Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend
Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27
“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’”
James Tissot, “Woman Behold Thy Son” (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.
Sometimes you’ll hear people complain that Mother’s Day, a modern commercial invention, has eclipsed Mothering Sunday, the traditional celebration kept on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is today. Mothering Sunday was traditionally the time that people who worked a long way from their homes came back to their “mother church”, the place where they were baptised and became a child of the Church. Of course, as a result, they had a chance to see their families. You’ll most often hear the complaint about Mothering Sunday being abandoned from a certain type of slightly grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman. Although I am very much such a grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman, I am in fact quite strongly in favour of Mother’s Day and that we keep it in church.
You see, Mother’s Day does two things at one—certainly it speaks into our own lives and our own families. Yet it also speaks into one of the beliefs about God and the universe that makes Christianity truly unique—that Jesus Christ is God made human. Jesus Christ is God, every bit as much as the Father, the maker of the universe, and every bit as much as the Holy Spirit, the mysterious force of life and love which circulates everywhere, and which we find rather difficult to understand. For Christians, Jesus Christ is not just a wise and holy teacher, and not even a prophet, but God Himself.
You may be wondering how Mother’s Day speaks into this. We see it in today’s very short Gospel reading—the incredible, horrendous, scene on Cross where Jesus, close to death, has been abandoned by all His followers except for four women, including His mother, and ‘the disciple he loved’ – generally assumed to be St John the Evangelist. Jesus asks John to take care of his mother. Think of what’s going on here: Jesus must be in physical agony, exhausted and close to death, and His main concern is the welfare of his mother. When we think of ‘the love of God’, we tend to think of something remote and abstract, perhaps even a bit overwhelming and frightening. But this isn’t remote or abstract love—it isn’t love for a great principle or a sort of universal love for all of humanity, wonderful and important as these things are. This is the love of one person in particular for another actual person, in the face of death. Most of us have experienced the sheer intensity of love when someone we love is dying; it can be overwhelming even when it doesn’t involve a brutal public execution. This is what God’s love is like—so intense it can be overwhelming, and felt for you in particular.
God’s love for us isn’t a vague sense of well-being towards humanity in general. God’s love for each of us is as intense as a son’s love for a mother. We know this, because this is how God loved His mother when He walked the Earth. If Jesus Christ is truly God, then this is what the Bible tells us. The love we feel within our families is a reflection of God’s love.
So God is not remote and inaccessible – God knows love and pain just as we do, and fear and self-doubt, and presumably runny noses and cuts and sprains and constipation. Some people don’t like this central doctrine of the Christian Faith being expressed in this very direct way. They think it might be a little disrespectful. But again, if Jesus Christ is truly God, then this is what the Bible tells us.
This is a very different conception of God than that held by our closest cousins in the world of Faith, Jews and Muslims. For all our similarities, there is nothing like this in their religions, and the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation – that Jesus Christ was truly God as well as truly human – can even strike them as presenting an offensive view of God.
So here’s the big question: why did God become human? Why did he enter this life with all its suffering and risk, presumably fully aware of the terrible way in which it would end? God did this to enable us to be forgiven. He did it to heal the rift that we human beings opened with God when, at some point in our evolutionary development, we developed the capacity to know good from evil. It’s this capacity to know right from wrong, the one thing that separates us from the animals, that is what the story of Adam and Eve and the snake is all about. Because when we did develop the knowledge of good and evil, we often chose to do evil, just because we could.
Again, this is particular and personal, not abstract. All of us, sometimes, choose to do things that know to be wrong even though we have better options. That is what we call sin. Sin is, of course, a major theme of Lent.
Mother’s Day or Mothering Sunday is always on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, just beyond the halfway point. It should lighten the heavy mood of Lent a little, just for a day. In the Church’s calendar this was also traditionally known as Refreshment Sunday—a time to pause from the rigours of Lent, and regather strength to finish the fast. How is the mood lightened? Well, if Lent is very significantly about sin, then this Sunday is all about forgiveness of sins.
Our first reading today, from St Paul’s Letter to the Colossians, is all about the Church trying to live as one body, like a big extended family. That’s why it speaks of forgiveness, for no family can work without forgiveness.
For a mother to love her children she must forgive them many things, perhaps frequently. That has often been the subject of Mothering Sunday sermons, seeking to encourage children – whether young people or adults – to appreciate all that their mothers do for them. But children also have to forgive their mothers – and that can be a bit of a taboo subject. No mother is perfect, and some people have very difficult relationships with their mothers, or even very difficult mothers. For a family to work, its members need to be prepared to forgive one another constantly.
If the Church really is to be an extended family, then we need – oh, how badly we need! – to be better at forgiving one another in the name of Him who on that Cross, exemplified love in forgiving His enemies, even those who put him to death. It’s easy to talk about forgiveness, of course. Doing it, can be a very difficult, and sometimes we make a huge emotional journey to enable ourselves to forgive something that has wounded us deeply, only for it to be taken for granted or thrown back in our face. Yet the world would be a much darker place without people being willing to forgive things that are rationally unforgivable. When we forgive things that are rationally unforgivable, we touch the nature of God.
This is the tough message that sits underneath the boxes of chocolates and posies of flowers on Mother’s Day: if we want to follow Christ, we need to be able to love like Christ, and to forgive like Christ. A tough message that we will often fail to live out. The good news, however, is that God is love personified in Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ could forgive even those who put him to death, then he can probably also forgive you the times you don’t live as you ought.
Now praise, glory, and honour be to God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who is with us when we are with our families and when we are on our own, in times of feasting and in times of fasting, in all the earth and for ever and ever. Amen.
Top image: The rood screen at St Mary the Virgin, Amersham. © Gerry Lynch, 11 July 2023.
Mothering Sunday, the traditional celebration kept on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is today. Mothering Sunday was traditionally the time that people who worked a long way from their homes came back to their “mother church”, the place where they were baptised and became a child of the Church.
Were those wounds emblematic of the grief our sins cause in the Father’s heart.