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In 1888, Vincent Van Gogh’s friend Augustine Roulin sat for a portrait. She was an ordinary woman, the wife of Vincent’s friend, the postmaster in Arles, France, where they all lived at the time. In the portrait, Augustine sits in her green dress in front of a colorful wallpaper in a rocking chair. In her hand, she holds a rope. These days, parents have all sorts of tricks to help children sleep, but in those times, one well worn trick for a tired baby was to fasten a rope to a baby’s cradle. Then, the caretaker, or often mother, would sit in the rocking chair and rock. The rhythm of her own rocking would pull the rope and rock the baby’s cradle back and forth along with her. She likely sang as she rocked and Vincent titled his painting “La Berceuse” or “the Lullaby.”
In 1887, the year before Vincent painted his painting, a French fishing boat had been shipwrecked in the treacherous Islandic waters. Vincent would have known of this tragic wreck. He would have also been familiar with the custom of Islandic fishermen to affix a porcelain image of Jesus’ mother, Mary, to the wall of the hull inside the ship. Although his paintings are worth millions and hang in museums now, Vincent was mostly interested in creating art for the working class and originally, he intended for his painting, “La Berceuse” to be hung in the hull of a fishing boat.
In a letter to a friend, he wrote that his hope would be “that the sailors, when they looked at the painting, would feel the old sense of being rocked and remember their own lullabies.” While this might have been a reference to the comforting music that a mother may have sung, Vincent might have also been thinking of the motion of a boat rocking out on the open sea, like a cradle. In addition to a reference to Mary (like a portrait of a Madonna) in the hull of a boat, it seems that Vincent had another thing in mind.
Although he lived in a pretty Roman Catholic corner of France, he was the son of a Dutch Reformed pastor and had considered, at one point, a call to ministry. Vincent knew his bible well. After finishing the “La Berceuse,” he wrote to his brother, Theo, and explained precisely how he envisioned that the painting should be displayed. The woman, or mother, he wrote, should be in the middle. And flanking her on two sides in a triptych--like an altar piece in the front of a church--were to be simple paintings of flowers in vases. They would be almost like altar flowers.
So while “La Berceuse” or “the Lullaby” framed by these flowers would have certainly conjured up ideas of a Madonna or a picture of Mary, it also would have called up an image of the divine mother, God, Herself. It was a triptych of God’s maternal love, ever present and keeping watch by night, singing us to sleep.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus laments and cries out, “Oh, Jerusalem, how I’ve longed to gather you together under my wings,” like a mother hen would. Jesus chooses a most tender image of a mother pulling her chicks close to her in a warm embrace of protection and care.
Many of us here know mothers who embody this kind of tenderness. Maybe they were our own mothers. One of you who had a beloved relationship with her mother, mentioned this week that if you were under this motherly wing, you would have been the chick huddled up close to her warm body, another of you said you would have been the one peeking out from under the wing. Others of us might not have had mothers exactly like this but we have friends who mother in this way or we’re married to mothers who care for our children like this. It is an image of warmth and protection, and specifically, of God’s care and love for us that we don’t often pause on.
Back to Vincent’s painting of La Berceuse for a moment and that three piece triptych that he envisioned. Not surprisingly, Vincent had opinions on the kind of flowers that would flank the portrait in the middle. As I mentioned, a triptych piece was typically located in a place of prayer or as an altar piece in the front of a church. It was a place to ask for God’s intercession. A place to give thanks. For Vincent, the flowers that symbolized thanksgiving were sunflowers. Two simple vases filled with ordinary sunflowers were to sit on either side of the mother.
In the last few weeks, we have seen many images in our news of mothers giving comfort to their children, particularly in Ukraine, and even rocking them and singing lullabies. We have also seen images of mothers (and fathers), both there and in other places calling us to imagine a different way of existing in this pain-filled world.
The image of a middle aged matronly woman in a rocking chair is not the first thing that comes to me when I imagine God. But then, a fluffy cuddly chicken isn’t either.
Most of our world worships The Almighty. And whether or not I mean an all powerful, mighty God with this point is perhaps irrelevant because power, itself, rules. “what else,” writes Debbie Blue, “would make God, ‘God’ but power? “Isn’t that practically what ‘God’ means?—some magisterial, omnipotent, almighty protector?” That was certainly the kind of power that existed in the time of Jesus. That was most definitely the kind of power that Jesus’ disciples may have imagined when they thought of a messiah. Warhorse power. The monied power of Herod, the efficiency of his management, and all the benefits that went along with it as a society that produced. Thunder and lightening power. The cavalry and boots on the ground and threats that folks get in line kind of power. A way of ranking people, and making sure it’s clear which people are the most important. And which ones aren’t.
A mother, in this traditional arrangement, will never be that powerful—other than maybe a joke or two about her power regarding her dominion over the house or something like that. Her power would always been seen as less.
So what is Jesus doing calling himself a mother Hen? Or what are we to do with Van Gogh’s motherly God in a rocking chair?
God is never going to be about showing us how great and flashy and mighty they are. God’s thing is not really power. This is pretty clear from the beginning when God comes to us as a powerless baby. God is never going to play Herod’s power game and ride in on a warhorse. It’s just not going to happen. God’s power isn’t really anything like what we think of as power—it’s not the kind of power we crave. It’s fragile. It’s tender. It’s not the kind of power we have faith in. It just isn’t.
And maybe that is quite the point with this mother hen.
Jesus chooses a mother hen. She is not the stealth, muscular Lion of Judah with strong claws and sharp teeth. She eats bugs and grains. She is soft. She is vulnerable. If there is danger, she will gather her brood under her wings. If there is great danger, she will scatter them and puff up her feathers and create a distraction for whatever dangerous predator is coming at them. She has nothing but her body to defend her young. She has no sleek, strong muscles of a lion, no sharp teeth of a mother bear, no strong claws of a bird of prey, like an eagle. She will do anything to protect her chicks, even sacrifice herself in the face of danger.
And Vincent paints a middle aged woman in a rocking chair. Perhaps a grand-mother. Flanked by two vases of sun flowers. And there they rock, in the dark, dusty hull of the boat, back and forth. When Vincent saw sunflowers, he saw a symbol of gratitude. When I see them today, I think of peace. But not the false peace that Caesar put into place with his Pax Romana, where everything was allegedly hunky dory, except for the people crushed at the bottom.
No, I think of the kind of peace that kneels down and washes the feet of the person in front of them. I think of the kind of peace that flips the productivity switch off and lifts a face to the warm sun above or looks clear eyed into the eyes human being. I think of the kind of Jesus-peace that journeys off the beaten path hoping to run into that woman at the well or determined to find that sheep that no one wanted. This kind of peace points to a different kind of way. It leaves that way of power and grasping and violence off in left field. It calls us to a new way of being where care, shelter, tenderness, service and compassion are the very definition of strength.
Jesus, our mother hen. Of course she longs to gather all of us under her wings us here in Chicago and across the oceans in Kiev, and Moscow and also Mogadishu, and Koala Lumpur, and Chiapas.
This week, may you hold that truth of God’s tender and passionate love that draws you close under her wing. And Jesus, our mother hen, also calls us to step out of our patterns and familiar ways of looking at the world. To soften our interactions. To flip our expectations and imagine a new world.
May you challenge some of your own patterns and assumptions this week. May you consider what is powerful and may you flip some of your own expectations this week. For this world that Jesus tells us of, is on its’ way.
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