Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Blessed are the empty wombs


Daughters of Jerusalem,
do not weep for me,
but weep for yourselves
and for your children. For the days
are surely coming when they will say:
Blessed are the barren
and the wombs that never bore
and the breasts that never nursed!
Then they will begin to say to the mountains, Fall on us,
and to the hills, Cover us.
For if they do this
when the wood is green,
what will happen when it is dry?
Luke 23: 28-31, New Revised Standard Version

Yet Jesus, whose own cousin put an end to the covenant of children for the childless, lays a blessing on the barren. He blesses the barren as barren for the first time. He takes their curse away. But not in granting a child—that blessing is not to be given anymore. Jesus' blessing is a hard blessing; it is a divine blessing, for it kills as it makes alive. It does not answer the deepest longing of husbands and wives to make babies together. It does not even dignify the grief and honor the curse. It casts away the curse, and the cure to the curse, the one with the other, and instantiates a new blessing altogether. Blessed are the barren, blessed are the empty wombs, blessed are the dry breasts.




Some more very good words can be found in this piece by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson who is the pastor at St. John Lutheran Church in Trenton, New Jersey,

4 comments:

  1. I'm not sure I've the time or inclination to research that, but it *looks* fundamentally wrong at first consideration. I'm pretty sure Jesus was being prophetic about the destruction of Jerusalem in that passage. Maybe there are better words elsewhere in the link?

    ReplyDelete
  2. The author goes on to give that context for sure.

    Then she explores some broader implications of what he spoke.

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  3. http://www.myspace.com/nancypenner

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