Mother

Propers: The Ascension of Our Lord, A.D. 2018 B

Homily:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We don’t know her name—not the original, anyway—but we know she was just over 30 years old when she got sick.

It wasn’t the first time plague had swept through her town. An earlier wave may well have killed off her husband and any children; she was likely a widow. And in 1373, it seemed that she had come to her deathbed. Paralysis slowly crept above her waist and throughout her upper body. Soon even her eyes were fixed straight ahead. The household sent for the parish priest to administer Last Rites.

And the priest held a crucifix before her eyes and said, “Daughter, I have brought you the image of your Savior. Look upon it and be comforted,” at which she managed then to move her gaze to focus upon the face of Christ.

And that is when the crucifix began to bleed.

This is the story of Julian of Norwich: mystic, theologian, anchoress, and one of the most important Christian authors of Middle Ages. She is in fact the first woman in history to write a book in English—a book about what happened to her that night. Lying there, upon what she thought to be her deathbed, Julian received astonishing visions of Christ’s sacrifice for her and of His overflowing love for the world.

Her experience of God’s grace in these visions so completely overwhelmed her that she could see no anger in God at all, no blame, no judgment. Only mercy and sacrifice and self-giving. All of sin was as nothing before God’s life and light and love. It was a love that filled and upheld and forgave all things, pouring out upon the cosmos as the blood poured from that crucifix. They were visions of depth and complexity and promise, intended, she believed, for the comfort of all Christian souls.

And she warned of the temptations of the devil, yes. She warned of damnation’s despair. But she also proclaimed that all men and women of goodwill would at long last be drawn to God through Christ Jesus; that God would work some wonder at the end of time so great that all of our pain, all of our brokenness, all the farthest-reaching echoes of our Fall, would be as nothing compared to Christ’s mercy poured out for the world.

She was shown that deep within the heart of all humanity, no matter how twisted, no matter how wicked we become, there still lies within us the image of God. And God will draw that image in all of us back at last to Him. He sees us all as one, she said, as Adam. And He sees Adam as Jesus Christ.

This was an age in which the Church spoke incessantly of hell. Julian’s own bishop was a man of violence and brutality—“the fighting bishop,” they called him. And Julian affirmed the beauty and indispensability of Holy Church, that she is the gift of God, the Body of Christ, the source of our salvation. Yet the God of whom Julian wrote bore little resemblance to the wrathful deity preached from the warrior’s pulpit. Not only is God not angry, she proclaimed, but God cannot be angry. That is not who He is.

Indeed, the image to which Julian kept returning was of God, of Christ, not as judgmental Father but as Mother, nourishing, forgiving, stalwart and sustaining. Hers was a feminine perspective of God. But please note what we mean by feminine. We’re not talking about some sanitized, June Cleaver, 1950s faux feminine façade. We’re talking about the fourteenth century, when women were in charge of the household with all its muck and mire, dirt and disease, butter, blood, and bones.

Back then, only one in five men could write. But those who could were trained in argumentation, in law, in conflict and theory and persuasion. Think Harvard Business School. It was an aggressive, assertive literary culture. But Julian wrote—in the vernacular, mind you—as someone who got her hands dirty; someone who knew the pain of childbirth and the agony of child loss; someone who butchered her own meat and skinned her own fish and mopped up the filth from the floor. She knew that motherhood is messy, demanding, and hard.

And she saw that in Christ’s love. For her, Christ’s wounded side was nothing less than the womb of our rebirth. His sufferings on the Cross were pangs of labor for God’s New Creation. Even His nourishing Blood, poured out for the life of the world, was likened to mother’s milk—which it is, mind you. Milk is basically processed blood, life poured out from mother to child, and medievals knew this centuries ago. I cannot stress how incarnational all this truly is.

Julian recovered, of course, and became an anchoress, living in a single cell within the Church of St Julian in Norwich, hence the name by which we know her today. And her writings, Revelations of Divine Love, have been a source of comfort and hope for Christians throughout the world lo these many centuries since her death. The mercies of which she writes, so expansive as to seem scandalous to those who prefer visions of an angry God, are revered by Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Orthodox alike. They truly are revelations of love for the entire Church of Christ.

So why all this about Julian? Why tell you her story today, of all days? Well, for several reasons. First up, May 13th is Julian’s feast day on the Roman calendar. Fair enough. But today is also Mother’s Day, which I would fear to sentimentalize. Now, it is true that Scripture uses male imagery for God. This is because the father, in the ancient world, represented authority and power, which are rightly due to God. The mother, in complementary manner, represented the home: intimacy, familiarity, safety, nourishment, love. But also pain.

Mothers suffer for their children. They suffer to bring us into the world. They suffer to keep the filth and chaos of the household at bay. They suffer to feed and provide, to comfort and heal, to keep the peace between warring siblings and offer a refuge from the harshness of the outside world. We take our mothers quite for granted. And that’s God too. God is the Mother who cannot forget Her nursing child. She is the householder who searches diligently for the missing coin. She is the mother hen who yearns to gather her chicks safely beneath the pinions of her wings. And all of this we find in Scripture.

Which brings me to the third and final reason I’ve chosen to speak about Julian this day. And that’s because today is the Feast of the Ascension. Today marks the 40th day after Christ’s Resurrection when He returned to Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. And I want to make it clear what exactly He returned to do.

Jesus ascended into Heaven to cast Satan out from the presence of God. Here’s what I mean: Even after the devil’s fall, Scripture speaks of him standing before the Throne of God as Satan, the Accuser—the prosecuting attorney, if you will. He stands before God and accuses us, lifts up our sins, lays bare our faults and our flaws and all the evils we protest yet so willfully choose for ourselves.

And Jesus returns to Heaven to cast him out! To throw Satan down from the heavenly court, back down into the pits of hell, so that no one now stands before God to accuse us of our sin. Instead, Jesus stands there—God Himself—bearing the wounds of His Passion, the Blood of His Covenant, and pleads on our behalf. He pleads as our Mother, His hands still bloodied from the work, His side still open from our birth. And He pours out all the love He has for us unto His Father—so that God Himself defends us before God, not on our own account but on His! Imagine such a Judgment as that which awaits us. Imagine the depths of such mercy.

In Jewish tradition, serious prayers are often offered up to God not on account of the sufferer, but on account of his mother. Think of his mother, Lord, we pray. But now imagine that whenever we pray, we are in fact praying to our Mother: the One who suffers for us, bleeds for us, lays down Her life that we have new birth; the One who is always on our side.

Don’t get hung up on the genders. I’m not here to reinforce stereotypes. Focus on the love. Consider those who love you most, who sacrifice for you, who lay down their lives for you. Think to your mother and your father and all the love they hold for you. And then know that God loves you infinitely more than mother or father ever could.

Daughter, I have brought you the image of your Savior. Look upon it and be comforted.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.