Hosea 11:1-4, 8-9; Psalm 32; Matthew 23:37-39; 2 Timothy 1:1-10
It's Mothering Sunday again - doesn't it come round fast? - time again for us to reflect on our mothers, our own mothering abilities, and the mothering ways of God. Someone mentioned in a meeting I was in yesterday that in many churches, a lot more women than men come to church; I suspect that's partly because, since the time when the second letter to Timothy was written, faith has often been passed down through the generations from mother to child - in Timothy's case, from his grandmother Lois through his mother Eunice to himself, their grandson.
And that in its turn is because still today, the parent who initially looks after a new child in the family, and who starts to teach that child what life is about, will often be the mother. There are some lovely Renaissance pictures of Jesus being taught to read by his mother Mary - and though they're learning with an illuminated book of Communion services and not a Hebrew Bible, that catches the spirit of understanding passed from mother to child. Of course, there are honourable exceptions - just think of the Middleton family coming to church: Ray the grandfather, Rob the father who spoke to us last year about his experience of fatherhood and his three sons; Joshua, and the twins Thomas and Harry. And of course there are men who bring up small children with great tenderness. But in general, the mother gets in first with her view of the world, and that can have enormous influence on us and our adult lives. As a knock-on effect, how our mothers dealt with us in early childhood may have an unexamined effect on how we think of God - unexamined, because mostly the traditional biblical pictures of God are masculine, but all the more powerful for that. If our mother was perfectionist and controlling, wanting us to be perfectly behaved on all occasions, we may end up thinking that God will only love us if we get things right. If our mother was cold and distant, we may find it hard to believe that God cares about us either. But if our mother was hospitable to all sorts of people, we may find it easier to believe God loves people who are not like us at all.
But before the mothers among us start to feel self-conscious, which is not at all my purpose this morning - motherhood is an amazing calling from God, and one I know myself to be totally unsuited to - let's take a bit of a detour and look at Jesus' own mothering skills. I'll admit there's not much in the Gospels to indicate that Jesus thought of himself as a mother, but the short passage from Matthew's Gospel we heard this morning does show how he uses this metaphor, among so many others, to try to get across to people who he is and why he's come among us.
You'll remember a few weeks ago Jesus warning his friends that if they're to follow him, they must take up their own crosses. Now we get another foreshadowing of his suffering to come. Even before Jesus enters Jerusalem in triumph, with everyone apparently on his side, he knows it's not going to be a simple happy ending. We've thought of God as a mother giving her toddler the freedom to walk and fall over and get up again, tethered only by leading reins. Now as he looks over his beloved city, knowing in his heart that his good news of God's love for all will be ignored, that rather than coming together like chicks clustering under their mother's wing, people will choose to stay separated from God and from each other, Jesus is more like a mother of a teenager going wrong.
It must be heartrending when you've given birth to a child, and mothered that child into the beginnings of adult life, to see them going down paths you would not have chosen for them. It must take great self-control not to rage, not to accuse of folly and ingratitude, not to try to lock them into their bedroom till they've seen sense, not to give up on someone who seems to have thrown back in your face all you've given them through the years. But though Jesus' words show sorrow and regret for the path that all around him were to tread, he does not take from them their freedom to make mistakes, even though the consequences will fall on his shoulders. That may strike us as strange. If Jesus could do miracles, why could he not, for their own good, just compel people to understand and follow him?
For some insight into an answer to this, we could do worse than look at our psalm this morning: the story of someone who has gone wrong, has made a clean breast of their mistakes to God, and has been renewed and restored to God's friendship.
It begins with the obvious but still necessary comment that when we have gone wrong, the first thing to do is to admit it, rather than digging a deeper hole for ourselves. That's not just to get a difficult part of the exercise over with - it's also an inordinate psychological pressure on us if we try to deny what we really know to be true, one which drains our strength, as the psalmist puts it. Once we have addressed our mistakes, when matters are clear between God and us, there will be no self-constructed barriers of embarrassment between us when we are really in need of God's help. But the part of the psalm that I'd like to draw our attention to here comes next: Don't be like a beast of burden, God warns us, an animal that will only go in the right direction if their rider drags on the reins. Because we are people, made in God's image, God refuses to direct us forcibly. It's up to us to respond freely to God's maternal touch of love on our lives by the sorts of choices we make. For when the relationship between mother and child works the way it should - and here I'm not talking emotional blackmail- we may hesitate to go wrong, just because we know how much that would upset our mother.
Of course, our own mothers are not superhuman, so they do not always know what is right for us. If they have brought us up well, they will have equipped to make our own decisions in adulthood, which may be very different from theirs. But if our grandmothers and mothers have by their upbringing and example given us a flavour of Jesus' love, they have put us onto the right path. It's not a trouble-free path of automatic happy endings, but the path of costly love, which will look to him for help and for perseverance in all life's troubles - ours, those of our children, and those of all people - and will find that help as abundant as daffodils in spring.