Mother's Day reflection


Today is as we know, Mothering Sunday. It was traditionally the Sunday were folk would return to their Mother Church, which was usually the church in which they had been baptised. Servants were given the day off and allowed to return home. There they attended Church and spent the day with their actual mothers and other family members.
These days the tradition has changed somewhat to one were we celebrate mothers and compare the way that God and God’s church care for people.
I think that this is a particularly poignant message given that at the moment so many of us are separated from both our mother’s and our home churches.

We are not however, separated from God, nor can we be.

In this reflection on Mother’s in the Bible I’ll be using a couple of pieces of creative writing which I might have used in a previous podcast. However, I like them and they fit the theme and everyone likes to hear a story even if it’s one we’ve heard before.

The first story that I want to share is based on a mother who isn’t even in the Bible. It is from a story which Jesus told about two sons and their father.
It is sometimes known as the parable of the prodigal son and can be found in Luke’s gospel in the Bible, chapter 15 beginning at verse 11.
The youngest of the two sons decides that he wants his share of his father’s wealth now, rather than wait for his dad to die. The father gives in and presents the youngest son with his money and off the son goes to another country to live it up. A famine strikes the new country, his money runs out and his new friends run out soon after and he is left with nothing.
Faced with the choice between feeding pigs and stealing their leftovers and the option of going home to ask his dad for a job, the son sets out for home, rehearsing his script on the way.
He’ll admit to what he’s done wrong, come to his father not as a son but as a hired hand and hope to get a job.
Dad sees him coming a mile off and welcomes him home with a feast. The big brother is annoyed by this as he thinks his brother has gotten off scot-free and goes off in a huff. The father finds him and explains that everything he has belongs to the older son but his brother was dead and has come back to life and that is something which needs celebrating!
In the parable of the prodigal son why is the mother missing from the story?
The mother may seem to be missing but the actions of the father are more like those of a mother.
In many ways it is really the father that is missing or at least it is by the actions of the father that are missing.
If we say that the father in the story is representative of God then what we are saying is that in some ways God’s natural way of acting towards humanity is as much like that of a mother as that of a father.

Dearest Miriam,
If only you were still with us. You would have known what to do, what to say, how to handle this situation.
When he asked for his inheritance, thereabouts wishing me dead in doing so. I thought he was just blowing off steam. Railing against his old man the way the young do. Only this time he stuck to his guns. So angry, so sure of himself but most of all so desperate to be his own man. He did not want to live in his father’s shadow, always compared to his brother.
After you died I did not know how to fill the gap you left in their lives. Malachi was older and just got on with it, but young Yousef was just so angry. He blamed me for you not being there, he was angry for me not being you.
So when he asked I did not know what else to do, how else to show him that I loved him. So I let him go. He took his money and left, never to be seen again.
Every day after he left I imagined every terrible thing that could have happened to him after he left our care. Saw him dead from robbers, dead from famine or dead from a simple accident I had the power to prevent. I felt how you must have felt every time either of them had gone off alone as they grew up. When they went off to play with the other children and you waited and worked near the doorway so that you could hear them and go running if needed. I thought you foolish then, they couldn’t have come to much harm and they needed to learn. You agreed but said “It would never stop you worrying.”
After Yousef left, I knew how you felt. Imagine my joy then on that day. When, after what had seemed like an eternity of waiting by the doorway for a son I now thought dead. I saw walking slowly down the road not the boy who had run away from home but the man who had walked back to it.
As soon as I saw him my legs were already carrying me forward. How had you restrained yourself all those years when they had come in late or come home hurt? How did you calmly walk over to them and wrap your arms around them? Overcome by the love and joy and relief that you must have felt every day I was running, robes flapping in the wind, sandals flip-flopping on the dusty track. I must have looked a sight!
I didn’t even let him get a word out! How did you manage to listen through their excuses and reasons for their mistakes without bursting out laughing from the joy I knew you had to have them home?
You would have been proud of me Miriam. I was not stern, I did not judge, I didn’t even ask where the money had gone. Our boy, now a grown man was home and he was alive. He had died a thousand times in my nightmares but now he was here resurrected and alive!
We threw a party the likes of which the region has never seen. The fatted calf was killed, for what occasion could be more important to give thanks to God than for a son brought back from death?
Of course Malachi was not happy with all this. I had always been so hard on them both but I always expected the most out of him as the eldest. He is so steadfast, I assured him that his inheritance was secure, the remaining 2/3 of the estate were all his. But how could we not celebrate our family being brought back together.
I realise now that what they needed from me was not just to be the father who commands and instructs and expects great things of them. I also need to be mother, teaching them love, mercy and acceptance. If you had still been here, I don’t think Yousef would have taken so long to come home.
With his mother, mercy was assured. With his father as he saw me, he was afraid to come as anything more than a man in search of work.
So Miriam, my lovely Miriam. Our family is whole once more, our sons home and safe, and the space you left in our lives filled…..by you in me, a complete parent, father and mother, as God is too, for all humankind.
The actions of God or the Father in the story are those of a father at the beginning but a mother at the end. The story reveals the completeness of God’s person and care for humanity.
There are some amazing mothers in the Bible, such as the Mother of Moses. In the book of Exodus, we find out that the Hebrew slaves of Egypt had grown in number so much that Pharaoh and the rest of the Egyptians were afraid of an uprising so Pharaoh gave the order to have all of the baby boys killed so they could not grow up to oppose him.
Moses mother risked everything to ensure the safety of her son, she put her faith in God and gave Moses up so that he could live.

When Mary was a young woman engaged to marry Joseph, the angle Gabriel came to her and told her that she would give birth to Gods son.

Even though doing so would endanger her life, endanger her future marriage and ultimately break her heart as Jesus went to the cross.

These are a couple of story like reflections which I wrote while at college, reflecting on looking after a baby. I wondered how it might have been for Mary as a young woman looking after Jesus as a baby as she dealt with all the things young mothers have to deal with.
How can one tiny baby produce this much poo? On solids for only two days now and his mother is regretting it. It is a curious fact that when you become a parent you become obsessed with poo. Colour. Consistency. Smell. But it is not surprising when they need changing at least ten times a day, this task becomes the skeleton on which the meat of your day hangs.
“At least.” She thinks, “At least, it is bath time.” No need to worry about wiping, let him sit and splash in the warm water.
These are the moments she loves, her and her son, beginning to play. He responds so much more these days and he smiles, most of the time.
He is splashing and laughing happily, so she turns to the bread warming in the oven. The splashing suddenly gets louder and the laughter turns to tears.
“Oh no!” She thinks, turning quickly back to the large slightly cracked bowl where the baby was sitting. Her fears are relieved, he'd only splashed himself in the face and taken him by surprise.
Mary gently lifts Jesus from the bath, cuddling him up in a large warm cloth. She sings soothingly to him and he begins to calm down.

Mary lets out a relieved sigh and returns to her daily routine, punctuated with feeding mashed vegetables and wiping the bottom of the Son of God.
Colic

Jesus is screaming, baby Jesus, purple in the face barely breathing in.......screaming. It is probably 2 in the morning, but the state Mary is in she cannot tell. Jesus has been screaming for what seems to Mary like 4 hours, inconsolable unless moving, bouncing, jiggling. So Mary walks. So Mary walks the miles that parents walk, round in circles, back and forth. Her legs are burning and her arm is numb, Jesus gurgles contentedly by her ear.
Dare she stop? Has he finally settled? Can she, should she sit, lay him down, chance going back to sleep...........Exhaustion makes the decision for her and her knees buckle and Mary sits back into the cushions of the lower room of the house. Silence.....Mary looks into the face of her son, her holy gift, God as man in her care. Jesus eyes are clenched shut, a tear bubbling into the corner of each and his face screwed into a incandescent mask of anguish, his mouth wide and sucking the air from the room....silence and then.....the world ends, with a sound that makes teeth ache and the hearing crackle. It is all Mary can do in the face of this barrage of noise to struggle to her feet and once again begin her slow plod on to infinity.

As Jesus begins to calm and quiet again, Mary hears a different sound from the upper room where Joseph lies sleeping. The sound is long and drawn coming from the lips of Joseph, a sound reminiscent of him sawing wood in his workshop. The sound cuts through Mary and she hates him. “how can he sleep through this?”, “how can he sleep leaving me to do all the work?”
Again she feels the dead weight on her arm, the numbing needles prickling into her fingers and hears the pathetic whimper in her ear.
She has had enough, all she wants to do is sleep, rest, collapse. It would be so much easier if Jesus wasn't here. She remembers that she was once told that his future would be hard for her, and it's this hard now? The thought keeps creeping as the burning creeps through her bones. The thought hisses in her mind, “Would it not be easier if Jesus wasn't here? You could take him outside and just leave him? You could put him by the window and maybe the wild dogs might solve the problem for you?”
Mary begins to move without thinking, limping towards the window. Lifting Jesus down from her shoulder she lays this screaming bundle of rags down and turns to walk away. As she turns, the cloth falls away from Jesus face a little and Mary looks into the face of her son. And a feeling surfaces, louder and stronger than the thoughts, louder than the burning and louder than the screaming. It is love.

With tears of pain, tears of love and tears of frustration stinging her eyes, Mary stoops and picks up her son.

She straightens up, clutches Jesus tight to her breast and resumes her slow stumbling march into the dawn.
---pause---
Jesus mother gives us a model of how we should relate to God.
From the very outset Mary accepts her role, she is given a ministry by GOD and even knowing it will be hard she accepts. We often forget Mary in the reformed tradition but I believe we do so at our peril. She was the first disciple in many ways and she was there until the very end with Jesus.
It would have been Mary who would have taught Jesus the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures. It would have been Mary who would have sat Jesus on her knee and told and retold the stories of GODs relationship with GODs people. She would have been the one who taught him to pray and give thanks.

Although not mentioned in the lost son parable the mothers influence is seen in the actions of the son.
When the Son came to his senses, he remembered what he had been taught. “I have sinned against you and against God” this was not something which a young man learns in Synagogue or in temple. They learn it in the primary place of Jewish worship, their home. They would have learned it not on the temple steps from some Rabbi but from their Mother on her knee.
A number of years ago when the new Methodist Worship book was released there was a big who-ha about it because of one simple word. Individual Churches and even some circuits decided that they would not adopt it simply because of this one word. Clearly it was a very dangerous word which could have caused all manner of problems if it were to be said in Church.
Any idea what that word was?
Mother.
One prayer in the new book had these words.
God our Father and our Mother,
we give you thanks and praise
for all that you have made,
for the stars in their splendour
and the world in its wonder
and for the glorious gift of human life.
With the saints and angels in heaven
we praise your holy name.
I think this was due to the language that has been used by the Bible in describing God and I think people get mixed up between God the Father and God the completeness of the Trinity. Because while Jesus prays to God the father and talks very much about his Father in male terms, GOD as the whole has no gender. The language used to describe the Holy Spirit in the Bibles native languages is either female or gender neutral. In GOD there is then aspects of Father and Mother, GOD is the complete and perfect parent and the model for us to follow in that.
Every man who has been a true Father to someone has shown that someone, something of the nature of GOD. Every woman who has been true Mother to someone has shown them the nature of GOD as well.
Because it is in parenting, whether to children born to us or children that GOD brings into our lives that we show the true unconditional love which we find as a description of GOD in 1 Corinthians 13.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails.
God as father, lets us leave and God the mother rejoices as we come home again.

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This photo was taken by me over a decade ago in China. I was wandering through a market and this grandmother saw me, this big lump of a Westerner lumbering around taking photos of everything as if piles of fruits and vegetables, herbs and spices, were the most amazing thing ever.

She clearly thought that she had something more amazing, and of course she was right. She had with her, her grandchild, dressed in the most pristine and brightly coloured clothing. With an expression of pure pride on her face she held up the child for their photo to be taken.

A simple reminder that the most amazing thing we have is not stuff but our relationships. Family and friends. True gifts of God.

God bless





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