Secular culture tells us that today is Mother’s Day. Mother’s Day is an American day of thanksgiving for mothers that dates back a little over 100 years, to the early years of the 20th Century. The Church, on the other hand, says that today, the 4th Sunday of Lent, is Mothering Sunday and that is a Christian celebration of motherhood which dates back to at least 1,200 years to the 8th Century. So today, we in the Church, are not keeping Mother’s Day, but celebrating Mothering Sunday. So what’s the difference?
The origins of Mothering Sunday lie in the old lectionary texts for the day from Isaiah 66, Psalm 122 and Galatians 4. Those readings speak of Jerusalem as ‘mother’ and of God comforting his people, “As a mother comforts her child…” In Medieval times it became a custom for people, inspired by the words of the psalm, “Let us go to the house of the Lord!” to go in procession to their ‘mother church’, which was usually the local cathedral. Later, in post-Reformation days in this country, the idea of ‘mother church’ was extended to include the parish church in which people had been baptised, and the much later custom of allowing domestic staff to have a day off on the 4th Sunday of Lent wasn’t so much so that they could visit their biological mothers, although they did that too, but to allow them to visit their mother church. And the practice of doing that became known as ‘mothering’, hence the name given to the day, Mothering Day, and eventually, Mothering Sunday. So whilst these days Mothering Sunday and Mother’s Day mean the same thing for many people, in origin and intent, they’re very different celebrations.
But today, in the Church as well as in secular culture, we think about mothers and give thanks for our mothers. But as well as thinking about the Church as our mother today, it’s customary too to think about the Blessed Virgin Mary as our mother, and we do that in a few different ways. Primarily of course, we think Mary as the mother of our Lord but, through his incarnation, we think of Jesus as our brother and so by extension, we think of Mary as our mother too. We also think of Mary as our mother because in his words from the Cross when Jesus gave her into the keeping of his beloved disciple as his mother and he into her keeping as her son, the Church has come to view Mary, again by extension, as the mother of all Christians. And as the mother of Jesus who is the head of the Church, we also think of Mary as the mother of the Church.
It’s often said, isn’t it, that there’s no love like a mother’s love? And that’s something that’s often applied to Mary as an exemplar of a mother’s love. We say this because of her ‘Yes’ to God in accepting her vocation to be the mother of his Son, and through her support of Jesus despite the sword, and probably many swords, which pierced her soul along the way.
It’s also said though, that Mary was enabled to do these things because she’d been specially prepared by God so that she could fulfil this particular vocation. And what’s meant by that isn’t that she was given the particular gifts that she needed in the way that we believe all Christians are, but that through a singular act of grace, God gave to Mary a gift unique to her. But therein lies a problem, two problems actually, both a real theological problem about the Incarnation, and a potential problem about Mary herself.
The theological problem concerns the humanity of Jesus. Both scripture and the Christian faith tell us that Jesus was fully human, and that it was essential that he was. He had to be just like every other human being in order to take our sins upon himself and remove them through his Passion and Cross. But Jesus took his humanity from Mary and if her humanity was not the same as ours, neither was his. So whatever gifts Mary was given by God to enable her to fulfil her vocation to be the mother of his Son, they can’t have changed her humanity; Mary had to be just like us too. Otherwise we veer towards a belief that was once expressed to me by someone in the Church that Jesus was so much better than us because Mary was so different to us. That simply cannot be the case, the Christian faith as we know and understand it collapses if that is the case.
The other problem is that if we say Mary was so prepared by God that there was no question or doubt that she would say ‘Yes’ when she was told she’d been chosen to be the mother of God’s Son, we can actually devalue her ‘Yes’ to God and render it meaningless because, to all intents and purposes, we’ve taken away Mary’s free will, and her ability to choose to say, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. We make Mary’s ‘Yes’ to God the pre-programmed function of an automaton. And if we do that then we can’t talk about Mary ‘Yes’ to God as being an act of love because without free will, without the ability and freedom to choose to love or not to love, there can be no love.
Let me put it this way. In the Gospels, Jesus says,
“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.“
In the same way that Solomon was praised for his glory, we praise people for what we might see as theirs. So, for example, if we see someone who’s clearly made a great effort to look good, and smart, with nice clothes and hair, good make-up, nice smelling perfume or after shave, we might praise them for it. And we’d do that because that person had made a choice to spend time and effort on their appearance. But no matter how lovely a flower looks or smells, there’s no praise, no personal praise, due to that or any flower for looking and smelling so nice because there’s no choice, no free will involved. The flower hasn’t made any conscious effort to look and smell as it does, it looks and smells that way simply because it’s a flower and that’s how flowers look and smell.
And so, if we’re going to praise and glorify Mary for her ‘Yes’ to God we must, always remember that it must have been her free choice; Mary must have been able to say ‘No’. And if that wasn’t the case then there was no love involved in Mary’s ‘Yes’ to God and no praise due to Mary for saying ‘Yes’ either. And it’s the same when we think about Jesus’ Passion and Cross.
In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says,
“…as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.”
Jesus is the Messiah and what happened to him was what was scripture said would happen to him. But nevertheless, Jesus had a choice. His temptation in the wilderness tells us he had a choice. His decision to go to Gethsemane on the night of his arrest knowing that Judas knew he’d be there and would lead the authorities straight to him tells us he had a choice. His agony in the garden tells us he had a choice and also what a very difficult choice it was. His refusal to defend himself before Pilate when Pilate was looking for a reason to let Jesus go free tells us he had a choice. Jesus could have said ‘No’ to God so many times, but he didn’t, he freely chose to be lifted up on the Cross in love and obedience to God his Father and out of love for us.
We always have to remember that Mary had a choice and Jesus had a choice. They were both given a vocation by God and they both freely chose to say ‘Yes’ and accept their vocation. And we have exactly the same choice. Each and every one of us will have been called and will be called again by God to carry out some task for him, and when that call comes we have a choice; we can either say ‘Yes’ or we can say ‘No’. We can choose to take up our cross and follow Jesus or we can lay our cross down, or even refuse to pick it up in the first place and say ‘No’ to our invitation to follow Jesus. It’s our choice.
It is said that there’s no love like a mother’s love but actually there is. There’s a love that exceeds all others, the love of a God who sent his Son into the world to save a people who’d rejected his love time and time again, and to save us who still reject his love today. And there’s the love of God’s Son who freely chose to be lifted up on a Cross and die to save those people who rejected his love then and to save us who still reject his love today. On this Mothering Sunday when it’s become customary to respond to the love of our mothers for us by showing some token of appreciation for their love, we might spare some time to think about how we’re going to respond to the love of God and his Son for us. How are we going to show our appreciation of their love for us? Are we going to respond with love as Mary and Jesus did by doing what they ask of us, or are we going to spurn their love and turn away when they call us to do something for them? That’s the choice we’re all faced with, and it is our choice; it’s up to us how we respond. So when that call comes, are we going to say ‘Yes’ to God, or are we going to say ‘No’ to God?
Amen.
Propers for the 4th Sunday of Lent (Mothering Sunday) 10th March 2024
Entrance Antiphon
Rejoice, Jerusalem!
Be glad for her, you who love her;
rejoice with her, you who mourned for her,
and you will find contentment at her consoling breasts.
The Collect
Merciful Lord,
absolve your people from their offences,
that through your bountiful goodness
we may all be delivered from the chains of those sins,
which by our frailty we have committed;
grant this, heavenly Father,
for Jesus Christ’s sake, our blessed Lord and Saviour,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)
Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-23
Psalm 137:1-6
Ephesians 2:4-10
John 3:14-21
RCL (St Gabriel’s)
Numbers 21:4-9
Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Ephesians 2:1-10
John 3:14-21
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 