Matthew 23:37

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which kills the prophets, and stones those who are sent to her! How often would I have gathered your children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and you would not!”

In these moving words Jesus sums up the people of Jerusalem the very heart of the Hebrew nation, and to a certain extent representative of the whole. It was a city whose economy was built around the Temple, and very religiously intense. Everything in it was bound up in religion, and it was because of their intensity of feeling that many came to live there as they grew older. But that was the problem. It was so intense that it was not open to the truth. Like the Scribes and Pharisees, who were typical of it, it was so bound up in ritual that it could not see beyond it. It had killed (Matthew 23:34) and stoned (2 Chronicles 24:21) the prophets (compare Matthew 21:35), and now it had rejected the One Who had finally come to take them under His wing. This last picture is a beautiful one. In time of danger the mother hen would call her chicks to hide under her wings, and this was what Jesus had offered Jerusalem (compare Deuteronomy 32:11; Psalms 17:8; Psalms 36:7; Psalms 91:4; Isaiah 31:5; etc). The message is that there was total security in Him. It was another subtle claim to be the Beloved Son. He is acting in the place of God. But they refused to find their shelter in Him (compare Isaiah 30:15).

It is noteworthy that Jesus could never look on Jerusalem without similar words coming to His lips. Compare Luke 13:34. It may well be that He had composed a dirge over Jerusalem which He repeated whenever He saw it.