The Sixth Sunday of Easter
May 9, 2021
The Rev. Christine Gilson
Today is both Mothers’ Day and Rogation Sunday symbols of love and self-giving, of fertility and prayers for good growth and bountiful harvest. To top it off, yesterday the Church celebrated Julian of Norwich, whose words about the mothering love of God have resonated with Christians and others for more than 700 years.
It’s not surprising we don’t often think about God and mothering together, but I began to understand the connection when I had my daughter. I recognized it one day as I was holding her, and realized that no matter what she did, I would love her even to death. I began to understand in a real way that what I felt was an image, however faint, of God’s love toward humankind. If I, who am so flawed a human being, could love my child, how much more could my heavenly father/mother love me. Of course my understanding was not only true of mothers as female, but of fathers as well, in their nurturing and “mothering” care for their children.
Which brings us to Julian of Norwich. All we really know about Julian is that
for most of her life she was an anchorite who lived by herself in a cell attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich. She is also the first woman who can be identified as having written in English. She was born about 1342 and in 1373 when she was deathly ill she received visions – “showings” of “Revelations of Divine Love,” which has been in print for a long time.
She lived and wrote at a time not unlike ours, political and social upheaval, almost unbearable anxiety. The Hundred Years’ War, that people thought would never end, was in progress. The Bubonic Plague had killed millions and millions of people. People were preoccupied with sin and damnation, and superstitions. There was little economic stability. The institutional church was in upheaval. The old reliable certainties of centuries past were weakened, the wrath of God seemed to be raining on the world, and there was no lack of preachers to tell the people that “the end was near,” because God was a vengeful God.
Into this chaos Julian of Norwich bore a message of God’s love, hope, care and ultimate joy for all of creation. She may well have been influenced by the same scriptures that we read today:
“Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood.” “Jesus said to his disciples, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”
Julian believed that all of God’s revelation is love. She writes, “Love was (our Lord’s) meaning.” All was shown to her for love, by love. Because of Love, the Lord told her, in those now-familiar word, that “I can make all things well; I will make all things well; I shall make all things well; and thou canst see for thyself that all manner of things shall be well.”
One way in which God reveals God’s love is through Jesus as a mother. Julian was by no means the first to envision Jesus with motherly qualities, but her descriptions are some of the most tender and lasting. Julian does not think that Jesus was “a woman” – she is perfectly aware that in his incarnation he was a man; but in his qualities of mercy he was “mother.” She has no trouble saying “He is our mother.” To be sure, Julian had an exalted view of motherhood in some of her sayings. No human mother is perfect, all of us know that. But Christ, in his divine perfection,
embodies all the best of motherhood.
Julian says, “And our Saviour is our true mother in whom we are eternally born and by whom we shall always be enclosed.” “So in our making, God almighty is our father by nature; and God all wisdom is our mother by nature along with the love and goodness of the Holy Ghost; and these are all one God, one Lord.” “The great power of the Trinity is our father, and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, and the great love of the Trinity is our lord.”
Furthermore, God’s dealings with human sin are motherly.
“But often when our falling and our wretched sin is shown to us, we are so terrified and so very ashamed that we hardly know where to put ourselves. But then our kind Mother does not want us to run from him, there is nothing he wants less. But he wants us to behave like a child; for when it is hurt or frightened it runs to its mother for help as fast as it can; and he wants us to do the same, like a humble child, saying, ‘My kind Mother, my gracious Mother, my dearest Mother, take pity on me. I have made myself dirty and unlike you, and I neither may nor can remedy this without your special help and grace.’”
Julian believed that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ gives himself to us in the same way a mother gives herself to us. Our mothers give their lives for us when we are born, and Christ gave himself for us in his death and resurrection.
She understands the agony of the crucifixion as an act of giving birth by which human beings, born of their human mothers to pain and death are reborn through Christ’s pangs and sufferings to the promise of heavenly bliss. And as a mother gives milk for her infant to drink, Jesus gives us himself as food in the sacrament – “the precious food of life itself.”
So when we celebrate Eucharist, let us remember especially remember the mothering image of God. In communion, may we feel surrounded by the mothering, nurturing presence of Christ, and make these words of Julian our own: “Let us flee to our Lord and we shall be comforted. Let us touch him, and we shall be made clean. Let us cleave to him, and we shall be sure and safe from every kind of peril.” And all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.