I often struggle with the set readings for Mothering Sunday
when it comes to planning our morning service. Frankly the official choices –
printed on the pew leaflet - are rather grim. Moses being left to take his
chances in the bulrushes. Hannah, desperate and childless, and yet when she
does bear the child she has longed for, she gives him up to be raised in the
Temple. In the Gospel there is either Simeon warning Mary that her child will
one day cause her pain, or the reading we’ve just heard, Mary watching that
prophecy come true as Jesus dies on the cross. It is all a very long way from the images on
the Mothering Sunday cards. These stories are powerful reminders of the cost
and pain of parenthood – sometimes too painful for All Age worship.
There’s another way in which the set readings are often hard
to reconcile with the popular view of Mothering Sunday, though, because they
challenge the idea of what it means to have a family, what Godly families might
look like – families where God can be found and known. These stories don’t give
us Ladybird book “Peter and Jane” pictures of mum and dad and two kids gathered
happily around the tea table. They are stories of groups of people – related or
not - managing somehow, to create family arrangements that work for them. These
often seem somewhat ramshackle – fostering your child out to an elderly priest
in the Temple, or, worse still, into the hands of a genocidal Pharaoh would be
hardly likely to be recommended practice now, and yet Eli loves Samuel, and
Moses finds a safe enough place to grow up – and perhaps skills which God later
needs him to have as a leader – because he grows up in Pharaoh’s court. . And
in the Gospel we see Jesus entrusting his mother to the keeping of John - not some male relative, which would have been
the respectable thing to do – and entrusting him to her too, creating a new
family for them now that he is dying.
The early Christians would have found this image
particularly helpful. Many of them had had to leave family ties behind, or
perhaps been pushed out of their families. Often too they knew that following
Jesus would expose their families to danger, and had to make the appalling
choice between keeping their families safe, or being true to their commitment
to Christ. Those who campaign for justice and truth face the same dilemma today
– think of Nelson Mandela, or Aung San Suu Kyi , whose families have paid
almost as high a price as they did because of the choices they made.
That’s why this new community, this new family that Jesus
called them into was so important to them, despite the fact that it seemed so
unorthodox to others. When they met together
slave and free, men and women, Jew and Greek, rich and poor were drawn
into one family, and it was every bit as close and committed as any of the
families they can come from and utterly essential to them.
Christianity is often seen as a bulwark of traditional
family values, but actually, a lot of what we find in the Bible is very far
from the stereotype of mum and dad and 2.4 children. There is a huge variety of
familial expression within the Bible – polygamous marriage was perfectly normal
and accepted, for example, up to and well beyond the time of Jesus. It was the
Romans and Greeks – pagans - who gave us monogamy, and it is only because the
Church developed first in their milieu that we think of it today as the norm.
The Biblical writers are, above all, realists. They
recognise that what matters is that people love and care for each other. What
pattern that love and care come in is of very little moment, so long as it
works.
This is all very relevant at the moment, of course, because
of the debate around gay marriage. You’ll all have your own opinions on this,
of course – personally I am all for encouraging love and commitment whatever
form it takes. But whatever we feel about this specific issue, the Biblical
picture is that families come in many forms, and the ones that work may not
look the way we expect them to. What matters is that each one of us can find a
place to belong, people to belong with, where we can be clothed with love, and
where the peace of Christ can rule in our hearts. Amen
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