Sermon Text(s): John 14:1-14, Anselm of Canterbury’s “Jesus as a Mother”
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Well, Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!
I say that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, for several reasons.
For one thing, it’s Mother’s Day, but we’re overwhelmed with “Father” imagery for God in our Gospel passage. “In my Father’s house there are many rooms.” “Show us the Father.” “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Father, Father, Father, Father, Father. 13 uses of that word in this short Gospel passage, to be exact. Somewhat ironic on Mother’s Day.
But we really shouldn’t expect the scripture passages to have any relation at all to Mother’s Day, because even though lots of churches make a big deal about it, Mother’s Day is not actually a religious holiday on the liturgical calendar.
I say “Happy Mother’s Day” with mixed emotions because Mother’s Day was never intended to be the syrupy sweet worship of motherhood that the greeting card and flower industry have turned it into. It had its origins in women organizing for social justice in the 19th century. A woman named Ann Jarvis in West Virginia organized Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and lower infant mortality in the 1850s. In the 1860s these groups cared for wounded soldiers from both sides of the Civil War. Several years after the war, prominent American activist Julia Ward Howe gave a speech known as the “Mother’s Day Proclamation” that called upon women to help the world seek nonviolent solutions to conflict. Her words ring across history with much Gospel truth:
“Arise, then, Christian women of this day! Arise, all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be that of water or of tears! Say firmly: We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
I’d be willing to bet none of you have ever found those words printed in any Mother’s Day cards!
And finally, I say “Happy Mother’s Day” somewhat cautiously, because I know that for so many, so very many, this day is not happy at all. For people whose mothers have recently died, for people who are estranged from their mothers, for people whose mothers abused them, for people who never knew their biological mother, for people who never had any positive mother figure in their lives, for women who deeply long to be mothers and yet are unable to conceive, for women who have experienced the loss and trauma of miscarriage… there are so many ways in which the secular, commercial Mother’s Day holiday, with the ways it pressures us to be happy about our relationships with our mothers and motherhood, brings so much pain to so many people.
And so my usual practice would be not to acknowledge Mother’s Day in worship, because it is, after all, not a liturgical holiday. But somehow, as a culture, we associate Mother’s Day with church. I read this week that in the United States, Mother’s Day is the third-highest church attendance day of the year, just behind Christmas and Easter. Going to church and then out to lunch with mom on Mother’s Day is something of a national ritual.
So, given that fact, and given the irony that the lectionary happened to serve up this passage with so much Father imagery in it today, I thought I’d take some time today to reflect theologically on motherhood and the divine feminine.
Although the official liturgies and writings of the church have used predominantly masculine imagery for God, our tradition is by no means void of the concept of God as a mother. The 20th century saw a renewal of interest in feminine images of God in the Christian tradition, but this concept was not a “new age” invention of the modern feminist movement. Although less prominent than the masculine imagery, feminine images for God have been used throughout Christian history.
Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom, is feminine, and whenever God’s wisdom is personified in the scriptures it is always portrayed as female, as in this passage from Proverbs, chapter 4 (Proverbs 4:5-6, 8-9):
“Get wisdom; get insight: do not forget, nor turn away
from the words of my mouth.
Do not forsake her, and she will keep you;
love her, and she will guard you…
Prize her highly, and she will exalt you;
she will honor you if you embrace her.
She will place on your head a fair garland;
she will bestow on you a beautiful crown.”
We don’t often hear passages like these with repeated use of the female pronoun used to describe God or an aspect of God, and for me, there is something incredibly powerful about them. I was raised hearing God referred to as “he,” and I never thought much about it. I knew it was a metaphor, and I never thought God was ACTUALLY a man because the male pronoun was used, but the first time I read a passage like this, I was surprised by how much it meant to me, how much more connected I felt to the scripture on a visceral level. Suddenly I realized that in my entire life, I’d never heard God referred to using the same pronoun I use to refer to myself. I also realized that that would have been a common experience for me if I were a man. With this revelation came a complete change of perspective on the importance of using gender-inclusive language for God, something I’d previously scoffed at as unnecessary.
But let’s move on to more specifically maternal images of God, not just feminine images, since it is Mother’s Day, after all, not just women’s day.
Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, there are images of God as a mother teaching a child to walk, a nursing mother, a woman in labor. Jesus himself uses the image of a mother hen gathering her chicks to describe his desire to bring peace to the people of Jerusalem: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34)
This scriptural passage might have influenced Anselm of Canterbury’s writings about “Jesus as a Mother,” the 11th century piece we heard in place of a psalm today:
“Jesus, as a mother, you gather us to you.
You are as gentle with us as a mother with her children.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds,
in sickness you nurse us and with pure milk you feed us.”
Like Anselm, Julian of Norwich, a 14th century English abbess, used the metaphor of Jesus as a mother. She compares Jesus’s suffering on the cross to the suffering of childbirth, and compares Jesus’s giving of his body to us in the Eucharist to a woman giving her body to her child in breastfeeding:
“The mother can give her child her milk to suck, but our dear mother Jesus can feed us with himself, and he does so most generously and most tenderly with the holy sacrament which is the precious food of life itself.”
Modern psychology has opened our eyes to the ways in which using parental imagery for God can be problematic, pointing out that using the terms “Father” or “Mother” can lead people to project all kinds of unresolved issues with their parents onto God. If someone’s father or mother was abusive, thinking of God as “Father” or “Mother” could make them see God as abusive as well. They may direct their anger at their parents toward God and find it difficult to have a relationship with God because of all the emotional baggage they have around the term “Father” or “Mother.”
These are certainly very real concerns. As my experience with hearing female pronouns used to refer to God illustrated, language is important and has real power in our lives. But I believe the intent of using parental imagery for God is not to elevate our own parents to divine status, not to confuse God with what our earthly parents were like, but to remind us that only God can meet the needs that we often look to our parents to fulfill. If our parents didn’t meet those needs, we are all the more aware of our need for God to meet them.
A Hindu woman in my hometown in South Carolina once shared with me why she thought of God primarily as Mother: “My mother died when I was very young,” she said, “so I needed God to be a mother to me.”
Even if we knew our parents and experienced them as loving and caring, they still fall short of what we yearn for on a deeper spiritual level. Our spiritual yearning – a yearning for unconditional love and acceptance – is not one that can be fulfilled by any human being, whether parent, friend, or spouse.
So on this Mother’s Day, no matter what your relationship with your mother or your children or your lack thereof, know that the God who made heaven and earth and all that is in them loves you more than your earthly Mother ever thought possible. She loves you with an everlasting love. She feeds you with her very body, binds up your wounds, and breathes new life into your soul. In our Mother’s house there are many rooms – there is room enough for all of us, and she gathers us in as a hen gathering her chicks. God is the Mother we can all celebrate with gratitude this day and every day. Amen.
