Mothering Sunday

Mothers.

St Michael’s, Exeter,

Mothering Sunday (Lent IV) 2009. 

‘Behold your mother!’

 + In nomine …

 Motherhood seems to be one of the most universal of phenomena. Not all of us have husbands, wives, children; but everyone has a mother. And perhaps, as we have learnt from psychologists, this relationship more than any other makes us who we are. All of us come from our mothers, they are our origin, at one time we existed literally within them for nine months, completely bound up with them, dependent upon them, fed by them. And for most of us, we continue to be fed and nurtured by them through our earliest years, even if our development as adults involves an increasing independence from them, a movement from unity to distinction. 

Most of us have a great affection for our mothers, but to be honest Mothering Sunday can bring out a rather schmulzy idealisation of mothers as perfect saints, driven by the flower and card industry. This can leave children thinking that love is reducible to flowers, mothers feeling they can’t live up to this ideal, while those who have lost mothers or have not become mothers themselves can feel desperately excluded.   And of course men are left out altogether! So let’s look a bit deeper at this question of motherhood, from a Christian perspective.      

          It is perhaps not surprising, given that we come from our mothers, that many ancient cultures pictured the supreme divinity as a mother goddess. If this wasn’t a universal primitive religion, it certainly seems to have been quite common. The Israelites were unusual amongst their neighbours in believing their God to be above questions of gender, to have no partner. For them the divine was more than simply a matter of fertility, which was also why they rejected the common practice of temple prostitution. God is somehow more than the material processes of creation; goodness and true power is more than fertility. In the Old Testament God is described with feminine as well as masculine images. The image of God is more truly seen in the unity of male and female, rather than in one or the other. 

          And yet all this gender imagery didn’t quite go away. We know that the prophets railed against divine wives creeping into the Temple, Asherahs and Queens of Heaven. And in the Old Testament itself we see the language of the feminine applied to God’s people, Israel becomes God’s true bride, from Hosea, to Isaiah and the Song of Songs. Here the feminine imagery seems to be more about the bride than the mother, and perhaps seems a bit more down to earth, focusing as much on our fallibility and God’s continuing love even when we stray from him. 

          In Catholic Christianity, this feminine mother language seems to find its supreme fulfilment in that daughter of Israel, the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady, the Mother of God, as the fourth Ecumenical Council declared her to be. She is the one who gives birth to God. And as we know her cult developed, absorbing many aspects of traditional goddess worship and becoming enormously popular. In the Scriptures though her role is glorious but not idealised. She is the one whose ‘yes’ makes possible the incarnation, as we will celebrate this Wednesday, but she is also the one who is told by Simeon that a sword will pierce her own heart, and who is puzzled and hurt when her twelve year old son goes missing in the Temple. At Cana she seems to miss the point again, and in Nazareth she hears those words which could so easily sound like a harsh rejection of his earthly family: ‘Who are my mother, and brothers and sisters? Whoever does the will of God is my mother and brother and sister.’ At the cross she stands by and sees her Son die before her. Mary points us to the human complexity of motherhood, the fact that being a mother involves much suffering as well as joy, and that as this person becomes independent from herself, the mother faces confusion and incomprehension. Being a mother is not all chocolates and flowers! It’s a lot of blood, toil, sweat and tears too. The true image of the mother is not just the one who will sacrifice herself for her loved one, which could become a destructive idolatry, but who beyond this gives herself and her son completely to God. But of course the Mater dolorosa of the stations and the stabat mater is not the final word. 

In St Luke Mary is present at Pentecost, she shares in the joy of her Son’s resurrection and the outpouring of his Spirit. We see that Mary’s sharing in her Son’s sorrow enables her to share in a unique way in his victory. Mary has not lost her Son to his friends and to his new family, the Church; rather she has gained a new family embracing the entire world. ‘Behold your mother’ says Christ to St John. Mary is now mother to the Church which is her Son’s body, mother to all of us. This is the basis of particular devotion to her beyond that of other saints. Her physical relationship with the Saviour has been transfigured and taken up by grace to be something more.   

          This ‘something more’ is the other focus of feminine language in Christianity: the community of faith, the bride of Christ and our Holy Mother the Church. If this sounds too Catholic to you, remember that even Calvin called the Church our mother and Paul’s letter to the Galatians speaks of that Jerusalem which is above, who is free and our mother. Here  in the Church bride and mother come together as one. Sometimes the Church is identified with Christ, as his body, and sometimes with us, as the people of God. But the feminine images introduce a note of difference to both these identifications: The Church is Christ’s body, but it is also his bride, that is not Christ, but joined to him. The Church is us, but also our mother, not us, somehow above and before us. She gives birth to us through baptism and feeds us through the sacraments, nurturing and protecting us as we grow into the likeness of Christ. 

If the Church is bride and mother, then we must say that the Church is a paradox, it is Christ and not Christ, us and more than us.  This is the dynamic tension of the Church’s life, it is human and divine, on the way from earth to Heaven. This is why we can love the Church, believe in it in our creeds, sing its praises as Jerusalem the golden; but also be completely realistic and down to earth about the Church, its divisions, its failures, all its little irritations.   

          All three of these feminine images, Israel, Mary and the Church, come together in the Book of Revelation where we have the woman clothed with the sun who gives birth to the Messiah. These images take us beyond any sort of idolatry of our earthly mothers, towards something more liberating that speaks to all of us: 

       We should certainly love and be grateful for our earthly mothers (and fathers); such devotion is after all one of the ten commandments. But we should not make idols of them, for their sake as much as ours. Above them we all can also celebrate our Lady Mary, and our holy Mother Church as mothers to us all. They may all be fallible, but together they are all genuine signs of God’s motherly love, sources of nurture and protection, objects of our love and devotion. And we are all, men as well as women, called to share in this motherly work of the Church, to be ‘mothers’ to Christ in the world, (‘be born in us today’ as the carol puts it) to show forth that motherly care and protection and nurture to those in need as we give birth to Christ in our world. 

         In nomine…

AMEN.