My own relationship with my mother was rocky, at best. It was a complex yarn that will probably, this side of the Kingdom, never get unraveled. Instead, the woman I most remember as mothering is a woman who was well beyond her childbearing years when she took me in. And she died when I was just so young. Pictured here, Sarah was my great-grandmother. She took a precocious little boy and helped to make me the man I am today.
That taught me a lesson.
Women have come and gone through the centuries. Some mothers, grandmothers; others aunts, cousins, sisters; and still others friends. These women come from all walks of life. Yet no matter where they come from or what status they hold, these are women who toil the soil of lives all their living years. Women who worked for hours, days, weeks, months and years, doing work that needed to be done for their own lives, and for the lives of those who love them and whom they love.
Some of them, like my grandmother, never even seeing the fruit of all that work.
But one thing is clear, they got the job done, because we're here living.
And oftentimes doing that work in a silence that screams down through history. Because oftentimes they never had the luxury of a freedom for living. Many felt their work was fate, and so it was their duty. Perhaps, as a result, they also carried some resentment -- and rightly so. Because as Sojourner Truth so rightly remanded: "Ain't a woman?"
So today, as we prepare for "Mother's Day", I want to celebrate not only the mothers and grandmothers, but the sisters, cousins, and friends, who have given so much, worked so hard, and done so boldly and with the courage of a new day.
Like I said, I know lots of folks will be quoting Proverbs 31 over the next day or so.
Me? I think John 19.25-27:
Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son." Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother." And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.What always strikes me about this little scene are the women. Mary, especially, a mother whose role in the gospel of John is so short. She really only appears twice. The first is that strange event in chapter 2, then nothing until her mention again in chapter 11. Then skip to chapter 19. We remember her more at Christmas, giving birth to Jesus. But John? John remembers her too, staying with her son through his death. And her honored place as Jesus' mother is expanded -- she becomes not just Jesus' mother, but "the beloved disciple"'s mother, too.
So there's more going on here than Jesus' death. What we see is the beautiful Mary, a woman who becomes not just Jesus' mother, not just a faithful disciple, but also the mother of others -- of us all in the Church. If we accept that John wrote Revelation, and that there is a common symbolism between the two books, we can read in Revelation 12 that the "woman" is a symbol of the mother of the Messiah as well as the mother of other "children" who "keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus". In Revelation, the "woman" is clearly Mary, with the implication that Mary, by birthing the Messiah, is the mother of the Church too. So Mary stands for the Church and is a model disciple; she and the church are central figures in God's work to bring redemption to the earth. By calling Mary "woman", Jesus is acknowledging her centrality in God's saving work. As the Fathers of the Church liked to say, if Jesus is the second Adam, Mary is the second Eve; if God is our Father, the Church is our mother.
Jesus makes our salvation possible on the cross, but he does so with Mary and the beloved disciple standing there in support. See, Mary -- Mary is the great mother of us all.
When I think "Mother's Day", I hardly think Proverbs 31. Instead, I think Mary. I think all those women -- mothers and grandmothers, sure, but also friends, sisters, cousins -- who have given so much, done so much, at great cost to themselves, and made the life we live possible.
So this weekend my tribute is to all of them.