May 9, 2004 - Fifth Sunday of Easter/Mother's Day
Revelation 21:1-6
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John 13:31-35
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“Only a Mother could love. . .”

My grandmother used to use an expression that always puzzled me. She’d be talking about someone and after commenting on this individual she’d say, “Oh, there’s a poor soul that only a mother could love.” I remember asking her about this saying and she would always say that she had lacked charity and needed to go to confession for it. Finally, one time she explained it to me in this way – and I guess I should have gotten it sooner – that some people are so difficult that only their mothers, the ones who had given them birth, could love them.

As I considered the holiday we celebrate and the readings before us, that phrase of Grandma’s kept coming back to me. What we see in the promise of the new heaven and new earth in the Revelator’s vision and in Jesus’ command to love is a mother’s love. What we see, what we experience, is the reality that God is not only our creating Father, but also our nurturing mother.

God is, at once, transcendent (wholly other, completely above us) and immanent (present to/with us). God cannot be known, attained, comprehended or experienced by the created world on its own power. Yet, God is immanent, present, in creation by God’s power and essence that undergirds and sustains all of created reality. Without God’s presence all that is wouldn’t exist – including us.

The God who is beyond us is still with us, and seeks to love creation, especially humanity, made in God’s image and likeness. Thus, God extends an invitation to share God’s life. John’s Gospel tells us, “As many as receive him, to them he gave power to be made children of God” (John 1.12).  Christians are then called to become, as Peter tells us, “partakers of divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4). This is what grace is all about, because God loves us regardless of what we’ve done or not done. God simply loves us because we are and offers this free gift to us through Christ in the Holy Spirit in an expansive, inclusive fashion.

That is why we can say that God has been revealed to us as Father AND as a Mother. God creates, gives life, provides nurture, and offers unconditional acceptance (grace). That’s what Fathers and Mothers do, isn’t it? The Hebrew scriptures often have God telling Israel that he has “borne them in his womb,” “given birth” to them as his people,” and “nourished them at the breast.” Isaiah, the prophet, speaks God’s word that “even though a mother might forsake her child, I will never forget you.”  Some of that same imagery is picked up in the Christian scripture when Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in his desire to “gather you as a mother hen gathers her chicks.”

Later, in the Patristic and then the Medieval periods, this metaphorical language of God as Mother grows and grows. Caroline Walker Bynum, for example, has written a masterful study on this subject called, Jesus As Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Bynum gives example after example of Jesus being referred to as Mother because he gave birth to the Church – indeed gave the whole world re-birth – on the cross.

Of all the authors who take up this theme, Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth century English hermitess, offers some of the most affecting imagery. I want to share just a few examples taken from the fifty-eighth chapter of her Showings.

And so in our making, God almighty is our loving Father, and God all wisdom is our loving Mother, with the love and the goodness of the Holy Spirit, which is all one God, one Lord. And in the joining and the union he is our very true spouse and we his beloved wife and his fair maiden, with which wife he was never displeased; for he says: I love you and you love me, and our love will never divide in two.

I contemplated the word of all the blessed Trinity, in which contemplation I saw and understood these three properties: the property of the fatherhood, and the property of the motherhood, and the property of the lordship in one God. In our almighty Father we have our protection and our bliss, as regards our natural substance, which is ours by our creation from without beginning; and in the second person, in knowledge and wisdom we have our perfection, as regards our sensuality, our restoration and our salvation, for he is our Mother, brother and saviour; and in our good Lord the Holy Spirit we have our reward and our gift for our living and our labour, endlessly surpassing all that we desire in his marvelous courtesy, out of his great plentiful grace. . .

. . .And so our Mother is working on us in various ways, in whom our parts are kept undivided; for in our Mother Christ we profit and increase, and in mercy he reforms and restores us, and by the power of his Passion, his death, and his Resurrection he unites us to our substance. So our Mother works in Mercy on all his beloved children. . . .which he does freely, by grace, fulfilling and surpassing all that creatures deserve.   [from Showings, pp. 293-4]

Notice how Julian emphasizes God’s grace and ‘courtesy’ to us. Even when we have rendered ourselves ugly through our actions or our attitudes, God continues to care for us and love us as only a mother could, because God has borne us in God’s heart.