The church calls today Mothering Sunday, the secular world calls it Mother’s Day. To me the ‘Mother’s Day’ tag is rather limiting, because we are encouraged to shower one person with cards, flowers and gifts, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but the church’s preference for ‘Mothering Sunday’ implies a far more inclusive approach. It allows for the possibility and appreciation that mothering is frequently more than simply a biological relationship.
Mothering, in a loving, caring, nurturing sense is something we all should be doing. In our Gospel reading for today we see the loving relationship between Mary and Jesus, and through this relationship the maternal nature of God’s love for us.
We know that God is not gendered, unable to be limited to human descriptions, and yet is seems much harder for us to consistently think of God as mother. I wonder why? So many descriptions of God and his love for us are so ‘motherly’: Scripture teaches us that our God is caring, attentive, tender, desirous of good for us, ever present, mindful of all our needs.
At the foot of the cross, Jesus gives his mother to John his beloved disciple, and in turn, John to his mother Mary. He entrusts his mother, the person who has been with him all his life, has raised him, loved him, nurtured him, to a person who was not related by blood, but a person who trusted and who loved him. Jesus had brothers and sisters, where were they?
Here, we see a new way of being family, and the start of what we now know as the church. In this new family that Jesus creates, mothering and loving provides care and love and security. The family unit is so diverse, mums and dads, mums and mums, dads and dads, aunts’, uncles, grandparents, god parents, neighbours…our mothering comes and is given in so many different ways and in a kaleidoscope of colour and manifestations.
Throughout the Gospels we are taught, through the words and actions of Jesus that God is as much mother as father. With Christ as our pattern and our guide we are to inform our own caring and loving, as he does for each of us.
This is not always easy to do. We might reflect upon how we are shaped and determined by our own, unique experience of mothering, regardless of who provided that care. We might seek guidance to help us tell the difference between our giving to receive – or to make ourselves feel better, or to fulfil our own illusions of our ‘goodness’ – and when we are truly acting with love towards others in the full knowledge that this will be costly, and often painful, but is life-giving, and holy, and required nonetheless.
We are all called to mothering of one kind or another, because we are created in the image of God who looks after us as his children. Jesus invites us into this new family of everlasting love and mutual belonging, to belong to him and to each other.
As we come together, although at a distance, with different needs, different expectations and with different understandings. May we each find that God meets us in our need and in our joy, in our sorrow and in our struggles.
And today, the fourth Sunday of Lent we thank God that through the shedding of Christs blood, a new family of love was formed, one that we call the church.
Jules Soanes
