Dcn Leah Sandwell-Weiss

Dear friends,

Mother’s Day is coming up this weekend. For many of us it’s a time to celebrate our mothers, for others a time to mourn their loss, for others a time to reflect on those who filled the role of mother. We all have an image of the ideal mother, and for those of us who’ve had children, we tend to measure ourselves against that ideal.

But there’s another image of motherhood that we should know about:  Jesus as mother. While I was vaguely aware of some scripture that hints at this, I was intrigued at last month’s College of Clergy meeting when The Rev’d Paula Datsko read a meditation on the topic. I told myself that I needed to find out more.

Then I found myself working on this Daily Bread on Julian of Norwich and discovered again that there are no coincidences. I knew a little, as perhaps many of you do, about Julian. She was an exact contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer, living from around 1342 to at least 1416. If you’ve heard of her, you may only be familiar with the most familiar quotations from her writings:  “Sin is necessary, but all will be well, and all will be well, and every kind of thing will be well.[*]

Julian had a set of visions of Jesus and God over the course of a day or two; she called these visions “showings,” and she wrote about them in a brief text shortly after they occurred in 1373 and around 20 years later in a longer text. This Long Text contains most of her linking of motherhood and Christ; here are three examples:

So our Lady [Mary] is our mother, in whom we are all enclosed and born of her in Christ, for she who is mother of our saviour is mother of all who are saved in our saviour; and our saviour is our true Mother, in whom we are endlessly born and out of whom we shall never come.

[A]s 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.

And so Jesus is our true Mother in nature by our first creation, and he is our true Mother in grace by his taking our created nature. All the lovely works and all the sweet loving offices of beloved motherhood are appropriated to the second person, for in him we have this godly will, whole and safe forever, both in nature and in grace, from his own goodness proper to him.[†]

There is so much more to these showings than I can mention here—I highly recommend reading them and the many books and articles about her and her theology, not just of the motherhood of Jesus, but of sin and of the trinity. I plan to read more myself.

Lord God, in your compassion you granted to the Lady Julian many revelations of your nurturing and sustaining love: Move our hearts, like hers, to seek you above all things, for in giving us yourself you give us all; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

—Dcn Leah

[*] Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: Showings, ed. Richard J. Payne, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, (Paulist Press, 1978), Long Text, Ch. 27.

[†] Id., Long Text Chapters 57 – 59.