Adapted from a sermon given at Church in the Wood, Hastings, Lent 2023.
Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.
- John 19:25-27 (NRSVue)
As with all such celebratory days laden with cultural and commercial pressures (like Valentine’s) Mother’s Day will all too often dredge up painful memories for many. We might call to mind friends who have struggled to have children of their own, and others who perhaps are mothers of deceased children – to have to bury one’s own child is arguably one of the cruellest of evils in this fallen world – but it is a very painful reality of human experience. Motherhood is painful. We also think on this day of those whose mothers are seriously unwell, or have passed on, those for whom the spot their mother once occupied in their lives are now just memories. And sadly, there are many who cannot say that their mothers were good exemplars, perhaps because their mothers were at best distant or entirely absent or worse still, present in cruelty and malice.
And what of Mothers themselves? The single mother who works herself into the ground to make ends meet? The mother of a solider on the front lines of war? The mother of a murderer? Perhaps for these reasons we should do away with Mother’s day to save all these people the pain it serves up each year. Maybe it would be better to have a day where we simply don’t look, and don’t draw attention to Motherhood.
“This is the day that the LORD has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.”
Psalm 118:24
Or perhaps not. The Church doesn’t tend to place such a great emphasis on Father’s day as it does Mother’s day. Perhaps it’s because God is our Heavenly Father, and every day is already His, and the last thing we need is to draw too strong a connection between the all too often scummy experience of our earthly father’s and that of God. But perhaps that is to push the gendered language of God as Father too far. Besides which, we all have a much more visceral connection with our mothers through the blood and guts of childbirth. Motherhood is painful. No one comes into this world any other way… not even our Lord.
Even God has a mother.
It’s fitting that the Church always chooses to celebrate Mother’s Day, in the middle of Lent. It’s as though the Church calendar, by placing the opportunity to celebrate mothers in the all-embracing purple ocean of sadness that is the Lenten season, recognises that today can be both a day of celebration and of grief.
The assigned Gospel reading from the lectionary for Mother’s Day is taken from the crucifixion account in John’s Gospel. Picture that scene again for a moment, the horror, shame, and bloody revulsion of crucifixion. Some people ask the question, “How could God subject His own Son to the agony of the Cross?” – which is to misunderstand what this Triune God - Father, Son, and Spirit - is doing on the Cross. For it is the work of all three, it is not something the Father does to the Son while the Spirit watches on as a hapless bystander. Remember it is us – not God – that crucifies Jesus Christ. Christ turns the pain of the cross into the work of God, and God’s accomplishment in putting to death Death itself, in His own body.
So, no that isn’t the hard question here. The truly difficult question is, given the presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, at the foot of the Cross,
“How could God subject this mother to her own Son’s agony on the Cross?”
A few years back while I was training for ministry, I had the privilege of taking a pilgrimage to Rome. Of course any trip to Rome isn’t complete without visiting the Vatican. Amidst the gratuitous glamour of the great baroque Basilica dedicated to St Peter I noticed a large crowd of tourists huddled around an enclave in one corner. As I sidled over to where they were gathered, I caught sight of what they were gawping at – Michelangelo’s La Pietà – the statue of Mary the mother of Jesus, with the limp corpse of her son draped across her lap; an arresting image. You don’t have to look at it for long to realise just how strange it is. Mary is unusually large in comparison to the corpse of her boy, and her countenance is oddly serene, far from the wailing grieving mother you might expect in such horrendous circumstances. Again, this strange abstraction and juxtaposition seems to fit well with having Mother’s Day in the middle of Lent.
In the Orthodox tradition, Mary is called theotokos; “God-bearer” a reference to Mary’s womb as the ark that bore Christ into the world. Here however, cast in marble and set up as an object of veneration, the title theotokos, takes on a whole new meaning. St Paul writing to the church in Corinth, said that he resolved to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ, and Him Crucified (1 Corinthians 2:2). Mary bearing her boy’s corpse and Paul bearing the message of Mary’s crucified Son, these are marks of the Church. In this way, Paul is also the mother who bears the crucified Christ (on occasion Paul employs maternal language when talking about his relation to the community). To confess the Christian faith, is to step into the shoes of the Mother who bears this bloody, foolish, and scandalous “Good News” in her arms; the message that God Himself came, and - making Himself completely knowable, vulnerable, and killable – subjected Himself to our violent depravity. We pushed this God out of the world, His world, and onto the Cross. But God, subjecting Himself to death at our hands, also overcame it, so that we – His executioners – would be forgiven, redeemed, and rectified. This is the faith of the Church.
We see this death-defying-life-giving work of God in action even from the God-forsakenness of the cross. Have you ever stopped to consider how unusual it is that in John’s Gospel, Jesus always refers to His mother as ‘woman’. Part of the clue to this strange familial faux pas is found in this passage. He says to His mother, “Woman, here is your son.” And to the Disciple, “Here is your mother.” Some interpret this as an indication that Jesus was looking out for His mother after His departure, so in effect saying “here is a son to look after you once I’ve ascended.” But Jesus is really doing something much more expansive than this. Jesus is establishing a new redeemed humanity, a new family, you could say a new Israel, one which is not linked by blood, or a particular connection to a geographical location, or by signs like circumcision, no; it is a family that transcends all of those ties, and is instead bound together by their participation in Jesus Himself by His death and through the Holy Spirit.
And this is again where St Paul is an insightful conversation partner with John’s Gospel. An oft repeated refrain throughout the majority of his letters (and which again crops up in the lectionary for Mother’s day) is:
“There is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.”
- Colossians 3:11
In other words, all of the categories, the boxes we put ourselves in, and even our own family units, have been reconstituted in Jesus – so that Mary can be the Mother of this disciple; so that the motherless can be mothered; so that the childless can be mother; so that for every person that walks through the doors of one of these buildings, they can come and expect to meet any of the women here, regardless of whether or not it is biologically true, as their very own mother.