The Fifth Sunday of Easter / Year A
John 14:1-14
Philip said to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father and we will be
satisfied.” Show us the Father? On this day, as a preacher, why couldn’t he
have said, “So, Jesus, tell us some stories about your mother.” Now, that would give me something with which
to work!
Surely one of the marks of the spiritual life is a desire to know
God, to understand something of the nature of the One who is Holy Other. But God is incomprehensible and unknowable,
save for what God chooses to reveal to us.
As we experience the unknowable God we compare what we sense to what we
do know. “In some ways God is like a
good shepherd.” “In some ways God is
like a father.” These metaphors, while
helpful, have their limitations. Your
experience of father may be very different from mine, so are we saying God is
like your father (who may have been cruel and overbearing) or like my father
(who may have been kind and nurturing)?
And what if your father had a beard, but mine did not. Which is God like? Push it enough and you realize God is neither
bearded or clean shaven because God is not like a father in this way.
Genesis 1:27 states “So God created humankind in
his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them.” This tells us we should be able
to look at men and see in them something of the image of God. It also tells us we should be able to look at
women and see something of what God is like.
And if we can see something of God in our fathers, then it follows we
should be able to look at our mothers and find the same. What we see of God in our fathers most likely
will be different from what we see of God in our mothers, still, by exploring
God’s mother-like qualities we will come to know God more fully and more
completely.
There are several
passages in the Old Testament that speak of God as being like one who gives
birth:
You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you
forgot the God who gave you birth.
(Deuteronomy 32:18)
For a long time I
have held my peace,
I have kept still and restrained myself;
now I will cry out
like a woman in labor,
I will gasp
and pant.
(Isaiah 42:14)
Can a woman forget
her nursing-child,
or show no compassion
for the child of her womb?
Even these may
forget,
yet I will not
forget you.
(Isaiah 49:15)
The prophet Hosea likens God to a mother who tenderly nurtures her
child:
Yet it was I who
taught Ephraim to walk,
I took them up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with
cords of human kindness,
with bands of love.
I was to them like
those
who lift infants to
their cheeks.
I
bent down to them and fed them. (11:3-4)
Isaiah draws on a similar image:
As a mother
comforts her child,
so I will comfort you;
you shall be
comforted in Jerusalem. (66:13)
The 22nd Psalm compares God to a midwife:
Yet it was you who
took me from the womb;
you kept me safe on my mother’s breast.
On you I was cast
from my birth,
and since my mother bore me
you
have been my God. (9-10)
In the Book of Deuteronomy God uses the
image of a mother eagle to enlarge our understanding:
As an eagle stirs
up its nest,
and hovers over its young;
as it spreads its
wings, takes them up,
and bears them aloft on its pinions,
the Lord alone guided him;
no foreign god
was with him. (32:11-12)
Jesus himself invokes the
image of a mother hen as a self-description: “How often have I desired to
gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” (Luke
13:34 and Matthew 23:37). We tend to think
of the paternal protective figure going off to do battle with the enemy and the
maternal protective figure as the one who gathers the children and shelters them
from harm. Here, at least, Jesus longs
to be a maternal figure in the lives of the people of Jerusalem.
These are just a few of the
biblical verses I could cite. They
reveal God as being one who gives birth to new life, who nurtures, feeds, cares
for, and watches over us. Surely you
have experienced God in these ways.
Perhaps you did not know portions of the bible think of these qualities
as being motherly and ascribe them to God.
Yolanda Pierce, a professor at Princeton University, writes this
about why, in addition to Father, she experiences God as Mother:
Long before I became familiar with the academic debates
concerning calling God “Mother,”... I was being raised in a household where I
instinctively understood that the divine presence was manifest in the loving
hands and arms of mothers, and most especially in the life of my grandmother
who raised me. My grandmother’s kitchen
was a theological laboratory where she taught me how to love people just as
naturally as she taught me to make peach cobbler and buttermilk biscuits. I
watched and listened as she ministered to the sick and the lost, with a Bible
in one hand and a freshly baked pound cake in the other, despite having no
official ministry role.
I knew that if God was real, if God truly loved me as a
parent loves a child, then God was also “Mother” and not only “Father.”
Maybe you can
relate in some way to Dr. Pierce’s experience.
Now try on this poem by renowned author and pastor Jacqui Lewis:
My God is a curvy
black woman with dreadlocks and dark, cocoa-brown skin.
She laughs from
her belly and is unashamed to cry.
She can rock a
whole world to sleep, singing in her contralto voice.
Her sighs breathe
life into humanity.
Her heartbreaks
cause eruptions of justice and love…
My God is an
incarnate feminine power, who smells like vanilla and is full of sass and
truth, delivered with kindness.
She’ll do anything
for her creation; her love is fierce.
She weeps when we
do
and insists on
justice.
She is God.
She is Love.
Now, I want you to relax and take a
deep breath. I am not going to make you
begin the Lord’s Prayer by saying “Our Mother, who art in heaven…” What I do what to do is expand your ability
to conceive of God and to understand how God continues to reveal God’s self in
diverse ways. God as Mother is merely
one window allowing us to see some aspects of the Divine Mystery.
So on Mother’s Day 2020, you might want
to ponder how God’s nature has been revealed to you through the mother figures
in your life. Use this day as an
opportunity to expand your understanding of God and to give thanks for the
mothers you have been blessed to know.
