Here Is Your Mother

John 19: 25-27

 

 

          Today is Mothers’ Day. Merchants love it. Next to Christmas and Valentine’s Day, more cards, letters and flowers are sold than any other day of the year in America. Restaurant owners like it too. Sons and daughters take out Mom for lunch on Mother’s Day. Many countries observe some form of Mother’s Day, though most do so toward the end of Lent rather than in May. Growing up, I remember carnations being associated with the day. As men and boys entered the church on Sunday, someone was there to pin on a carnation, red if your mother was living, white if she had passed on to God. I suppose the relaxing of Sunday clothing had something to do with that custom fading.

          God thinks so much of motherhood and parenting that he gave us the Fifth Commandment. “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you”[Ex. 20: 12]. There aren’t but ten commandments, so obviously God thought a lot of his creation of parenthood,

 particularly motherhood.

          I looked up Mother in the dictionary. Do you know there are ten definitions! Ten! And that’s just for the noun. It can be used as an adjective or a verb and then it has eighteen definitions. Mother is one of those words that have such deep meaning; the definitions don’t seem to really do it justice. Is it enough to say that a mother is a female parent? Of course not. How about a mother-in-law, stepmother or adoptive mother? No. They can be accurate, but facts don’t always qualify as truth. Here’s one: a term of address for a female parent or a woman having or regarded as having the status, function, or authority of a female parent. Well, that is certainly accurate, but that is not the person after whom President Woodrow Wilson named a national holiday in 1914. 

          What is a Mother? There are lots of mothers in the Bible. All kinds of mothers. There is Sarah, willing to undergo pregnancy at the age of ninety in order to have a child. There is Hannah, who so desperately wanted a son that she took a vow to God that if he would open her womb and bless her with a son, she would give him back to the Lord all the days of his life. Her prayer was answered and she kept her promise. She gave up her only child as soon as he was weaned.We know her son as Samuel, one of the great judges of Israel. Other mothers are prominent in the Bible, from Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth, to Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist. Then there is Mary, Elizabeth’s cousin, barely of age and hardly ready for life. And yet, God chose her to bear his own Son in earthly form. For thirty three years, she was mother to humanity and divinity. She lived to see that child hanging on a cross like a common thief.

          What about that son? The last day of his life, he was pretty busy. He was dying a horrible physical death, saving the thief next to him, taking on the sin of humanity and doing it all sinlessly and with God turned away from all that sin. Yes, Jesus was busy. But he was not too busy not to try in his last hour to make provision for his mother. In the 19^th chapter of John’s gospel, we have this incredible scene. Jesus is on the cross. He is close to death. Four women are huddled close to him. The other gospels tell us that they stood at a distance. This is not inconsistent with John’s account. This was at a different time, a critical time. Jesus was close to death and the women huddled close to the cross. Mary was there. With her were most probably Mary Magdalene, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Salome, Mary’s sister and the wife of Zebedee, parents of James and John. John was there too. Jesus saw them and he said to his mother: “Woman, behold, your son!” He was not talking about himself, but his cousin John. His next statement was to John, to whom he said: “Behold, your mother.” It was both a request and a dying declaration to his cousin to take care of his mother. It was the eldest son trying to do his duty, upholding the fifth commandment. His mother was almost certainly widowed and probably in her early fifties with little or no personal income.  Why John? Jesus’ half-brothers were most probably in Capernaum and did not yet believe in him as the Son of God.  So John is commissioned to look after Mary.  According to John’s gospel, John took Mary that very hour into his home. Even at the very end of his life, Jesus was trying to honor his mother.

        So what is a mother? Certainly she is a caregiver. Certainly she sacrifices for the child in her care. Certainly she has the patience of Job, the brass of a trumpet, a love for that child or children so deep as to be the example we use to try to explain how God himself loves us.

          As I try to define what or who a mother is, it occurs to me that I have a few examples in my own family.  I have three grown daughters. Each of them is a mother in her own right, yet each of them is different in how they fill out their own definition of motherhood. One is a mother to her son, but now as she enters a new chapter in her life, she may find herself eventually being a stepmother as well. If she does, she will love just as hard and deep, but she will find that task different from the role she has played so far. Another daughter is a mother to her son in a traditional home, but she is the youngest and her role will continue to change as she and her family mature. A third daughter is neither married nor does she have children from her womb as yet, but she has spent the last decade devoting herself to hundreds of children from all over Africa and the United States. Is she less a mother than my other daughters? Hardly! Her title is different, but her role meets more than one of those eighteen definitions in the dictionary. My own family just goes to show that the term Mother is a whole lot easier to recognize than it is to define.

          What is a mother? A mother is someone who cares more about a child than she does herself. It may be hard to get the definition out of a dictionary, but it’s not hard at all to recognize a mother.

          Today, we can combine a very important Scriptural lesson that Jesus remembered to his last hour on earth—that of honoring our mother-- with a national holiday which celebrates motherhood and the women in our lives who bear that title. Many of you are here today, sitting with your mothers. Many more of you will be leaving in a hurry so that you can quickly get to your mother’s house to take her out to lunch or celebrate some of her home cooking. Either way, we do right to honor our mothers not just this day…but every day!