Sermon for the Third Sunday after Easter
“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”
The mystery of motherhood belongs, paradoxically, it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. It belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is radical new birth and radical new life. The Resurrection goes to the root of all life itself. That root is the reciprocal love of the Son for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. We are brought to birth in this new life out of the tombs of our sorrows, out of the prisons of our souls, out of the graves of our wills still wrapped in “a cloak of maliciousness,” the spirit of ill-will that is so deadly to our souls and our communities.
The idea of new birth and new life is a mothering image, an image about giving birth. Sorrow and pain give place to joy. We have only to live that joy which is not about our arbitrary moods and feelings but a joy which is beyond the fluctuations and changes of this world, a “joy [that] no man taketh from you”. Why? Because it has to do with our being opened out to the divine life of God himself. This is the great meaning of the Resurrection. The Risen Christ is in our midst in the power of his Spirit. He lives in us and we in him. Such is the burden of our liturgical life which extends outwardly to give shape to our lives socially, politically, morally, and so on.
Jesus would teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which he has inaugurated and established through his Death and Resurrection. We can only be nurtured in what we have received; in what has been given to us. We can only give as mothers give – sacrificially and selflessly – through what God has given and established in us. What we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. The love of mothers falls short, after all, of the completeness of God’s love for us. Our loves find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed to us in Christ Jesus.
