Winter had been unusually long but I just had to get out in the bush. It was a case of maintaining what little sanity I had left, not to mention Linda’s. So on the last day of March, with the bush roads still wearing some of the snow winter had left behind and in many places still choked with healthy drifts, I set off alone in search of a male bear for our larder. I knew no bear in its right mind would be out of bed yet but sanity could not wait. This was a scouting journey.
I had not gone far on this early spring day, dawdling along as I walked, pushing back the snow and scouting for future spring rambling and hunting possibilities. There was still lots of snow all around, especially under the trees. And that’s when I ran into a small young mother bear with three yearling cubs, all carbon copies of each other. They were close, only about 20 metres away, when I bumped into them. I was completely surprised. There was no way they should have been out of bed yet; it was far too early and there was still far too much snow. Whilst I was still caught in my best bear defense — something outdoor writer and humorist Patrick McManus calls a “running stationary panic” — and before I could muster a hasty retreat of any kind, the mother bear barked at the three cubs, swatted the last one in line on the rump and all three scrambled up a big Douglas fir tree that was right next to them. The tree had a girth of about two feet and was easily 150 feet tall. The three cubs scampered right to the top.
And then the mother bear stood up on her hind legs and, leaning against the tree with one front arm, she looked me square in the eye. I thought to myself, “Well here we go. I am about to get chased up my own tree by an angry mother bear. I hope she foregoes the swat to the rump in my case.”
But rather than looking at me with the usual ferocity of a mother bear with cubs, she had this tired, kind of wrung out look that as near as said, “You have no idea what I have to endure with these three rampaging teenagers of mine.” I halted my stationary panic and began to chuckle at her. She looked like a haggard mother who had been trying desperately to sleep in on a Saturday morning in spite of a set of early-rising rambunctious triplets. I said to her, “Well girl, it’s real early for you to be out of bed, there is far too much snow on the ground yet. Why don’t you just amble off and leave your kids up that tree and find a place to snooze.”
And that’s exactly what she did. She dropped to the ground onto all fours, and ambled off into a thicket of immature fir trees. She was soon out of sight but I could imagine her looking for a bed of nice pine grass to sleep in and curling up with a great huge sigh. The cubs would stay up the tree until she told them to come down. But that’s when all hell broke loose up in the Douglas fir high-rise. Seeing mama take off and leave was too much. Acting completely atypically, and bawling like three banshees, the cubs came down the 150-foot fir tree like a bunch of firefighters sliding down a greased brass pole on their way to a five-alarm blaze. They hit the ground bawling and scrambling to catch up with mom, their hind legs clumsily stretching up beyond their ears as they ran. So much for mama’s snooze!
I shook my head, chuckled and continued on with my scouting tramp. Long-suffering mothers. I could think of several of the human variety that I knew, some with broods just as rambunctious as the three cubs, and bigger too. The love of a long-suffering mother, animal or human, always touches me deeply, partly because it is so profound on its own merits and partly because I never knew it directly in my own life, at least that I can remember. The young bear mom got me to thinking about it again, and oddly a Jesus story popped into mind.
Jesus is thinking about the city and its people and he says: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, just as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not have it!” (Luke 13:34) Several chapters later, Luke continues the story: “When [Jesus] approached Jerusalem, he saw the city and wept over it, saying, ‘If you had known in this day, even you, the things which make for peace! But now they have been hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19:41-42)
What is so compelling in this story is the way Jesus compares his love for those who reject him to that of a long-suffering mother. He could have used my she-bear with three rambunctious cubs but he used a hen that is trying to desperately stuff her brood of rambunctious chicks under her wings instead. Whatever the metaphor, his weeping over the city drives the nail home in the message. How does Jesus relate to the lost, to those who don’t know him or receive him and the salvation he brings? The point is pretty clear: with heart-rending love and tears, like a long-suffering mother. I have never really thought about it before, but this is amazing. Reformed scholar Charles Hodge wrote in the 1870s that: “A mother’s love is a mystery and a wonder. It is the most perfect analogue of the love of God. As the relation in which parents stand to their children has this close analogy to the relation in which God stands to (all) his rational creatures …”
Being somewhat of a Calvinist, I guess I have pretty much pictured Jesus relating to those who reject him and his salvation with a rather cavalier and cold attitude: “Well it was destined you know, or predestined at least.” And my approach has been pretty much what I perceived his approach was, pretty cavalier and cold. But my recent bear experience that stirred Jesus’ chicken story to the surface won’t stand for this attitude. Over and over Jesus insists: “… the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost … it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.” (Luke 19:10 and Matthew 18:14) I have always known that. But it’s the way that Jesus relates to the lost that is the shock. And if he relates this way, as his disciple I am called to be on the road to becoming like him as I relate to these same people. I am called to be in the process of replacing my cold, cavalier complacency with a gut-wrenching, heart-rending, long-suffering mother-like love, yes even tears and grief, for the lost. This is what I am pondering this Mother’s Day and it is raising all kinds of new issues and attitudes for me with regards to evangelism.
Rev. David Webber is a contributing editor to the Record. He is a minister of the Cariboo, B.C., house church ministry and the author of From Under a Blazing Aspen, And the Aspens Whisper and Like a Winter’s Aspen: Embracing the Creator’s Fire.
