Dear Friends,
Every day can’t be Mother’s Day, but every day we have a mother.
If we have unanswered questions about our own mothers, if we doubt the word “Mother” applies to us in any way, we are in good company.
Motherhood gives rise to a complicated set of relationships.
Jesus had a mother, and we know that he didn’t always have an easy time with her. We have only to look in Chapter 3 of Mark or Chapter 12 of Matthew or Chapter 8 of Luke. In each of these accounts, Mary and his relatives came looking for Jesus, who was already becoming controversial. In Mark 3.21, the relatives of Jesus wanted to take charge of him, convinced he was out of his mind. But when Mary and other relatives tried to take him with them, Jesus replied: “Who are my mother and brothers? Here are my mother and brothers: anyone who does the will of God – that person is my brother and sister and mother.”
That sounds like a rejection of Mary by Jesus – but it wasn’t. Mary knew about doing God’s will, after all, hadn’t she said “yes” to God before Jesus was conceived? Jesus knew about doing God’s will from his mother. So, in his moment, Jesus was telling everyone gathered around in what seemed to be a confrontation, that his mother fit the description of one who does God’s will.
She stood by him as his disciple when other disciples did not. She stood beneath the cross and held his dead body in her arms. Later, on Pentecost, she would be the only one to have received the Holy Spirit in a second significant moment, the first being the annunciation. Mary, who had nudged Jesus into action at Cana, trusted he would be all who was meant to be, even when he seemed to be a failure, condemned and executed.
When Jesus handed the disciple John and Mary to each other at the foot of the cross, he handed Mary another motherhood – the motherhood of all disciples, including you and me.
I think we can draw courage from the way Jesus and Mary worked things out in their mother-son relationship, whether we are mothers, or we think of our mothers, living or dead. Neither mothering nor being someone’s child is easy. Sometimes it takes a lifetime to understand one another, if we even do then, but the mother-child relationship cannot be reversed or undone.
Look at the painting pictured above. Done by a local artist, it is, at one and the same time, touching and humorous. Mama is kissing her child with ardor. The child doesn’t know what to make of it.
In our own lives, what we do with our relationship with our mother, how we grow, given the mothers we have, is not just up to us, although it is in part up to us.
On this day – Mother’s Day – let love have its way, whatever that means. Let the grace of God pour over us, so that we stand in the meaning of mother in the ways that best cause us to be amazed, to rejoice, to heal if need be, to accept and to let our mothers be who they are. Let us be who we are. Let Mary be our guide to a new depth of relationship with her Son, and our own mothers.
~Sister Joan Sobala
