Posts Tagged ‘Jesus as Mother’

Jesus our mother

August 28, 2021

Pentecost 13 – 2021
John 6:56-69
Marian Free

In the name of God who is always beyond our capacity to fully know. Amen.

On Friday I attended a virtual seminar titled “Speaking of Christ, Christa, Christx”. I imagine that for a great many, if not all of you, the presentations would have been challenging and confronting especially if you were being exposed to these ideas for the first time. Having begun my biblical studies at a time when feminism was beginning to make an impact on the ways in which theology and the bible were studied, I found the day stimulating and refreshing. As the title of the seminar suggests, the papers were based around the idea that just as God is genderless, so too is the Christ. That is, while it is undeniable that Jesus inhabited a male body, the second person of the Trinity represents all humanity, in all its expressions. We affirm this Sunday by Sunday in the words of the Nicene Creed when we say: “Jesus became truly human”.

The idea that Jesus can represent both the masculine and the feminine is not new, but was a view commonly held in the Middle Ages. At that time in history the focus of the church was on the fate of the individual at the point of death and in particular on judgement and hell. In both literature and the visual arts lurid depictions of hell included such things eternally burning fire, demons with pitchforks and screaming human beings.

In reaction to this emphasis on hell and therefore on a demanding, oppressive, and even cruel God a number of things happened.
• The idea of purgatory was developed – a place between heaven and hell in which the (imperfect) soul could be purified and so achieve the state of holiness required to enter heaven.
• Devotion to Mary grew. In Mary the general populace found a softer, feminine force who could intercede with a forbidding God on their behalf.
• It was not only Mary who represented the feminine. The second person of the Trinity came to characterise the feminine aspect of God. Julian of Norwich for example consistently spoke of Jesus as mother. She writes: “our true Mother Jesus, he alone bears us for joy and for endless life. So, he carries us within him in love. The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself.” In a similar vein Anselm of Canterbury wrote: “Jesus, as a mother you gather your people to you; you are gentle with us as a mother with her child.” (For the full version of this poem see p428 of your prayer book).

All these things I know from my study of Medieval History and Friday’s seminar did not revisit these concepts but explored new ideas relevant to our time and place in history. Something that particularly piqued my interest was a paper that claimed that the earliest images of Christ included the feminine. Of course, I have not had time to follow this up with my own research, but I should not have been surprised. The Christ hymn, with which John’s gospel begins speaks of Jesus as Word or wisdom/Sophia. We first come across Sophia in the book of Proverbs in which wisdom/Word/Sophia is unequivocally female. In Proverbs 1 we read: “Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
21 At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks (Proverbs 1:20,21). Wisdom is co-creator with God and exists from the beginning with God – language later appropriated in the Christ hymn.

What was new to me – and this is where the seminar meets today’s gospel – was the claim that the images that we find in John 6 of eating flesh and drinking blood were, in the earliest post-resurrection days, associated with breast feeding. While I would have to read more to confirm this, it fits with the imagery later used by Julian of Norwich who compares partaking of the sacrament with breast-feeding. Indeed, the imagery of idea of pregnancy and breast feeding is very compelling and much less offensive than that of consuming actual flesh and blood. In the womb the unborn child is sustained by the blood of the mother and after birth, the child feeds from the breast. A child exists because it feeds off the flesh and blood of its mother.

However we understand Jesus’ imagery of eating flesh and drinking blood, it is quite clear that his audience found his language offensive. As I said last week, eating an animal with its blood was absolutely forbidden in Jewish law. Jesus’ language was so confronting that many of his disciples turned back. They could understand the miracle of the manna in the wilderness. That did not require any leap of the imagination. While it was not actual bread, the manna was edible, and it did sustain the Israelites through their long journey in the desert. What the people didn’t seem to understand was that while manna was physical and visible, its effects were temporary. Manna could sustain earthly existence, bodily flesh, what it could not do was feed the spirit or offer life beyond the grave. In his imagery of eating flesh and drinking blood, Jesus challenged his followers to consume those things that are spiritual and that prepare and equip a person for eternity.

I understand that the image of a genderless Christ may not speak to you. The point of my illustration is this, that whether we like them or not, we should never completely close ourselves to new ideas, to new ways of seeing. Many of those who followed Jesus simply could not embrace anything new. Their imaginations were limited to what they could see and feel and as a consequence, they turned away from a relationship with Jesus that we know to be life-giving and sustaining.

The lesson of today’s gospel is this: if we hold on to what we think we know, if confine our understanding to physical realities and if we hold on to earthly ways of thinking, we will be no different from those who turned away from Jesus and from Jesus’ difficult sayings. We will close the door on new possibilities for relationship and for being.

The unknowable God is constantly revealing God’s self to those who are willing expose themselves to new ideas, new ways of knowing God. Faith after all is a journey, not a destination. My prayer for all of us is that we will continue to deepen and to grow our relationship with the living God – Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver – however uncomfortable and challenging that may be.

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Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver

May 25, 2013

Trinity Sunday 2013

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Romans 1:1-5, John 16

Marian Free

 

In the name of God, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver. Amen.

The MIddle Ages was a time in which there was a great flowering of spirituality.  After the morbidity and fear of the Dark Ages, in which judgement and hell were predominant religious themes, the spiritual tenor of the Middle Ages was an understanding of God’s love and Jesus’ saving passion. The spirituality of the time was more intimate and forgiving. God was not envisaged as a distant judge but a close and familiar friend.

Many of our favourite and most well-known saints belong to this period of history – Francis and Claire of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Sienna – to mention a few. The spirit of the age was such that it not only saw the emergence of mystics and saints, but also the renewal of faith of much of the general population. This was demonstrated by the number of people in all walks of life who went on pilgrimages and by the groups of women (Beguines) who, while not entering a religious order, lived together in community.

One of the expressions of spirituality at that time was that of anchorite. Men and women had built for themselves single rooms attached to churches or Cathedrals in which they confined themselves for the remainder of their lives – praying, meditating and reading their scriptures. Julian of Norwich was one such person[1]. Little is known of Julian except that when she was thirty and a half, in 1373 she was ill to the point of death. During this time she had a series of revelations (Showings in her terminology) which she recorded in both a shorter and a longer account. It is through these writings that she is known to us.

The church emerged from the bleakness of the Dark Ages with an image of God that was less distant and wrathful, more forgiving and understanding, full of tenderness and compassion. Julian’s experience of God reflects this trend. Perhaps the most powerful illustration of this is the illustration which imagines God as a mother who may sometimes allow a child to fall, for its own benefit, but who can never suffer any kind of peril to come to her child because of her love. On the other hand, the child, when it is distressed and frightened, runs quickly to his mother (300).

Even though Julian claims to be uneducated, the style of her writing and her knowledge of scripture indicate otherwise. For example, though her language is vastly different, her theology is not too dissimilar to that found in the readings from Proverbs and Romans today (the presence of Wisdom, or the second person of the Trinity at creation, the delight that the Trinity takes in creation and the notion that God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit).

Julian’s homely and familiar relationship with God embraces her understanding of God as Trinity which is expressed in such language as God’s courtesy, that God loves us tenderly and that there is no wrath in God only endless goodness and friendship. The relationship is mutual. Just as the Trinity rejoices in humanity, so the Trinity fills our heart with the greatest joy (181). In fact joy, bliss and delight are words that are repeated in Julian’s description of the relationship between God and humanity. Her experience tells us of God’s confidence in and presence in us: “we are in God and God is in us” (286). When the Trinity created us, he “joined and united us to himself and through this union we are kept as pure and as noble as we were created” (293).

The Trinity, a concept that many of us tend to make hard work of, seems to have been as natural as breathing to Julian. That God is one and God is three, is the basis of her faith. She doesn’t labour over the nature of the relationship, but it is clear from what she writes that she did not think of God in any other way. While she speaks of the individual persons of the Trinity, it is clear that her concept of God is primarily Trinitarian.  For example, she can say: “the Trinity is God and God is the Trinity. The Trinity is our maker, our protector, our everlasting lover, our endless joy and our bliss, from our Lord Jesus Christ and in our Lord Jesus Christ.” (181)

All members of the Trinity are all engaged in our creation and all take delight in humankind and “it is their greatest delight that we rejoice in the joy which the blessed Trinity has in our creation.”(286)  “God the blessed Trinity, who is everlasting being, just as he is eternal from without beginning, just so was it in his eternal purpose to create human nature, which fair nature was first prepared for his own Son, the second person, and when he wished, by full agreement of the whole Trinity he created us all at once.” (293)

Interestingly, though Julian refers to Jesus as “he”, she constantly refers to the second person of the Trinity as “Mother”.  This was consistent with the spirit of the time which, in reaction to the harsh and distant God of the previous generation, discovered in Jesus the love and compassion often attributed to a mother. So for example, Julian can say: “As truly as God is our Father, so truly is God our Mother. Our Father wills, our Mother works, our good Lord the Holy Spirit confirms. In these three is all our life: nature, mercy and grace (296).” “And so in our making, God almighty is our loving Father, and God all wisdom is our loving Mother, with the love and goodness of the Holy Spirit, which is all one God, one Lord” (293).

It is too easy to dismiss the Trinity as difficult to understand or explain. Mystics like Julian remind us that it is not a concept to be feared, but to be embraced; to know ourselves known and loved by God – Father, Son and Spirit, Earth-Maker, Pain-Bearer and Life-Giver, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier.  Three persons, one God whose creative power breathed us into being, whose saving power restored us and whose in-dwelling presence continues to fill us with love and joy.

[1] Colledge, Edmund, O.S.A., Walsh, James, S.J. Julian of Norwich: Showings. The Western Classics of Christianity. New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1978.

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