A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year C

 

As truly as God is our Father, so truly God is our Mother. [1]

 

All of us, I’m sure, know that today is Mother’s Day --  a day set aside to honor mothers, grandmothers, godmothers and all who have been as mothers to us.  Today we celebrate the ideal of strong, nurturing, sustaining, life-giving love that we associate with motherhood.  We know, of course, that no human mother has lived that ideal love perfectly and that some mothers, by neglect or abuse, have betrayed it terribly. But if we have been fortunate, we have been blessed by women who have lived some measure of that ideal in our own lives, and on Mother’s Day, we give thanks to and for them.  

 

What fewer of us likely know is that on the Church’s calendar, yesterday was the feast day of Dame Julian of Norwich, whose words abut the mother hood of God I began with.  Julian lived from about 1342 to 1416 and for most of her life was an anchoress --  a woman of prayer who lived her life in a cell attached to the wall of a church.  Through an inner window, she could listen to and participate in worship and receive communion; through an outer window, she could speak to visitors and offer spiritual guidance.  

 

When she was thirty, Julian became ill to the point of death and received last rites.  On her sickbed she received what she called 16 “showings” or revelations of the Love of God.  These were visions not only with her eyes but with what she calls her “spiritual understanding.”  She survived the illness and spent much of the rest of her life meditating on what she had seen, and, with God’s help, seeking ever greater understanding of what her visions had shown of the depth and passion of God’s love.  The result was a book, the first written in English by a woman, called in most modern translations, The Revelations of Divine Love. 

 

It is an incredibly rich book, well worth the effort of entering the mind of a medieval spiritual writer.  Within the framework of  God’s love that is at the heart of her revelations, Julian tackles the tough issues of faith --  how to reconcile the existence of sin and suffering in the world with a loving, omnipotent Creator; how it is possible in such a world to affirm, as she does, that “all shall be well;”  how it remains true, in the face of such mysteries, that in all things, God’s meaning towards humanity is love. And along the way, Julian does what some other medieval Christians also did --  she speaks of God as our Mother.

 

Like everything else in Julian’s writing, her references to the motherhood of God emerge from her awareness of the fullness of God’s love.  “I understood three ways of looking at motherhood in God,” she writes.  “The first is the creating of our human nature; the second is His taking of our human nature ….; the third is motherhood of action … and all is one love.” [2] 

 

The first of these three -- the motherhood of God in the creating of our human nature – is not too hard for us to grasp.  The human nature of each of us was created in our biological mothers’ wombs.  Doesn’t it, then, make sense to call, the ultimate source of our human nature, God our Mother?  We are used to calling ourselves children of a heavenly Father; Julian tells us we are children of a heavenly Mother, as well:

 

“Thus in our creation, God All Power is our natural Father, and God All Wisdom is our natural Mother, with the Love and the Goodness of the Holy Spirit — who is all one God, one Lord.”  [3]  

 

As the order of this Trinitarian quote suggests, for Julian, our heavenly Mother is the Second Person of the Trinity, the eternal Wisdom of God who became human in Jesus Christ.  The “taking of our human nature” in the Incarnation is the second aspect of how she sees God’s Motherhood. Grasping what she means by this may be a bit harder.  “The Second Person of the Trinity … is our Mother in mercy by taking on our fleshliness … ; in our Mother Christ, we benefit and grow, and in mercy He redeems and restores us, and, by the virtue of His Passion and His death and resurrection, He [joins] us to our essence.  In this way, our Mother works in mercy to all His children.” [4]

 

Julian means several things by this somewhat puzzling language.  First, that God’s act of becoming flesh, of sharing our human nature, is itself a merciful act of motherly love -- a caring intimacy in which our heavenly Mother joins our human essence so as to be one with us in all that we undergo.  As she writes in another passage, “Christ came in our poor flesh to share a mother’s care.” [5]

 

Moreover, this act of love in taking our nature makes it possible for us to be redeemed and restored and to grow into the creatures God has always wanted us to be from the beginning of our creation.  Our redemption, made possible by this motherly act of love, leads to our rebirth to eternal life.  “Our Savior is our true Mother in whom we are endlessly born. [6]  Our [human] mothers bear us for pain and for death; our true mother, Jesus, bears us for joy and endless life.”[7]

 

It may be that the “motherhood of action,” the third of Julian’s three ways of seeing the motherhood of God, will speak most clearly to us --  for here she speaks about what mothers, at their best, have always done:  protect, love and guide their children as they grow.

 

“To the quality of motherhood belongs natural love, wisdom, and knowledge — and this is God….  The kind, loving mother who is aware and knows the need of her child protects the child most tenderly as the nature and state of motherhood wills.  And as the child increases in age, she changes her method but not her love.  And when the child is increased further in age, she permits it to be chastised to break down vices and to cause the child to accept virtues and graces.  This nurturing of the child, with all that is fair and good, our Lord does in the mothers by whom it is done.  Thus He is our Mother in our human nature by the action of grace …”  [8]

 

As the culmination of God’s motherhood of action, Julian tells us, Jesus our Mother feeds us.

“A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our precious mother, Jesus, can feed us with himself.  He does so most graciously and most tenderly, with the Blessed Sacrament, which is the precious food of true life.” [9]  

 

The startling juxtaposition of these two images – a mother nursing her child and Jesus feeding us with his own Body and Blood  --  calls to mind the pelican, a medieval symbol of Christ.  “According to legend, in a time of famine a mother pelican would draw blood from her own breast and give the blood to her chicks. Thus the pelican … symbolizes the sacrifice of Christ on the cross (because he gave his blood for others) as well as the Eucharist (because it represents Christ's blood and provides spiritual nourishment.)” [10]  

 

The symbolism of the pelican along with Julian’s words remind us that in Jesus, we have a loving Mother who feeds us with his very self, his own life.  As Julian writes, “This fair lovely word "mother" is so sweet and so kind in itself, that it can not truly be said of anyone nor to anyone except of Him and to Him who is true Mother of life and of all.” [11]

 

Julian was not alone among medieval Christian writers in speaking of Jesus as Mother this way.  Anselm of Canterbury (most famous for the philosophically mind-bending ontological proof for the existence of God – don’t ask me to try to explain it)  also wrote a poem-prayer about the motherhood of Jesus in words that Julian may well have known:

 

Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you:
You are gentle with us as a mother with her children;
Often you weep over our sins and our pride:
Tenderly you draw us from hatred and judgment.
You comfort us in sorrow and bind up our wounds:
In sickness you nurse us, and with pure milk you feed us.
Jesus, by your dying we are born to new life:
By your anguish and labor we come forth in joy.  [12]

 

This Mother’s Day, dear children of God, as you remember your mothers, grandmothers, god-mothers and other mothers, don’t forget Jesus, your true Mother of life and of all.  Give thanks for the gift of this Mother’s life-giving love; seek, always, his motherly guidance, and rejoice that at this Altar, your Mother feeds you with his very life.

 

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

May 9^th, 2010