Readings Psalm 34, 11-20 and John 3, 14-21
Today as we celebrate mothering Sunday I am going to explore our two readings with regard to how God is like a mother, and how his church is a family for believers. These readings might not necessarily have jumped out at you as the obvious ones for the festival we celebrate today but I hope that by bearing with me you will see how it all fits together. I want to begin by saying that when reflecting upon human motherhood and parenting I am pretty much assuming that we have had a good experience in that regard. If this for you is not the case and so this celebration of mothers is a difficult one for you then I hope that you can draw comfort from the pattern of our Lord, if not from your own mother. Please, if you are struggling with this issue, take the opportunity to speak with me after the service and we can arrange to meet up and talk things through prayerfully.
The Gospel reading, John 3.14-21 is of course one of the most famous passages in the Bible. At first glance it says nothing to us about mothers, being the outcome of a meeting of two men, Nicodemus and Christ. However, there are some connections, which I will unpack in a moment, but first let us dwell a moment on verse 17; everyone is familiar – some perhaps overly familiar – with John 3, verse 16, perhaps one of the most famous verses in the Bible, through which many people have come to faith. But its neighbour verse 17 is always in its shadow and deserves an outing – “For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him”. If verse 16 is an invitation to find hope in Christ, verse 17 gives us a pattern of how to behave when, living in that hope, in faith in Christ, we relate to the wider world. God’s purpose is driven by love for the world. It may not always feel like that or appear like that, but as Christians we are called to bring the salvation that God offers to the attention of the world, rather than to condemn it.
John 3 picks up the thought of Numbers 21, where Moses commanded that a snake be lifted up so that those who looked to it could be delivered from the bite of poisonous snakes. The New Testament Christian significance of this image is of course the concept of looking in faith to the cross of Christ, to be delivered and saved from death. Those who look to the crucified saviour can be delivered from sin if they believe in the offer God has made. Belief/faith/trust is the New Testament equivalent of covenant responsibility in the Hebrew Bible. There is a delicate balance to be maintained here. God's offer of salvation in Christ, like his entry into covenant with Israel, depends on God's free choice as creator dealing with creation. The biblical view is that God both demands but also enables our response to him.
In this way God is very like a human mother, who in relation to her children both enables (by her love and care for them) and demands (by her parental influence and discipline) their response to her. To me Psalm 34, while it does not specifically refer to God as a mother, contains many things that we would naturally associate with a motherly role – protection, care, healing, watching out for us. All of these are ways in which our mothers (and our God) love us and provoke in us the response of love and trust.
Whilst we have to believe and trust, which God himself will enable but not compel, it is God's initial grace and not our response that enables the saving action. As St John’s first epistle puts it, we love because he first loved us. Christian theology is full of paradoxes! God offers us salvation, will enable us to enter into it but never compel us to do so. If we decline God's offer, however, we place ourselves in a position where we will be judged for failure to respond to God. This is as much a call to be moral in our dealings with our neighbour as to honour God.
It may seem paradoxical but it still seems to me to be a good pattern of parenting, to inspire mothers and fathers today. For example, I am very aware of the pressure my children are under as vicarage kids – at the age they are now, they have to go to church, and have no choice. However, if one of them expresses doubts or disbelief it is our practice to allow space for that, and to allow for disagreement with our approach to faith. We do not compel our children to follow Christ just because we do so “professionally”, but we provide for them a means by which to follow him as and when they wish to.
And the church, which for me, with respect to the recipients of posies on Mothering Sunday through the ages, is the focus of today’s celebration, has a key role in this. The church provides the context not only for us to freely enter into relationship with God, into salvation, and also the context in which we as parents or even grandparents pass on without compulsion the faith we have received to the next generations of our families. On mothering Sunday it is right to celebrate and pray for mothers, but we ought also to be praying for and celebrating the family of the church, the household of faith.
Using some material by Rev'd Dr Jonathan Knight taken from www.rootsontheweb.com
