Mothering Sunday: March 19

1 Samuel 1.20-end, Luke 2. 33-35

Today is Mothering Sunday, and it’s one of the trickiest days of the year for preachers. To judge by the adverts and the cards, we might think family life is just hearts and flowers, and happy people gathered together around the dinner table, full of smiles and sweet harmony. But if we’re honest, we all know that this day comes shot through with all sorts of other emotions too.  In any fair-sized group of people there will be those who long to be parents, but can’t be, those whose children have died, those whose mothers have died, those who families were neglectful or abusive, or those who’ve never really had a family at all, those who don’t want children, but feel judged for that. 

Perhaps an alternative definition of a family might be “a place where things go wrong”, because I’ve never met one where they didn’t. Grief, loss, guilt, shame, betrayal; families are often places where we encounter our deepest sorrows as well as our deepest joys.

That’s why I’m glad that the Bible readings set for today don’t airbrush those realities. To be honest, it’s hard to find a stereotypically happy family in Scripture anyway. Cain kills his brother Abel, Abraham twice gives his wife away to other men, and then tries to sacrifice his son, Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery… and that’s just in the first book of the Bible! It’s like East Enders on steroids. It very rarely portrays family life as uncomplicated or easy.  

The readings we’ve heard today underline that. In the first we meet Hannah, who, we’re told, “conceived and bore a son.” If you didn’t know the background, you might think “so what? Women are having children all the time.” But in Hannah’s case this was nothing short of a miracle. Her husband had two wives, quite a common and unremarkable thing in the Bible. The other wife, Peninnah, had children, but Hannah hadn’t been able to have any, and Peninnah and her offspring took great pleasure in reminding her of it. Hannah was desperate for a child, and when her story starts, in the passage before the one we heard, she’s praying at the shrine of God in Bethel, which was at that time the place where the Ark of the Covenant was kept, the symbol of the presence of God at the heart of the nation. Her prayers are so intense that the old priest, Eli, thinks she’s drunk and tells her to stop making a spectacle of herself. She explains what the problem really is. Eli is moved by her plight and assures her that God has heard her prayers and that she will have the son she longs for. 

That’s where today’s reading picks up the tale, and where it takes a surprising turn, because instead of keeping the child who she eventually gives birth to, as soon as he’s weaned, probably around three or four years of age, she brings him to Eli to grow up in his care. She’d promised to do this when he told her she’d get pregnant, and she keeps her promise. It seems a strange thing to do, though. It might look rather heartless to us, to give away the child she has waited so long to bear. Why does she do it?

It’s possible that she thinks Samuel will have a better life with Eli than in her feuding family, and that might be right, but I don’t think that’s what the Bible wants us to focus on. It’s that Hannah knows, even if only vaguely, that her child, given so miraculously by God, matters not only to her, but to the whole nation. And she’s right. Samuel will grow up to be one of the most important prophets in the Old Testament. He will guide Israel through times of turmoil and change. He will anoint the nation’s first two kings, and listen to God on their behalf, supporting and sometimes challenging them. Hannah brings Samuel to Eli at Bethel because this is where he needs to be to fulfil that calling, centred on God, learning to listen for that guiding voice.

The child we meet in the Gospel reading will go on to have an even more profound impact on the world around him, but at a huge cost to his mother. At six weeks old, Jesus is brought to the Temple to be presented there, as every new baby was. There he is spotted not by the temple authorities, but by Simeon and Anna, two elderly fellow worshippers, who acclaim him as the Messiah. “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel…” says Simeon. “and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” This child has a job to do, in other words, but there will be pain ahead as well as joy. She will watch him die on the cross. He won’t be there to support her in her old age. But we see her active in the early church, there on the day of Pentecost, bearing witness to what he means to the whole world, not just to her, the one who, in her words, who “puts down the mighty from their seats and exalts the humble and meek”. 

Parenthood often takes guts, but perhaps the greatest challenge is to see beyond the horizon of the family, as Mary, Joseph, and Hannah do. Their hopes are wider than simply having someone they can love and someone who will love them. They see their children as gifts given to the world, not just to themselves. 

We all need people like that in our lives, whether they are our mothers or not. We need people who believe our lives have meaning, who stick with us when we struggle, who support, but don’t stifle, who let us be ourselves. And today is a day for honouring all those people, whether they are parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, godparents, teachers, friends, neighbours, the people who have shown us that we matter, not for what we can do for them, but for who we are. I wonder who those people are for you? They probably weren’t perfect. They may not have been in your life for long. They may not have done anything very dramatic. Sometimes it only takes a word, or a small act of kindness to make a difference.

As I said at the beginning, Mothering Sunday can be fraught with emotional heffalump traps, but perhaps it becomes a little easier when we realise that it was never really meant just to be a celebration of our biological families. It is meant to remind us to look for the love around us, to recognise and celebrate mothering wherever we find it, and to call us in our turn to extend that mothering love to others, reflecting the mothering love of God, who sees in every one of her children the potential to light up the world and longs to set us free to do that.

Amen