How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!

 "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.  Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with then in the blood of the prophets.'  Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.  Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt.  Serpents, brood of vipers!  How can you escape the condemnation of hell?  Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes:  some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.  Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!  See!  Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'"

- Matthew 23:27-39

In our current readings, Jesus is in Jerusalem, and it is Holy Week.  He has made His Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem, cleansed the temple, and engaged in confrontation, questioning, and testing by the various parties of the  leadership, with His own challenging responses.  (See the readings from Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.)  In Monday's reading, Jesus began His final public sermon, a great indictment of the practices of the leadership.  In yesterday's reading, He continued:   "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you shut up the kingdom against men; for you neither go in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in.  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you devour widows' houses, and for a pretense make long prayers.  Therefore you will receive greater condemnation.  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you travel land and sea to win one proselyte, and when he is won, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.  Woe to you, blind guides, who say, 'Whoever swears by the temple, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the temple, he is obliged to perform it.'  Fools and blind!  For which is greater, the gold or the temple that sanctifies the gold?  And, 'Whoever swears by the altar, it is nothing; but whoever swears by the gift that is on it, he is obliged to perform it.'   Fools and blind!  For which is greater, the gift or the altar that sanctifies the gift?  Therefore he who swears by the altar, swears by it and by all things on it.  He who swears by the temple, swears by it and by Him who dwells on it.  And he who swears by heaven, swears by the throne of God and by Him who sits on it.  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law:  justice and mercy and faith.  These you ought to have done, without leaving the others undone.  Blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!  Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence.  Blind Pharisee, first cleanse the inside of the cup and dish, that the outside of them may be clean also."

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you are like whitewashed tombs which indeed appear beautiful outwardly, but inside are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness.  Even so you also outwardly appear righteous to men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness."  Again, Jesus uses vivid imagery to express the idea -- and the true spiritual condition -- of their religious hypocrisy.  We would do well to remember that Jesus is the One who has come to give us life in abundance.  He is the light of the world, and that light is the life of the world.  It is evil that is death, and the internal darkness of tombs is full of death.

"Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  Because you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and say, 'If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with then in the blood of the prophets.'  Therefore you are witnesses against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.  Fill up, then, the measure of your fathers' guilt.  Serpents, brood of vipers!  How can you escape the condemnation of hell?  Therefore, indeed, I send you prophets, wise men, and scribes:  some of them you will kill and crucify, and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city, that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.  Assuredly, I say to you, all these things will come upon this generation."  Here is another measure of hypocrisy:  those who have harmed the servants who have come in the name of the Lord, calling God's people back to God, are their "fathers."  The present day leadership builds tombs to the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous, and declares they would not have responded as did their fathers.  But Jesus says they are identical and do the same, and thereby witness against themselves.  By doing what they do (and will do to him) they also inherit the guilt of the same acts.  See Jesus' parable of the Wicked Vinedressers in Wednesday's reading for a deliberate illustration of what He is alluding to here.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!  How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!  See!  Your house is left to you desolate; for I say to you, you shall see Me no more till you say, 'Blessed is He who comes in the name of the LORD!'"  My study bible says here that God's deepest desire is the reconciliation of His people, yet most do not want Him.  The house left desolate refers to the temple and also to the nation (of which the temple is great symbol and representative), as a house also has the meaning of "family" or "tribe" (Psalm 115:12, 135:19).

Jesus' repeated use of the word "woe" in this final public sermon is one that is important for us to understand in its context.  Hilary of Poitiers has commented that "woe" is a voice of sorrowing. For this reason Jesus says earlier in the sermon that the Pharisees and scribes close the kingdom of heaven, because they hide in the law the consolation of His truth.  They lost sight of the advent of the Messiah expected by the prophets.  St. Hilary writes, "Through deceptive teachings, they do not allow others to go to heaven either. They do not adorn the way of eternity" (On Matthew 24.3).  That woe is a voice of sorrowing is very pertinent and evident in today's reading, as we read Jesus' clear words of lamentation over Jerusalem.  Jesus' words give us this clear understanding, when He says, "How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!"   The maternal image of the hen gathering her chicks is the image of Christ as He pronounces woe, even as He calls Jerusalem "the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her."    All the images given here are maternal and caring.  He even calls Jerusalem "her," giving us not just the language of mother and home, but also of the Bride.  This final summing up of woes regarding the leadership isn't one of condemning anger, but of sorrowful lament.  There may be a kind of righteous anger or indignation at the practices that harm the people, especially the poorest and the helpless who are led astray and preyed upon, but there is sorrow in the lament of where it all leads, and the result these choices will produce.  All of the practices that Jesus condemns are those of turning astray from God and from the prophets and servants repeatedly sent to call them back to God and to God's ways.  The last and final one sent is Christ -- the Son Himself (see again the parable of the Wicked Vinedressers in Wednesday's reading).  Christ's great lament over His beloved, the Bride Jerusalem, becomes a teaching for all of us and for the whole world.  This isn't just about one people, but it is about all of us who call ourselves children by adoption, who desire also to be a part of God's people by following Christ.  The Church falls under the same "rule" that Jesus espouses here.  Hypocrisy that hides greed and exploitation will also bring woe and lamentation, a sad state.  It hides death and darkness inside of a whitewashed exterior, when we are called to come to the One who gives life to the world.  If we look around us in our world, we can see the effects of evil acts.  There is hypocrisy to go around.  Those who profess to love Christ cannot hide behind a false exterior kind of morality or "legality" while the things they do only bring more death and suffering into the world, especially to those who are powerless.  Let us remember His words of lamentation, and that they apply to us today as they did on that day when Jesus said them in the temple in Jerusalem a generation before its destruction in 70 A.D. at the siege of Jerusalem.  He is still the mother hen who wishes to gather her chicks under her wings, if we are but willing to come.