The ConneXion

For those of you would were at our Sunday service, you will (hopefully) remember that we discussed a strange claim that the bible makes, namely, that we are all called to be mother’s. We looked at Matthew 12:50 where Jesus says, “…whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother…” and we looked at Galatians 4:19 where Paul notes to the Galatians that he is “…again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you”. What radical claims this Gospel makes! Yes, biological mother’s stand as significant signs of God’s grace and creative love being poured out continually into creation. And yet, at the same time, this grace and creative love is totally beyond anything that biology can determine or limit. In fact, God’s grace and creative love reconfigure the world, not in terms of biological categories, but in terms of the expansive love of Jesus and the Kingdom of Heaven. In Jesus and in the Kingdom, terms like “mother,” “brother,” and “sister” become linked to all who love the way that Jesus loves and we know that Jesus’ love is seen in his ability to birth possibility where it had not been there before.

A stunning modern day picture of this comes from the film Children of Men where, in the most powerful scene in the movie, the main character Theo leads the only mother left on the planet, with her newborn baby, through a throng of people at war. When the baby cries, all of the gunshots cease, all of the screaming subsides, and for once, people are mesmerized by the crying of a child. This is a beautiful picture of what it looks like for all of us to carry the Christ into the messiest and darkest situations the world throws at us. This is what it looks like for us to be in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed throughout the world. May we all be inspired, this mother’s day, to be Mother’s.