Biblion Bible Commentary
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How Often I Would Have Gathered You
Matthew 23:37-39
37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not! · WEB
The woes end in grief, in the voice of a bird trying to shelter its young.
"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her!" Matthew 23:37.
The name is spoken twice, which in Hebrew is how you address someone you love and are about to lose. Everything in the chapter has been building to a verdict, and what arrives instead is grief.
"How often I would have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!"
The image is domestic and it is a picture of danger. A hen spreads her wings when something is coming, and the chicks that come in survive because she takes it instead of them. Scripture uses the shelter of God's wings often Psalms 91:4 Ruth 2:12, and the version here is the humblest bird available.
How often is the phrase to sit with. It says this was not one offer at the end of one week; there was a long history of it, most of which this book does not record. And the last three words carry the whole tragedy: you would not. Not could not. The gathering failed on a refusal, and nothing in the sentence suggests the willingness was ever on the other side.
"Behold, your house is left to you desolate" Matthew 23:38. Your house — not my Father's house, which is what he called it when he cleared it three days earlier Matthew 21:13. The building is handed back to its tenants, and what makes it desolate is who has left it. He walks out of the temple in the next verse and does not return.
"You will not see me from now on, until you say, 'Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!'" Matthew 23:39.
The last word of the woes is a condition, and conditions can be met. The words he quotes are the ones shouted at the gate on Sunday Matthew 21:9, from the psalm sung to greet a pilgrim coming up to the feast. The sentence sets a term on the absence rather than closing it, and it leaves the city holding the line it will need to say.
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