Mothering Sunday

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  15th March Mothering Sunday

  Readings: Exodus 2.1-10; Colossians 3.12-17; John 19.25b-27

  Theme: The Motherhood of God

  Today we celebrate Mothering Sunday. This is a moment each year for us to pause and to reflect on the gift of motherhood. Each of our readings helps us to do that. The first reading recounts the story of the mother of Moses, Jochebed. Faced with a decree from the Egyptians that, to control the Jewish population, all male Hebrew children are to be put to death, she places her child in a basket in the river. The daughter of Pharaoh discovers him in the basket at the riverbank and names him ‘Moses’ which means ‘the one taken out of the water.’ The sacrifice of Jochebed represents the values which so many mothers put into practice for their children and signals the signs which indicate ‘the chosen ones of God.’

  This theme of ‘the chosen ones of God’ is the topic of the second reading from Colossians. God´s chosen ones are to clothe themselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience.” The value of love brings all these together in perfect harmony. Love indicates that a person knows God, because ‘God is love and those who live in love live in God.’ So, the love of a mother for her children is an image of the love of God for each one of us. In this sense, God is our mother and the motherhood of God is a theme with deep resonances in the scriptures.

  The Gospel brings these themes together in the figure of the mother of the Lord, Mary. She is the one chosen by God to bear the child Jesus in her womb and to nurture him as he grew in knowledge and maturity. The scene of Mary at the foot of the cross, the stabat mater, is depicted in various artistic forms and is a moving representation of a poignant moment during the crucifixion. 

  The meeting of Jesus with his mother on the cross becomes the occasion of the giving of Mary to the church as its mother. The body which Mary gives birth to in Jesus, following his death and resurrection, now takes the form of the body of Christ on earth, the church, in which Mary assumes her place in the home of John and nurtures the formation of this new body into the maturing body of the church.

  This is why the church is often referred to in feminine terms as a ‘she’. The church is the ‘bride of Christ’ and she thus unites us to the Lord through the gift of the Holy Spirit. So, in these images of our mother and of the bride, the church is the body which is the feminine principal in the union of humanity and divinity. The body of Christ and the head of Christ forms the union of this male and female, divine and human in the church which is the pilgrim people on the way to its final destination at the end of time, when ‘God will be all in all.’

  In this sense, to be human is to recognize the feminine principle of the church which differentiates us from God at the same time as uniting us to God. Difference in union, distinction without separation, is how we should understand the church in itsrelationship to God, infinitely close and always preserving this fundamental distinction between God and the creation.

  It should thus not come as a surprise to us to understand the nature of Christ and the nature of the Church as sharing in a deep structural similarity. Just as the Christ is the union of the divine and the human in the incarnation of Jesus, so too the church is made up of the union of the sisterhood of humanity with the brotherhood of God, in the Son, Jesus. Mary represents this in her various titles of ‘mother of the church’ and ‘mother of God’ (Theotokos), because she embodies for us what it means to be the church. As the woman full of grace, she is the one whose ‘yes’ to the angel made it possible for the Lord to be incarnate in her.

  We too are called to give this ‘yes’ to the Holy Spirit in our lives, so that we can become mothers in the church in allowing the Christ child to be born in our hearts. This is why it is important for us to understand the place of Mary in the history of salvation, because she points us towards just what it means to be church in giving birth to the Lord. As members of the church, we are all called to share in this motherhood through giving birth to the Lord in our lives. In this we become full of grace, just like Mary whose ‘yes’ has made our own ‘yes’ to the Holy Spirit possible.

  So, as we celebrate and give thanks today for the gift of motherhood, let us remember that in recognizing this part of our humanity, we recognize the complementary relationship that God has with us through God’s divinity, which always remains completely other to us in our humanity. It is through recognizing this absolute difference that we are able to enter into intimate union with the God who has adopted this difference into the very heart of the Most Holy Trinity, so that we may become, what we are each called to be; namely,adopted children of God, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.