Sermon for Mothering Sunday

Fourth Sunday in Lent

Sunday 30th February 2025

1 Samuel 1.20-end, Colossians 3.12-17, John 19 25-27

Mothering Sunday has a complicated history. It began as a day to celebrate ‘Mother Church’. On the fourth Sunday in Lent, people would go to the church where they were baptised and reflect on their baptismal vows and their pilgrimage of faith. Then, as the Industrial Revolution took young people away from their villages to work in factories and in service, Mothering Sunday became a day of family reunion, when these workers would return to their childhood homes, sometimes carrying a simnel cake, a fruitcake that could survive a long journey. In the twentieth century, however, these traditions were overwhelmed by an import from America, Mothers’ Day, which has evolved into the commercial extravaganza we know today.  It’s a boon for restaurants and florists and gift shops, but for many people, for many different reasons, it’s a day of pain and regret – so much so that many businesses now offer their customers the choice to opt out of Mother’s Day marketing.

I believe that it’s very important that the Church should not opt out of celebrating Mothering Sunday, because we have a message that is both more realistic and more hopeful than the greeting cards can offer. The Bible is not remotely sentimental about human relationships, including family relationships. Just look at the Old Testament readings for today. We hear the story of Hannah, a woman for whom the pain of childlessness is so great that when she weeps in the Temple the priest thinks she is drunk. And when her prayer is granted and she has a son, Samuel, she gives him up to become a Nazarite, a boy consecrated to the service of the Lord. Later in the story there is a heartbreaking detail. We are told that on the one visit that she is allowed each year, Hannah brings her child a little robe that she has made for him. We can only guess at her sorrow.

Our alternative Old Testament reading is the story of the baby in the bulrushes, the son of Israelite slaves who is adopted by an Egyptian princess and given an Egyptian name, Moses. No wonder, perhaps, that he grows up to be a troubled young man unsure of his identity, who gets into a fight and, without meaning to, kills someone. It’s a scenario that might be – indeed is being – played out on our television screens today.

I could go on. There is so much grief for lost children in Scripture: Saul weeping for Jonathan, David crying for Absalom, mothers desolate for their sons killed by Herod, Mary standing at the foot of the Cross. There is the whole drama of family estrangement and reconciliation captured in the parable of the Prodigal Son, which leaves the elder son outside the celebration, feeling the sting of his father’s outrageous generosity to his younger brother.

Yet, for all this suffering, for all our fallibility, we are told that human relationships are the key to understanding our relationship with God. ‘A new commandment I give unto you’, said Jesus to his disciples, ‘that you love one another as I have loved you’. It was only in preparing for today that I began to think seriously about what this means. How did Jesus love his disciples? Essentially, he loved them as a good parent loves a child. He nurtured them: feeding them on the beach, comforting them when they were frightened of the storm, kneeling and washing their feet, praying for them. But he was also absolutely committed to their flourishing. He was always pushing them beyond their comfort zone, sending them out to manage by themselves, willing them to understand, aware that he would not always be there to rescue them. And he forgave them, over and over again, when they were slow to follow him and even when they betrayed him.

So today is a day for us to celebrate and give thanks for those people, whether or not they are part of our biological family, who have loved us in that generous, costly way that Jesus loved his disciples. Because these people have shown us something of how God loves us. Mark Oakley, the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, puts it like this: ‘All our relationships of love in this world, the giving and receiving of shared love, of partners, family and friends, are beautiful and partial reflections of the truest and most immoveable love there is. God is the heartland of our very meaning, the source of your life, and is for you, every bit of you, the parts you like, the parts you doubt, the parts you hate. All loved. He’s not going anywhere. Love has remarkable things yet to show us. God is mothering us so that we grow in love and confidence.’

May we know, and celebrate, the motherly love of God, today and always. Amen.