John 15: 9-17

Happy Mother’s Day!  This is a day of special thanksgiving to God for the love and care of mothers.   Mother’s Day is always special, because Mother’s Day not only affords us the opportunity to give thanks for our mothers, but it is also a time to reflect on the “mothering” attributes of our God.  God our “mother” is an image of God that lends itself to thoughts of tenderness and self-sacrifice. 

Today’s gospel lesson is perfect for Mother’s Day.  “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”  Jesus refers to God as Father, not mother, but the characteristic of God that he is focusing on is not masculine power or strength, but rather, the motherly characteristic of love.  As a Jewish person, Jesus knew well that the Hebrew word used for “compassion” in the Old Testament comes directly from the word “womb.”

Jesus knew the book of Isaiah very well where God is pictured as a mother in the moment of nursing her baby.  Isaiah 49:15 reads: “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?  Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.”

I have met some Christians who challenged me as I describe God as mother.  It seemed to me that they were wondering if I was a heretic or something.  I think it is laughable that there are people who get worried about what might happen to our faith if we thought of God as Mother, as if the mother image might weaken god and remove some essentially masculine quality.  The primary association we have with motherhood is compassion, caring love.  This is a perfectly appropriate way to think about God.

As I shared in the Bible Study and in the Confirmation Class, your image of God makes a big difference on your prayer life.  Think about it, if your primary image of God is the Lord of Judgment Day, for example, how would you feel?  Would be comfortable to be with God?  Or, would you run away and hide from God?  MY image of God is closer to caring mother rather than masculine father…, far from the Lord of Judgment Day.  Probably that is why I love to be in the bosom of God through contemplative prayers so much. 

Another characteristic of motherhood is sacrificial love.  That is the image that Jesus reflects on when he speaks of the depth of love.  The following is Jesus’ last words: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.

The word “friend” here comes from one of the Greek words for love, philia which is brotherly love, the love between friends who are “like brothers and sisters.”  But, in my perspective, the meaning of friend/friendship has been weakened significantly because of the facebook phenomenon.  About a few years ago, one of my facebook friends posted something like this: “Because I have reached 5,000 friends limitation mark, I cannot receive any more friends.  So, I opened another facebook account.  Please, send your friend request to my new account which is….”  I have no idea how many friends he has now.  At least, 5,000.  Are they all his friends?  Really?

I have less than 200 facebook friends.  But, please, don’t tell my friends that I don’t know who some of them are.  I have no idea how they have become my friends.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I can lay down my life for them.  Do you?  My point is this: Because the word, “friend” is now so weak, I think we can hear this better if we use “beloved.” “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s beloved.”

It is an image of Christ’s self sacrificial love.  Jesus is pictured as a self-sacrificial mother.  When we move from the image of the womb as the place to see compassion, to the image of a self-sacrificing mother, we have moved from emotions (compassion) to actions (sacrificial love).

When we think about how much God loves us, God lays down her life for us, it is truly amazing.  But it is more than merely amazing.  It is also a mandate.  We, who have been chosen by God’s initial act of love for us, have been given the mandate to be people of that same sacrificial love for one another.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

That little word “as” is huge: “as I have loved you.”  The measure of our love is Christ’s.  There is no way to weaken this to make it un-shocking.  This is our mandate; nothing less.  It is followed by another little word with huge implications; the word “if.”

“You are my [beloved] ones IF you do what I command you”

Here, Jesus summed up all of the commands of Torah, the Law of Moses with the dual mandate to love.  “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’   This is the greatest and first commandment.   And a second is: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’   On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”   (Matt 22:38-40)

It is not hard for us to love our own kind.  Even animals love and care for their own young.  Social animals will tend and care for their group.  I like to watch programs like Nature on PBS.  I watched many times how buffalos, elephants, chimpanzees, even bees and ants sacrifice themselves defending their clan.  It is no great virtue to love those like ourselves.  It is nothing more than pure practical common sense to look out for those who are necessary for one’s own survival.  So, to love one’s family, one’s race, one’s nation is nothing more than pragmatism; our survival and our interest depends on them; of course we will love them.  It does not take a Christian to figure that out.

The Christian mandate goes beyond self interested care – even if it does expand the inner circle indefinitely.  The command of Christ is to love “as I have loved you.”  How does this work?  On mother’s day, let our mothers be the starting point for our models.  Would our mothers have left us hungry and not fed us?  Would they have left us outside the door to sleep on the street?  Would they have ignored our wounds or our illnesses?  Would our mothers have allowed us to be bullied because we were weak if it was in their power to intervene?  Would our mothers allowed us to be abused or discriminated for just being different in terms of skin color or sexual orientation?  Would they not have sacrificed themselves for us?

Our mothers modeled for us, by emotion and by action, what our Lord has said in our text today:

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s beloved.”

“You are my beloved ones if you do what I command you”

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you”

If we continue to read John’s Gospel, even as Jesus was dying on a cross, he didn’t stop thinking of others – especially his mother in chapter 19.  At the time of Jesus’ death, Mary was about 45 years old.  And since we never read of Joseph after the visit to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve, some suggest that Mary was a widow when Jesus died.

As the oldest son, Jesus made sure his mother would be cared for after his death. He looked down from the cross and saw Mary and John.  He spoke first to Mary. “Mother, I’m leaving you now and I’m not going to be able to take care of you after I’m gone.  Mother, John will now be your son.  He will take my place.”  Then Jesus addressed John. “John, my mother will now be your mother.  Take care of her.  Provide for her as I would if I were still alive.”

In Jesus’ words to Mary and John we must learn an important lesson: a person should never stop honoring his or her mother.As Christians, we must also remember that we are a spiritual family. Jesus points to each of his followers here today and says to us, “Here is your son.  Here is your mother.  Here is your father.  Here is your brother.  Here is your sister.  And here is your child.”  My brothers and sisters in Christ, we are to love one another as Christ has loved us.  Amen.