith. He is speaking to good observant Jews who are practicing their faith according to the tradition of the elders.

Furthermore, this is not about Jesus being rejected when He introduces a "New Religion". On the contrary, everything Jesus has said and done has been to fulfill the words of the prophets about the Messiah the Jews had longed for. The trouble was that their longing had become distorted. They had the wrong understanding of their religion and of the promised Messiah. Thus, Jesus longing will continue and end in His death.

We dare not view this story from a 21^st Century, Christian versus Jew perspective. Jesus’ lament must be heard by us as about us too. When we hear or read that Jesus said, "How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not", we need to recognize that Jesus’ anguished lament is directed at us and at our children.

Just as the religious people of Jesus’ religion, Judaism, rejected Him and through Him the very God they worshiped, we too sometimes reject Jesus by making choices like Adam and Eve made, like the Children of Israel in the wilderness made, like the people who killed the prophets made, and like the religious people of Jesus day made.

I think it could be a valuable - a life-giving - Lenten discipline to leave us at this point in our Lenten journey. I will leave it for each of us to reflect on how we - each of us - rejects God at times. We can have the courage to face this discipline and engage in it because we have heard how God in Jesus walked the Road of Longing all the way to the cross, so that we could be forgiven our rejections of God and could be drawn back to Him through faith in His Son.

Let us each walk our own Road of Longing for that intimate relationship with God that our ancestors lost and that Jesus has regained for us. Amen.