A Theological Meditation by Brother Aaron — April 2026
Personal Back Story
The car that carried our precious cargo drove away from our campsite on a Tuesday evening, and I stood in the gravel watching the taillights disappear through the trees. My son-in-law was driving, my daughter in the passenger’s seat. Their two children—our grandchildren, seven and nine—were buckled into the back seat, waving through the rear window until the road curved and they were gone. They had spent the week with us. My wife and I had filled those days the way grandparents do—exploring trails behind the campground, sitting under the stars at night with a glowing fire between us and talking about everything and nothing all at once, reading scripture stories before bedtime by lantern light, playing games of all sorts, laughter and hugs, and generally spoiling them senseless. Simple things. The things that get remembered.
I walked back to our rig—an RV that has been our home for years now, parked in whatever corner of the country the Lord has led us to—and found my wife sitting in her soft chair with a lost look in her eye. She had been crying. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind, where the tears come because the house is suddenly too still and the people you love most in the world are driving away from you into a future you cannot control.
We talked for a long time that night. The conversation moved the way these conversations do—from the temporal to the eternal and back again.
We talked about our granddaughter’s cute little outfits and whether she needs a new pair of shoes. We talked about our grandson’s tender heart and whether he will be prepared to face the social maze of middle school. We talked about screen time and sugar and bedtimes and the thousand small decisions that shape a child’s character before the child is old enough to know it is being shaped.
And then, as it always does when you love your grandchildren enough to weep over them, the conversation turned to the hardest question: how much of this should we even influence?
We are not their parents. Their parents are already wonderful, but are still learning. They are young and tired and doing their best in a world that offers very little help and an enormous amount of competing noise and values. We taught our own children as well as we knew how, and now those children are teaching theirs, and the methods are not always what we would personally choose, and the priorities are not always what we would set, and the very big world around them is not the world we raised our children in. It is faster and louder and more confusing, and the dangers are less visible and more pervasive. And we—Nana and Papa—are grandparents who travel the country in an RV, who see our grandchildren in concentrated bursts of love and then watch them drive away too often for our comfort.
So we sat in the quiet spring evening of our wooded campsite that Tuesday night. I said something to her that surprised me even as I said it. I told her that what we were feeling—this ache, this longing to gather them closer, this grief at not being able to protect them from every hard lesson waiting for them in the years ahead—was the smallest possible echo of something God feels for every one of His children, all the time, across the entire sweep of human history. And as I said it, the Spirit bore witness to me with a force I have learned, over sixty years of living, not to ignore.
The words of Christ came into my mind as clearly as if I were reading them from the page:
I have read that verse hundreds of times. I have taught it. I have preached it at Church, in virtual reality gatherings, and across picnic tables in campgrounds across America. But I had never felt it the way I felt it that night—sitting across from my wife in a quiet RV, watching her grieve because our grandchildren were driving away into a world we cannot make safe for them.
That night became the beginning of this study.
The Hen Who Would Have Gathered
There is something deliberately startling about the image Jesus chose. He did not compare Himself to an eagle—the great bird of Deuteronomy 32, the one who stirs up her nest and bears her young on her wings with sovereign power. He did not compare Himself to a lion, which is the image the prophets used when they wanted to convey the terrifying majesty of God. He chose a hen. A farmyard mother bird. An animal so common, so unmajestic, so entirely ordinary that you could walk past one a hundred times and never think of God in comparison.
But that is the point. The hen does not dominate her chicks. She does not herd them with talons or scatter their enemies with a roar. She calls. She clucks in a voice her chicks were designed to recognize, and when they come—if they come—she spreads her wings and covers them with her own body. She gives warmth. She gives shelter. She positions herself between her young and whatever danger is approaching. And if the chicks will not come, she keeps calling. She does not stop. But she does not chase them down and force them under her wings. She cannot gather what will not be gathered.
I want you to sit with that image for a moment. The God of the universe—the Being who spoke the worlds into existence, who holds the stars in their courses, who parted the Red Sea and raised the dead—compares Himself to a hen. Not to display His power. To explain His love. And more than His love—to display the shape of His love, which is invitational, which is warm, which is near, and which can be refused, but never ends.
That refusal is the knife’s edge of the entire passage: “and ye would not.”
Three words. In the Greek, it is the aorist active indicative of thelō—“you willed not,” “you chose not.” Not “you could not.” Not “you were prevented.” You chose. You exercised the very gift of moral agency that I fought to preserve before the foundation of the world, and you used it to walk the other direction.
This is not the voice of a God who has failed. This is the voice of a God who has succeeded at something so costly that it breaks His own heart. He created beings free enough to reject Him. And they did.
Past, Present, Future
The Gospel of Matthew gives us the lament in a single devastating verse. But the Book of Mormon—one of the great gifts of the Restoration—gives us something more. In 3 Nephi 10:4–6, the resurrected Christ speaks to the survivors of catastrophic destruction in the Americas, and He expands the hen metaphor across three tenses that transform it from a moment of grief into a covenant spanning all of history:
Read those three verses slowly. They are three sentences, and they contain the entire story of God’s relationship with His children.
The first is a statement of fact. I have gathered you. Past tense. Accomplished. God has acted. He has nourished. He has sheltered. There is a history of realized love—a track record of faithfulness that no amount of human unfaithfulness can erase. Every covenant kept, every prophet sent, every miracle performed, every quiet prompting of the Spirit in a restless heart at three in the morning—all of it is contained in that “have gathered.”
The second is a statement of grief. I would have gathered you—and ye would not. This is the lament. The longing that cannot be fulfilled because the ones you love have chosen a different direction and must live their own lives. Not because you stopped calling. Not because your wings were not open. But because they are free to come and to go.
The third is a statement of hope. I will gather you—if ye will repent and return. The covenant is not closed. The wings are still open. The offer stands. But it is conditional—not on God’s willingness, which is assured, but on ours.
The Most Powerful Creative Act
If you have read very many of my writings found at wordsofplainness.org, then you know that Latter-day Saints believe in a pre-mortal existence—a life before this life, in which we lived as spirit children of God and in His presence. You know that we believe a council was held before the foundation of the world, and that two plans were proposed. One plan preserved moral agency—the power of God’s children to choose for themselves—at the cost of inevitable suffering, sin, and loss. The other plan destroyed agency in exchange for guaranteed salvation: every soul brought home, no one lost, no one allowed to fail. The first plan required a Savior. The second required a dictator.
God the Father chose the plan that preserved freedom. He chose it knowing the cost. He chose it knowing that the freedom He was granting would be used by some of His children to reject Him, to hurt one another, to tear themselves apart in ways that would make Him weep. God chose to respect agency because He understood something that I felt as a father and now more deeply as a grandfather: that you cannot produce character by compulsion. You can produce compliance. You can produce obedience. But you cannot produce wisdom, or courage, or compassion, or faith—not by forcing them. These things can only be grown on the grounds of genuine choice.
The Beatitudes prove it. You cannot be poor in spirit if your spirit is not free to be proud. You cannot hunger and thirst after righteousness if righteousness is forced upon you. You cannot be a peacemaker if conflict is prevented by compulsion. Every virtue Christ described in the Sermon on the Mount requires agency and opposition. Remove these conditions and you do not get holiness. You get machinery.
This is what I was trying to say to my wife that night at the campsite, though I did not have the words for it yet. The ache we felt—the longing to protect our grandchildren from every hard lesson—was real, and it was right, and it was an echo of something divine. But the divine version of that ache includes a wisdom that the human version is still learning: that the hard lessons are not a flaw in the plan. They are the plan. Not because God is cruel. Because He is wise. Because this life is an educational training ground for His spirit children. Because He knows that the only way to produce a being capable of becoming like Him is to give that being the power to choose—and then to stand back, with wings open, and wait.
That standing back is neither passive nor unfeeling. It is the hardest thing a parent can do, and the greatest.
The God Who Weeps
There is an old tradition in Christian theology—borrowed from Greek philosophy, refined through centuries of creedal debate—that says God cannot suffer. The technical term is divine impassibility. The argument runs like this: God is perfect. Perfection implies changelessness. If God could be affected by external events—if He could be hurt by His children’s choices, if He could grieve—then He would be dependent on His creation for His emotional state, and a dependent God is not a perfect God. Therefore, God does not grieve. Whatever Jesus expressed in Matthew 23:37, it must have been a property of His human nature only, or a figure of speech designed to teach us something about sin’s consequences without implying that the Almighty actually felt the loss.
I understand the logic. I reject the conclusion.
I reject it not because I have a better philosophical argument—though I do think the argument is mortally flawed—but because I have a better source. In the book of Moses, one of the revealed scriptures of the Restoration, the prophet Enoch sees a vision of God looking upon the wickedness of His children. And God weeps. Enoch is astonished. He asks the question that every human heart asks when confronted with a grieving God: “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?” (Moses 7:29). The question is genuine. Enoch expected a God who was above this—beyond it, untouched by it. He did not expect tears.
God’s answer is devastating in its simplicity. He weeps because His children are “without affection” and “hate their own blood” (Moses 7:33). He weeps because He gave them commandments and they would not obey, as He also did in mortal flesh as Jesus Christ in Luke 19. He weeps because the suffering they are enduring—the suffering they are inflicting on each other—is the fruit of the very freedom He granted them. And He cannot take the freedom back without destroying the purpose for which He created them.
This is not a God who is diminished by grief. This is a God whose capacity to grieve is a higher dimension of His perfection. A God who could watch His children destroy themselves and feel nothing would not be more perfect. He would be less. He would be unworthy of our trust. He would be less than any human mother who has ever wept over a wayward child. He would be less than my wife, sitting in the evening wilderness with quiet tears. The God of Moses 7 is not the “Unmoved Mover” of Aristotle. He is the Most Moved Mover—a God whose love makes Him vulnerable to the very beings He created in His image. This is the courage and wisdom of God in the Highest, who is also our tender and faithful Parent.
The Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel also believed this. He argued that the prophets of the Hebrew Bible consistently presented a God of divine pathos—a God who is “deeply affected” by human actions, who enters into the drama of history not as a detached observer but as a participant whose heart is on the line. Heschel saw what the creeds could not accommodate: that the infinite concern of a holy God is not a weakness to be explained away but the very center of His character.
The Restoration confirms Heschel’s insight by direct revelation. No council of bishops made this determination. No vote was taken on a man-made creed. God spoke, He is His own interpreter, and He said: I weep. That settles the question—not by human logic, but by divine self-disclosure.
And if God weeps, then the lament over Jerusalem is not a figure of speech. It is the most transparent moment of divine emotion in all of scripture. It is God telling us what it costs to be the kind of eternal Parent He is.
How the World Reads This Text
I need to pause here to address something that matters for anyone who takes this study seriously. I have participated in many interfaith conversations where someone cited a creed or verse at me as though this would be the final settlement of all issues.
I carefully avoid contention, but questions of hermeneutics matter to me personally. Such inquiries set aside biases and inherited frameworks in an attempt to understand, interpret, and apply the meaning of a scriptural text rather than just stating facts. I like to consider historical context, authorial intent, and the believer’s perspectives in the hope of bridging ancient scripture and modern applications.
Throughout the history of Christianity, scholars, bishops, and theologians have read Matthew 23:37 and arrived at various conclusions shaped by the best philosophical tools they had available. This is not a criticism. It is a fact. Human beings interpret scripture through the theological categories they possess, and for most of Christian history, the available categories were borrowed from Greek philosophy—categories like substance, essence, nature, person, and impassibility. These categories produced the great ecumenical creeds—Nicaea, Constantinople, Chalcedon—and those creeds defended genuine biblical truths, including the full deity of Christ, against heresies that would have gutted the gospel. The councils were human processes. The truths they defended were real.
But human processes have human limits. When the councils adopted the Aristotelian assumption that perfection implies impassibility, they imported a philosophical commitment that sits in tension with the scriptural witness. The psalmist says God is angry with the wicked every day (Psalm 7:11). Hosea says God’s heart is “overturned within Him” and His “compassion grows warm and tender” (Hosea 11:8). Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus (John 11:35). And in Moses 7, God weeps over the wickedness of the world. In Luke 19, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem itself. If the creeds say God cannot be affected, and scripture says God weeps, which authority prevails?
The Restoration answers that question without ambiguity: scripture prevails, and especially revealed scripture—the kind that comes not from human deliberation but from the voice of God through a living prophet. This does not mean that the creedal traditions are worthless. It means they are partial. They saw genuine truths through a glass darkly. The Restoration provides additional light—not to destroy what the councils built, but to correct where they overreached and to fill in what they could not see.
I call this the posture of reframing and fulfillment. The Restoration does not discard the insights of two thousand years of Christian thought. It receives them with gratitude, engages them honestly, and then brings to bear a category of evidence that no human tradition could generate on its own: new revelation from the Living God to prophets whom He chose for His own reasons. The pre-mortal council, the weeping God of Enoch, the threefold temporal structure of 3 Nephi 10—these are not the conclusions of a better committee. They are the words of the Lord. And where they illuminate what the councils could not see, the Restoration reader follows the light of God.
I say this not to argue with my brothers and sisters in other Christian traditions. I say it because anyone reading this study deserves to know where I stand and why. I believe the hen’s lament is the most transparent window into the heart of God in all of scripture. I believe it because four separate lines of scholarly research converge on that conclusion. But I also believe it because the Restoration provides the cosmic context—the pre-mortal agency, the weeping God, the threefold covenant—that makes the conclusion not merely plausible but necessary. Without that context, the lament is a beautiful but puzzling moment of prophetic grief. With it, the lament is a revelation of the deepest truth about who God is.
What the Hen Teaches Every Parent
I am a retired science teacher. I spent decades in classrooms, watching thousands of children learn—and watching some of them refuse to learn. I know what it feels like to offer knowledge and have it rejected. I know what it feels like to see a student make a choice that you know will lead to pain, and to hold your tongue because you also know that the pain is the lesson. Teaching taught me more about God’s parenting than any sermon I ever heard.
But grandparenting has taught me more than teaching. When your grandchildren are in your care, you are fully responsible but only temporarily. They are yours for a week, a weekend, a holiday. You pour everything you have into them—your love, your time, your faith, your prayers—and then you hand them back to their parents and say goodbye with mingled smiles and tears. As they drive away, you stand in the gravel watching the taillights, and you think: Did I give them enough? Will it hold?
The hen metaphor speaks directly to this experience. Not because grandparents are all like hens. Because God is. And because the dynamic He describes—the longing to gather, the refusal to compel, the grief when the chicks will not come—is the dynamic of every relationship built on love and freedom. It is the dynamic of parenting. It is the dynamic of teaching. It is the dynamic of ministry. It is the dynamic of every friendship, every marriage, every pastoral encounter where one soul reaches for another and the other turns away.
The hen metaphor implicitly warns against three distortions of love that I have seen destroy relationships and families:
The first is COERCION—the parent who forces the child under the wings. In theological terms, this is Satan’s plan: total control, no risk, no agency. In parenting terms, it is the authoritarian household where obedience is demanded without understanding and compliance is valued above character. Children raised this way may look gathered, but they have not chosen to come. They are safe on the outside and resentful on the inside.
But the hen does not force.
The second is ABSENCE—the parent who respects the child’s freedom so completely that the parent never governs nor leads at all. In theological terms, this is deism: a God who created the world and then withdrew. In parenting terms, it is neglect dressed up as respect for autonomy.
But the hen is not absent.
She calls. She calls repeatedly. “How often” implies a lifetime of invitation. The divine parent sends prophets, establishes covenants, provides scripture, offers ordinances, and finally comes Himself. There is nothing passive about agency-respecting love. It is the most aggressive, persistent, creative form of love there is, combined with the respect for the agency of the child.
The third is RESCUE—the parent who intervenes every time the child faces a consequence. In theological terms, this is the false gospel that says grace means never having to suffer. But the Plan of Salvation includes suffering by design: “It must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11). “All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good” (D&C 122:7).
The hen grieves when the chicks refuse to come. But she does not chase them down and absorb every consequence on their behalf. As parents and grandparents, we struggle with this urge often but recognize that it would weaken our chicks to remove accountability and natural consequences.
Is there a rescue? Yes, but not the kind that removes choice. The Atonement of Jesus Christ absorbs consequences; it does not abolish them. This is reflected in Christ’s statement that He did not come to destroy the Law of Justice but to fulfill it with the Law of Mercy. Salvation operates on different terms because God’s parental power and perfection is beyond our own. Still, the Atonement does not prevent consequences. It provides a way through them.
What, then, does the hen teach? She teaches that the highest form of love is the love that holds its power in check. She teaches that wisdom sometimes looks like grief. She teaches that the mark of a perfect parent is not a perfect outcome but a perfect posture—wings open, voice calling, body positioned between the danger and the child, and the child still free to run the other direction.
My wife and I are learning this. We are learning it the hard way, the same way every parent and grandparent learns it—by living it, night after night, in the quiet of a campsite where some of the people we love most have driven away.
Wings of the Cherubim
The farmyard symbolism of hen’s wings also reminds me of the symbolic wings of angels that were crafted from gold and placed on the lid of the Ark of the Covenant in ancient Israel.
In Hebrew, the word for “mercy seat”—the gold lid placed atop the Ark of the Covenant—is kapporeth. It derives from a root word that means “to cover sins,” “to atone.” The mercy seat was not just a lid. It was a place of atonement—the single most sacred object in all of Israelite worship. The Lord gave the design to His prophet: two cherubim of hammered gold, placed at each end, with their wings spread above, overshadowing the mercy seat (Exodus 25:18–20). The outstretched wings of the cherubim formed a canopy—a covering—over the place where blood was applied and sins were wiped away.
The Hebrew word for “wings” in that passage, kĕnāpîm, is the same word used throughout the Psalms when the writers speak of finding refuge “under God’s wings”—Psalm 17:8, Psalm 36:7, Psalm 57:1, Psalm 61:4, Psalm 63:7, Psalm 91:4. When the psalmist cries out, “Under his wings you will find refuge,” the immediate physical referent in Israelite worship was not an abstract metaphor. It was a real place: the Holy of Holies, where God dwelt between the cherubim, above the mercy seat, between the outstretched wings. To take refuge under God’s wings was to enter the most sacred space in all the earth—the place where God spoke (Exodus 25:22), where sins were covered (Leviticus 16:14–15), and where the high priest came face to face with the living God.
Now read Jesus’ words again: “I would have gathered you under my wings.”
He is not borrowing a nature metaphor. He is making a claim about who He is. He is saying: I am the mercy seat. I am the place where God meets His people. I am the covering of sins. The space between my wings is the Holy of Holies—and it is open to anyone who will come.
The Jewish scholar Avivah Zornberg offers a breathtaking insight about this space. She observes that unlike pagan temples, which placed a solid idol at the center of the shrine, the Israelite tabernacle placed nothing between the cherubim’s wings. The heart of the tabernacle was an empty space—a tokh, an interior hollow—through which God spoke. The wings did not contain God. They framed the space where God was encountered. The cherubim’s gaze, directed downward and toward each other from opposite ends of the mercy seat, formed not a throne of power but a posture of attentive intimacy. God was present not as an object to be gazed upon but as a voice to be heard in the silence between the wings.
Apply this to the hen metaphor.
When the chicks come under the hen’s wings, they enter a tokh—a space formed by the hen’s own body and wings. That space is warm. It is sheltered. It is intimate. And it is the place where the chick hears the hen’s heartbeat—the closest possible proximity to the one who gave it life. The chick who refuses to come is not merely missing out on physical safety. The chick is missing out on encounter—the experience of being near enough to the one who loves you to hear the beating of her heart.
For those of us in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who worship in temples, this connection carries a weight that I suspect the Lord intended. The hen metaphor, encountered early in the story of Christ’s mortal ministry, foreshadows the temple experience that awaits every soul who follows the covenant path to its fullness. The wings of the hen are the wings of the cherubim. The shelter of the metaphor is the shelter of the ordinance. The space between the wings—the space of encounter, of atonement, of the divine voice—is the space that every temple worshiper enters when they cross the threshold into the house of the Lord. And the God who calls from between the wings of the mercy seat is the same God who stood before the people of 3 Nephi and said, “Behold, I am Jesus Christ” (3 Nephi 11:10)—and the same God who awaits every searching soul in the holiest room of His restored temples.
The Hen Who Entered the Fire
There is one more dimension of this metaphor that I need to address, and it is the one that brings everything together.
The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright suggested that the hen metaphor evokes the image of a barnyard fire—a mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings as the flames sweep through, sheltering them with her own body. When the fire passes, the hen is found dead—incinerated—but the chicks beneath her wings are alive.
I do not know whether Jesus had this specific image in mind. But I know this: the logic of the metaphor leads inevitably to the Cross. If the hen will not force her chicks under her wings, and the chicks will not come, and the fire is real—the fire of consequence, the fire of justice, the fire that comes from living in a world where agency means that choices matter and suffering is real—then what does the hen do?
She enters the fire.
She does not override the chicks’ freedom. She does not drag them to safety. But she will not stand at a distance while the fire consumes them. She goes to where they are. She enters their darkness. She takes the fire upon her own body. And she offers, from within the flames, a shelter they can still choose.
That is Gethsemane. That is Golgotha. That is the Atonement of Jesus Christ.
The restraint of the lament and the sacrifice of the Cross are two expressions of the same divine character. A God who will not compel must therefore suffer. Because He will not force His children to come under His wings, He must go to them—into their suffering, into their sin, into the furthest consequences of their misuse of the freedom He gave them—and offer, from within that suffering, a way home. The gathering that Israel would not accept voluntarily, Christ accomplished vicariously. The hen who could not force her chicks to safety chose instead to descend into the fire and die so that the chicks who would gather might live.
This is the Atonement in avian miniature. And it is the answer to the question that every parent, every grandparent, every teacher, every pastor eventually asks: What do you do when the person you love will not come? You go to them. Not to override their choice. Not to remove the consequences. But to be with them, to lift the hands of the weary, to extend love and kindness undeserved—to help them bear what they cannot bear alone—and to keep the way home open, even from inside the fire.
Wings Still Open
I began this study sitting in a quiet campsite, watching taillights disappear through the trees. I end it standing before a truth that is larger than I can fully articulate—a truth about the nature of God that touches everything I believe about parenthood, about agency, about suffering, about the Atonement of Jesus Christ, and about the temples—both kinds of temples: dedicated buildings where we worship and our dedicated hearts where His Spirit dwells. The hen metaphor is not one teaching among many. It is a nexus—a place where the entire gospel converges into a single image of aching, self-restrained, inexhaustible love.
The hen has gathered. The hen would have gathered more. The hen will gather still—as many as will hearken to her voice and humble themselves and call upon her in mighty prayer. The wings are still open. The call still sounds. The fire is real and the shelter is real and the choice is ours.
I do not know what will happen with my grandchildren. I do not know what hard lessons are waiting for them, or whether the seeds of faith we have tried to plant in their hearts will take root in soil we cannot tend. I do not know whether the taillights I watched disappear into the Kentucky evening will lead them toward Christ or away from Him. What I know is that their grandfather will keep calling, and their grandmother will keep praying, and the God who wept over Jerusalem and over the cities of the Nephites and over all the children who have ever run from the sound of His voice—that God will keep His wings open for as long as there is a soul willing to come unto Him.
That is the promise of the lament. Not that every chick will come. But that the hen will never stop calling. This offers me comfort in all the roles I play in this life: son, brother, husband, parent, grandparent, and minister.
In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.