Luke 13:1-9
I am convinced that one
of the most powerful forces in all the universe is a mother’s prayers for her
children. An inspirational example of the efficacy of such prayer comes from the
life of Saint Monica, the mother of Saint Augustine. Of all of the children she
bore, it was Augustine that proved to be the source of the greatest anxiety for
Monica. Augustine was not always a saint in fact in his early days he lived a
pretty rock n’ roll life style of womanizing, heavy drinking, and partying. He
even got sucked into a religious cult called Manicheism. In his
autobiographical work, the Confessions, St. Augustine writes that through it
all his mother never gave up on him, but continued to pray for his conversion.
In her agony for the soul of her son, Monica sought the council of Bishop
Ambrose who told her, “God’s time will come. Go now, it is not possible that
the son of so many tears should perish.”
If you are a mother who
worries for her troubled children, you should be encouraged by the story of
Saint Monica. Not only did her son finally accept the Christian faith, but he went
on to become one of its most powerful and articulate defenders, a Bishop and a
doctor of the Church.
The love of a mother is
often the Hound of Heaven in the life of a wayward son. The country singer
Merle Haggard said it best,
I turned twenty-one in prison doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but Mama tried, Mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better, but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame 'cause Mama tried
There is perhaps no
better image of the relentless, unwavering, way that God’s grace pursues us in
our sinfulness. We address God as Father—I believe it is appropriate for us to
do so not least because that is what Jesus taught us to do. I think it would be
a mistake to change the Lord’s Prayer from ‘Our Father’ to ‘Our Mother’ like
some liturgical revisionist suggest—yet nevertheless there is a maternal as
well as a paternal side to God. God, as an eternal spirit, transcends the
categories of gender. Both male and female, fatherhood and motherhood, find
their source, their virtue, beauty and truth in their creator. Both man and
woman were created in the image of God and both are meant to represent him in
their unique way.
The Bible at times uses
maternal language to speak of God’s loving-kindness. For instance Isaiah writes,
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on
the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Isa
49:15), and “As one whom his mother comforts, so will I comfort you” (Isa
66:13).
Nowhere is God’s motherly
compassion and tender mercy better seen than in our Lord Jesus Christ who says
to his rebellious people, “How often have I desired to gather your children
together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Indeed many spiritual writers and theologians, such as Saint Anselm and Julian
of Norwich, have spoken of the motherhood of Christ. The metaphor of Christ as mother is appropriate
in a number of ways.
First, Christ is the
one that his people run to for protection from danger and comfort in sorrow. A
mother hen will gladly sacrifice her own safety for the protection of her
young. If a fox or some other predator sneaks into the hen house the mother
will call her young to her and shelter them with her own body, putting herself
between them and the danger. The chicks will instinctively run to her for
safety and shelter. In the same way Christ puts himself, his own body, between
us and our sins. He bears the brunt of their consequences on our behalf. He
yearns that his people might run to him for safety and protection.
The mother is the
fiercest and most selfless protector of her young. For instance no one wants to
get between a mama grizzly and her cubs! The mother’s bosom is the universal
place of safety and security. When we are endangered, when we are perplexed,
when we are sorrowful, Christ wants us to find our solace in him. He covers us
with his righteousness when we are fallen in sin, he shields us when we are
attacked by temptation and despair. As Psalm 91 says, “He will cover you with
his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will
be your shield and rampart.”
Secondly, the
motherhood of Christ is seen in the fact that he washes, feeds, and nurtures
us. It is one of the wonders of nature that a mother is able to nourish her
child with her own body. Julian of Norwich
writes,
“The mother may suckle
her children with her own milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he feeds us with
himself. And he does this most courteously, with much tenderness, with the
Blessed Sacrament that is our precious food of true life. And with the sweet
sacraments he sustains us with every mercy and grace.”
Just as an infant
depends on his mother for all his needs, so are we dependent on Christ. He
cares for us in our helplessness just as a mother cares for her young. He washes us in baptism and the
blood of his cross and feeds us with his own body and blood.
One of the oldest
symbols for Christ, dating back at least to the second century, is that of a
Pelican feeding her chicks. The image is actually rooted in an ancient legend
that predates Christianity. The legend was that in a time of famine a mother
pelican actually tore pieces of her own flesh out to feed her starving young
with her flesh and blood. In one version of the story the mother bird revives
her chicks from death. The Church embraced this story as an image of Jesus’
motherly love for his people and it became a fixture in church architecture.
Third, and finally,
Christ is our mother because he suffers the pains of labor to bring forth a new
creation. Jesus spoke of his own imminent suffering in terms of a mother’s
labor pains. He said, “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her
time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her
joy that a child is born into the world.”
In the same way, Jesus
considered the agony of his passion to be pure joy on account of the new
creation account of the new creation it brought about. He bore each of us, our
sin, our guilt, our shame, in his own body on the cross. He considered the pain
to be worth it in order that we might be born again and saved from the power of
sin and death.
When Christ died on the
cross, a roman soldier pierced his side and out gushed blood and water. The
Church Fathers see great spiritual significance in this fact. Blood and water,
they say, represent the two chief sacraments of the Church, the Eucharist and
Holy Baptism. Just as Eve was taken from the side of Adam, so here is the
Church born from the bleeding side of Christ. We are the children of his labor
and passion.
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