mothering sunday

The Tough Message of Mother’s Day: Sermon Preached on 30th March 2025 (Mothering Sunday)

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A classic rood screen, late Victorian, with Mary and St John both facing the nave along with Christ, St Mary to the left.

Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Holy Cross, Seend

Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’”

A painting depicts a somber scene of the Crucifixion. At the center, a figure is nailed to a wooden cross, wearing a white cloth around the waist. The sky is dark and stormy, adding to the dramatic atmosphere. Below the cross, several figures are gathered, dressed in robes typical of ancient times. A woman in a striped robe kneels at the base of the cross, her head bowed in grief. To her left, another figure in a white robe stands with hands clasped, looking up at the cross. To the right, a woman in a light blue and white robe also gazes upward, her expression one of sorrow. In the background, other figures, including soldiers in armor and onlookers, observe the scene. The ground is rocky and barren, emphasizing the bleakness of the moment.
James Tissot, “Woman Behold Thy Son” (1886-94), in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum.

Sometimes you’ll hear people complain that Mother’s Day, a modern commercial invention, has eclipsed Mothering Sunday, the traditional celebration kept on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which is today. Mothering Sunday was traditionally the time that people who worked a long way from their homes came back to their “mother church”, the place where they were baptised and became a child of the Church. Of course, as a result, they had a chance to see their families. You’ll most often hear the complaint about Mothering Sunday being abandoned from a certain type of slightly grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman. Although I am very much such a grumpy old-fashioned High Church clergyman, I am in fact quite strongly in favour of Mother’s Day and that we keep it in church.

You see, Mother’s Day does two things at one—certainly it speaks into our own lives and our own families. Yet it also speaks into one of the beliefs about God and the universe that makes Christianity truly unique—that Jesus Christ is God made human. Jesus Christ is God, every bit as much as the Father, the maker of the universe, and every bit as much as the Holy Spirit, the mysterious force of life and love which circulates everywhere, and which we find rather difficult to understand. For Christians, Jesus Christ is not just a wise and holy teacher, and not even a prophet, but God Himself.

You may be wondering how Mother’s Day speaks into this. We see it in today’s very short Gospel reading—the incredible, horrendous, scene on Cross where Jesus, close to death, has been abandoned by all His followers except for four women, including His mother, and ‘the disciple he loved’ – generally assumed to be St John the Evangelist. Jesus asks John to take care of his mother. Think of what’s going on here: Jesus must be in physical agony, exhausted and close to death, and His main concern is the welfare of his mother. When we think of ‘the love of God’, we tend to think of something remote and abstract, perhaps even a bit overwhelming and frightening. But this isn’t remote or abstract love—it isn’t love for a great principle or a sort of universal love for all of humanity, wonderful and important as these things are. This is the love of one person in particular for another actual person, in the face of death. Most of us have experienced the sheer intensity of love when someone we love is dying; it can be overwhelming even when it doesn’t involve a brutal public execution. This is what God’s love is like—so intense it can be overwhelming, and felt for you in particular.

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Motherhood and Apple Pie: Sermon Preached on 10th March 2024 (Mothering Sunday)

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Surreal apple pies in an MK Cirulionis fantasy landscape

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’”

A mother helps her young daughter to make apple pie.
Who could argue with the idea of motherhood and apple pie? Well, most of us.

“Motherhood and apple pie!”—Who could argue against motherhood and apple pie? The Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary tells me that this is a phrase we have imported from North American English, and is “used to represent an idea of perfect home life and comfort.” All those of you in the congregation who are mothers can confirm, that’s what motherhood is, isn’t it?—Perfect home life and comfort!

Or maybe not.

Our Gospel reading for Mothering Sunday is not, thankfully, some sanitised, cartoonish, version of what motherhood is about. This is motherhood at its rawest—Mary watches Christ, even speaks with Christ, as He is put to death. The trauma from experiencing the death of a child, including an adult child, is perhaps greater than that of any other type of bereavement. One can scarcely imagine what it feels like to witness it at first hand, in these circumstances. As some of you know, my sister died when we were both children, and I know only too well how devastating the death of a child is to a mother – and to a father. Yet, look at the memorial tablets on the walls of our parish churches and it is obvious this was a distressingly frequent event until the last hundred years or so—and it was frequent even for the well-off. Such is the human condition.

To love is to open yourself to hurt. To bear children is to open yourself to being hurt, through the hurts they themselves live through, and sometimes even directly by them. So God too, in creating humanity in His image and thus granting us free will, opened Himself to being hurt by the life He had given birth to.

And here is the unique thing about the Christian understanding of God: Jesus Christ was God made one of us, and in that He exposed Himself to one of the worst fates the world can inflict on anyone—a brutal, humiliating, public, death, in front of his mother.

Motherhood as a perfect home life and comfort? If, only.

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Our Mucky Humanity: Sermon Preached on 19th March 2023 (Fourth Sunday of Lent)

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An excerpt from El Greco's late 16th Century painting of Jesus healing a blind man. Jesus is sticking is mud covered fingers in a man's eyes as some Pharisees point disapprovingly and a dog sniffs at Jesus' belongings. The colours are bright although the architecture is anachronistic for 1st Century Palestine.

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend

Ephesians 5. 8–14; John 9. 1–41

“…he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes…”

Some of you will have noticed that there was a rugby match between England and Ireland yesterday. For those who have not the slightest interest in sport, let me cut a long story short by saying that Ireland won comfortably. I tell you that not to gloat – although I’m sure that some of you will be cynical about my intentions! – but to provide context for this morning’s readings.

When I was schoolboy I wanted, for a brief time at least, to play rugby for Ireland. In my imagination, I would see myself in a green jersey on the pitch at a packed Lansdowne Road, on a mild March afternoon like yesterday’s, in the final weekend of  a Six Nations championship, crashing over the line for the winning try as the seconds ticked down in a Grand Slam decider. Hopefully, a Grand Slam decider against England! It has, however, been a long time since five-foot-five has been a sufficient stature for international rugby, and so those dreams had to remain unfulfilled. I must trust that God’s plans for me never involved international rugby, for otherwise he would have given me an extra centimetre… or twenty. Indeed, in His good sense God probably realised that I was never going to enjoy a life of getting up at half-five every morning to lift weights and down protein shakes. God made me to be me, not just in my soul and my mind, but also in my body, which He made specifically for me, with its stumpy little legs and fat backside.

The Healing of the Man Born Blind, painted by El Greco in 1567. It now hangs in the Palazzo della Pilotta, Parma, Italy.

Christians face the constant danger of reducing their faith to something otherworldly, overly spiritualised, and detached from physical reality. Yet one of the things that stands out in this morning’s long Gospel reading is the sheer physicality of its portrayal of Jesus. The passage rejoices in the messiness of human life and the human body – Jesus spits in public, indeed in front of his own followers, then rubs his spittle in the mud, makes a paste out of it, and rubs it in the blind man’s eyes.

Even more significantly, this comes immediately after Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world”. Jesus has therefore just identified Himself with “I am”, the Hebrew term for God, and said His life was of global importance. Then He gets His hands muddy with his own spit and washes a stranger with the product.

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The Cost of Love: Sermon Preached at Holy Cross, Seend, Sunday 27th March 2022 (Mothering Sunday)

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Readings – Colossians 3: 12–17; John 19: 25b–27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’” 

Let me start this morning’s sermon with a verse of poetry:

Morning glory, starlit sky,
soaring music, scholar’s truth,
flight of swallows, autumn leaves,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.

So begins the greatest poem of Bill Vanstone, seen by many as the most impressive Anglican thinker and theologian of the latter part of the Twentieth Century. At this time of year, with the weather magnificent and the air full of the scents and new life of spring, even in times as troubled as those we are in, one can be enraptured by this sort of mood, simply by being alive. It feels like heaven! Perhaps indeed it is an intimation of heaven.

A beautiful morning for another away match at Holy Cross, Seend. © Gerry Lynch

Of course, even in our brightest moments, that is never the whole story. Many of us will come here this morning with serious problems of our own; even those of us fortunate enough not to be in that position will be deeply worried about serious problems faced by people we love.

Love is the greatest gift given to any of us by God. It is the most wonderful and miraculous and life-giving thing about being human. Yet it also has a tremendous cost. It opens us up to feeling the pains of the people we love.  The second stanza of Vanstone’s poem is clear about that cost, as it continues:

Open are the gifts of God,
gifts of love to mind and sense;
hidden is love’s agony,
love’s endeavour, love’s expense.

Some people seem to think that even to celebrate this Sunday as Mother’s Day is somehow excluding and potentially wounding for those without children or whose relationships with their mothers were difficult. Well, as a childless, single man, let me say that it is simply an obvious statement of fact that mothers have a particular and unique relationship with the children they have born in their womb, an intensely physical connection that no male can ever have. Mothers perhaps more than any of us know just how costly and agonising love can be.

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