Some times we over read metaphors, and in the current church this is one of them. This is alluded to as showing the feminine side of God, which must be emphasized, for the feminist heresy holds women either in a higher state or completely equal, as if masculine and feminine are fungible. Indeed, the current cutting edge of liberalism is queer theory, which finds our very anatomy inconvenient and demands that it is changed, with state subsidies.
But if we lose the difference between male and female we lose some of our humanity. Besides, the passage is one of grief, and it is more about the hardness of heart within Jerusalem, than the metaphor.
At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” And he said to them, “Go and tell that fox, ‘Behold, I cast out demons and perform cures today and tomorrow, and the third day I finish my course. Nevertheless, I must go on my way today and tomorrow and the day following, for it cannot be that a prophet should perish away from Jerusalem.’ O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! Behold, your house is forsaken. And I tell you, you will not see me until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!’”(Luke 13:31-35 ESV)
I am a bloke. I like girls, and I prefer the girls not be blokesses, dressed up in tramping gear in town, and with their butch haircuts. Not that I have anything against tramping gear. There is something about the feminine which is different, strange and wonderful: there is a role for women in the home and in the church and in the marketplace and there always has been one. But men are different: men have other duties. If you despise the masculine and say all must we equal you damage the feminine. And that is where we are in the Church.
In other words, they see men and women as wholly interchangeable, their differences as purposeless accidents that exist without reason, and any God-given hierarchy as something to be avoided. This mindset is otherwise known as egalitarianism. As was mentioned, this teaching came into Churchianity from secular feminism, who sees women as exactly equal to men in some cases and greater than men in others. It then found its voice in a religious expression as all feminist concepts do, from those who are desiring to wed their feminism to any form of Christian expression.
One of the things that happens in the more conservative churches — generally where men are elders, and the reformed faith is preached — is that there are more women, and they are happy. Well, happy-ish: another factor in such places is that there are a lot of children and they frequently have a few small ones around them. I don’t think this is completely churchian niceness. Moreover, these women are not stupid nor silent: over summer I heard a medical student talking about being with her husband in a mission station in her elective, and the local doctors left, leaving her dad and her to run the place: married (at 23 or so), pregnant, and with a tradesman as a husband who was fixing the hospital around them.
In the liberal churches the women put on the costumes of priests as if they are playing dress up. They distort scripture. There are less men, many single women, less children, and the gospel is smothered by other agendas.
It is not only Jerusalem that stops the prophets, but our ideologies. We tell many to be silent, and when we preach repentance we are told we are bigots. As if we forget the fundamental place of equality.
We are all equally damned in our sin. We all need Christ, for he is the only way to salvation. As Jesus took a threat from a ruler and said that the religious politics of Jerusalem killed prophets, in this day we have to be careful that we do not do the same.
For if we do this, our congregation will quench the spirit, and we will become another historical fossil, practising the forms of the faith but denying the power of it.
