Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27
“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’”
Who could argue with the idea of motherhood and apple pie? Well, most of us.
“Motherhood and apple pie!”—Who could argue against motherhood and apple pie? The Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary tells me that this is a phrase we have imported from North American English, and is “used to represent an idea of perfect home life and comfort.” All those of you in the congregation who are mothers can confirm, that’s what motherhood is, isn’t it?—Perfect home life and comfort!
Or maybe not.
Our Gospel reading for Mothering Sunday is not, thankfully, some sanitised, cartoonish, version of what motherhood is about. This is motherhood at its rawest—Mary watches Christ, even speaks with Christ, as He is put to death. The trauma from experiencing the death of a child, including an adult child, is perhaps greater than that of any other type of bereavement. One can scarcely imagine what it feels like to witness it at first hand, in these circumstances. As some of you know, my sister died when we were both children, and I know only too well how devastating the death of a child is to a mother – and to a father. Yet, look at the memorial tablets on the walls of our parish churches and it is obvious this was a distressingly frequent event until the last hundred years or so—and it was frequent even for the well-off. Such is the human condition.
To love is to open yourself to hurt. To bear children is to open yourself to being hurt, through the hurts they themselves live through, and sometimes even directly by them. So God too, in creating humanity in His image and thus granting us free will, opened Himself to being hurt by the life He had given birth to.
And here is the unique thing about the Christian understanding of God: Jesus Christ was God made one of us, and in that He exposed Himself to one of the worst fates the world can inflict on anyone—a brutal, humiliating, public, death, in front of his mother.
Motherhood as a perfect home life and comfort? If, only.
Yet even in this awful scene, in the face of that awful death, Jesus Christ, truly God, is human enough to love His mother particularly, human enough to care about what will happen to His mother after He dies, and entrust her future care to St John, the disciple whom He loved. This scene encapsulates some of what Christians think about God, and we don’t think about God. We don’t think God is some sort of cosmic watchmaker who set the universe in motion and then rested on a cloud, far removed from the suffering of the beings He made. Instead, God loves us so much that He became one of us to save us from the consequences of the hurt to the order of creation that human beings caused in The Fall.
That we have this reading in Church on Mother’s Day, a festival which most of us think of as being as sweet and unthreatening as apple pie does something quite remarkable. It turns something in danger of being maudlin and over-commercialised into a celebration of the creation of life in the face of death, and a celebration of love in the face of death. It turns what can too easily be a celebration of fake motherhood, one of papering over family tensions and rough edges smoothed over to sell supermarket bouquets, into a celebration of the real thing, with all its pains and imperfections.
We celebrate that we human beings perhaps most closely touch the nature of God in our impulse to make new life, and in our capacity for love. These are the aspects of human nature that most obviously reveal that we are truly made in the image and likeness of God. And God, in His turn, in the face of His own earthly death affirms the things that are most human about us—that every one of us was born of a woman, and that most of us have an instinctive bond with our kin.
This celebration of real world motherhood reminds us that Christ’s commands to His followers to love – to love one another, and to love even our enemies – are made in the full knowledge of how profoundly the world lives in the shadow of death, pain, and evil; and how all this can make love, at times, seem the most monumental act of folly. Yet we are made for love, for many different kinds of love – romantic love, brotherly love, love for the highest ideals and aspirations of humanity, love of one’s mother, love of a child one has given birth to.
Motherhood and apple pie. It would be easy to dismiss the list of virtues in our Epistle reading in that way. Who could, after all, object to “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience”? They’re all wonderful things, right? Yet, often these virtues are dismissed as weaknesses, the sort of things that people who benefit from injustice use as excuses for inaction, or that conflict avoiders hide behind because they don’t want to confront problems. Yet this list of excellences to strive for – “compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” – comes from one of those letters St Paul wrote, in his ever-direct style, to tackle a problem in a church.
The Church in Colossae had been founded by one of Paul’s associates, a man named Epaphras. It had started well, but then seemed to get distracted by false teachers promoting “philosophy and empty deceit”. In this part of the letter, Paul is telling the Christians in Colossae to lift their eyes up again, away from the earthly things that have diverted them towards divine things such as forgiveness, and thankfulness, and inner peace, and love.
In turning away from worldly things, we are not to turn away from the world. God, after all, didn’t turn away from the world but because He loved us, came into it in all its mess in the person of Jesus Christ. So, we are to cultivate these virtues precisely so we can act in the world as instruments of God’s love for humanity, and God’s forgiveness, and God’s peace. In fact, Paul uses a very interesting turn of phrase; he advises the Colossians to “clothe” themselves with these virtues! We need to clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, and above all love, to ensure we are not naked in the face of the way the world can wound us.
And here we return to the difficult mystery that I brought up early in the sermon. It is precisely when we love that we open ourselves to being wounded most grievously. Yet if we fail to love, we cut ourselves off from the very thing that most clearly makes the pains of the human condition worth bearing. God knows, love can be agonising – God knows, not least because of that terrible moment on the Cross when He asked St John to treat Mary as his own mother. To repeat, we touch the godliness of our human nature most closely in our impulse to make new life and in our capacity to love, and we touch the essence of God particularly closely when love brings us agony.
Motherhood and apple pie? No, our celebration of Mothering Sunday is a proclamation of joy in the face of the worst that life throws at us, and our worship today an offering of thanks to the universe’s Creator and ours for making us in His image. For to love what you have created, nurtured from its beginning, given birth to—that is something that every mother understands.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
