Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Mother’s Day)

May 14, 2023

“The Motherly Love of God”

Readings: Acts 17:22-31; John 14:15-21

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hans Urs von Balthasar was a Swiss Catholic priest and theologian who was one of the most prolific authors in modern history. He wrote 85 books, over 500 articles and essays, and almost 100 translations of other people’s work.

Yet in all this prodigious output, all those thousands of pages he wrote, there is one insight of his that I find most memorable. And it’s simple but profound.

Von Balthasar writes that our first experience after birth is being placed in the arms of our mother and seeing her face… where the “I” encounters the “Thou” for the first time, and the “Thou” smiles in a relationship of love and sustenance.

Our mother is the first person who sees us, who knows us and loves us. Our mother is the first person we see, the first person we learn to love. We first learn what it means to love from our mother, as she cares for us and feeds us and holds us in her loving embrace.

(When one thinks of the birth of Christ and his relationship with his mother Mary, one begins to see why so many throughout Christian history have felt such affection for her).

Mothers teach us what it means to be in communion with another person, which is what Christian maturity is ultimately about: learning to become persons. Not atomized data points or statistics, not consumers, but persons.

And our relationship with our mothers is a reflection of the love which God has for us. God is the One who knows us first, who loves us first; “we love Him because He first loved us.” God is the One in “whom we live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul says, the One who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. God is the One who, more than any other, tenderly cares for us. Mothers have the dignity and privilege of reflecting the love of God in their own way.

The whole of the Christian life in the Church, in fact, is rightly seen as maternal. Because after all, what does a mother do for a newborn infant? A mother bathes her child, clothes him, feeds him. And that is what happens for us in the Church: We are helpless, lost in sin, unable to cleanse ourselves or care for ourselves. But God, who is merciful, cleanses us in the waters of baptism, clothes us with the righteousness of Christ, and feeds us with the holy nourishment of Word and Sacrament.

It is in the Church where we learn that life is not ultimately about things, whether material things like possessions or immaterial things like success or comfort. Life is not essentially about using things but about enjoying communion with other persons.

So it is personal language that Jesus uses in his farewell discourse: “The Spirit of truth will abide in you and will be in you. On that day, you will know that I am in my Father and you are in me, and I am in you.”

This is what the Christian life is truly about, this is what human life is about: union and communion with the One who loves us. He in us and we in Him. We receive the love of God made manifest to us in Jesus, and with God’s grace, we are empowered to love God in return.

And our love for God is demonstrated through keeping the commandments of Christ, as he says in our Gospel reading: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” If we love Christ, we will strive to do what he would have us do and avoid what he has forbidden.

Even here there is a parallel with human parenting. A mother tells her child, “Don’t stick your finger in the electrical socket!” not because she is capricious, but because it is for the child’s good. The commandments draw boundaries in the world, which we respect for our own good and disregard to our own detriment. And for that reason, obedience to the commandments of Christ is never a merely legal matter, never merely about keeping the rules or doing the “right” things. Keeping the commandments is the concrete way of abiding in that communion for which we are made, as Jesus says: “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” Obedience here is not primarily legal but relational.

Brothers and sisters: Remember the great love which God has for you. Remember that with motherly care, God has cleansed you and clothed you, taught you and corrected you, fed you and sheltered you within the haven of the Church. And remember that you were made for communion: communion with God and communion with other people.

I want to return to the image I used at the beginning: mother and child locking eyes for the first time. I spoke of the mother as the one who sees us first and loves us first, and I related that to God, who is truly the One who sees and loves us first. But the analogy does eventually break down.

For while it is true that one’s mother is the first person we get to know, the one who is present right from the moment of our birth, she is usually not someone who is present at our death. For most of us, our mothers die before we do, and so they are present at the beginning of our life, but not the end.

But it is not so with God. At the hour of our death, just as at the hour of our birth, God is present… as not only the One who loved us in the beginning, but as the One who loves us at our mortal end.

And beyond death, we will see God, not through a glass darkly, but face to face. And our eyes will find His, and we will see the Face of the One who has ever loved us and cared for us. We will see Him truly for the first time, and there will be… recognition. We will recognize Him as the One who has tenderly cared for us all this time. And that recognition will be the beginning of endless joy. Amen.