“Receive with meekness the implanted word”
In the secular culture of North America, today is Mother’s Day but in the sacred culture of the Church today is The Fourth Sunday after Easter which presents to us yet again, the Easter mantra of Jesus, “because I go to my Father.” In the face of our contemporary confusions about gender and language, it seems almost a kind of miracle that we still have Mother’s Day and the Easter mantra. But there is a great wisdom and a compelling and substantial truth in these images.
The coming together of the secular and the sacred in this way is suggestive, I think, and illustrates the nature of their engagement. The Resurrection is a redire ad principia that changes how we view everything. It signals the way all things are gathered back to God. Sacred and secular are not simply opposed; the challenge is to understand something of their interrelation, something of the way in which the sacred engages the secular and gathers it to God; something of the way, too, in which the secular reflects the Divine.
The mystery of motherhood belongs, as paradoxical as it might seem, to the mystery of the Son’s going to the Father. In short, it, too, belongs to the mystery of the Resurrection in its essential meaning. 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. Having brought us to birth in this new life, the Risen Christ would also nurture us in this new life, like a mother nursing a child.
The point of the Eastertide Gospels is to teach us about that radical new life of the Spirit which has been inaugurated and established through Christ’s 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 us of himself in Jesus Christ – sacrificially and selflessly.
“Receive with meekness the implanted word”, St. James says. What we have received from God has to be nurtured in us by God. Even the love of mothers falls short, after all, of the completeness of God’s love for us, a point that the prophet Isaiah makes ever so strongly. “Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you”, God says, reminding us that the love of God is by definition radically other and greater than our human and finite loves. They find their perfection and their fullness only in the love of God revealed in Christ Jesus. Our finite loves participate in the infinite life of God; such is the nature of the mystical theology of our liturgy.
Christ nurtures us in this new life through the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Father and the Son. The Spirit is given to be the life of the Church as the soul of the body. The Church is the mother, “the eternal feminine”, as it were, where we are nurtured and sustained by God’s love bestowed upon us through the all-sufficient sacrifice of the Word and Son of the Father. We can only enter into this love through the forms in which it has been made known to us, that is to say, through the revelation of God in the witness of the Scriptures to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. We can only act upon what we receive. Such is the meaning of the Church and such is the nature of motherhood, too.
We need to understand again the truth and the power of these images, both for what they teach about the mystery of God as Trinity and for what they teach us about ourselves. Christ places us in his love for the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit. The Church is the mother where that divine life has its beginning in us and where we are nurtured in its understanding. God creates the womb out of which we are born anew and enter into this understanding. Such is the Resurrection; the tomb literally becomes the womb of new life. His word creates and calls us forth, just as Lazarus, called out of the tomb by the word of Jesus, comes forth into the presence of Jesus. He is restored to the fellowship of friends and family, to Mary and Martha. Our loves find their end and their perfection in the presence of the Son in his love for the Father in the bond of the Spirit. The Church is the mother where that love is received and acted upon in us.
The Holy Spirit is the animating spirit of the Church. It belongs to the magical, mystical quality of the Easter season to set our lives upon a new and ever-renewing foundation of grace. “Grace is the foundation”, says one of the great nursing fathers of the spiritual tradition, “which alone can rule our unruly wills and illuminate our darkened minds” (Bonaventure, freely translated), a point which is echoed in today’s Collect. Sin is that spirit of unruliness in us, our lawlessness, and sin is that spirit of darkness, too, our blindness to the things which Christ would have us know.
In the great Gospel which orders all our thoughts on this day and week, Jesus teaches us about the radical meaning of his death and resurrection in his going from us and he teaches us about the coming of the Holy Spirit to keep us in the love of God. “Now I go my way to him that sent me, and none of you asks me, Where are you going?” In his presence, we take his presence for granted. The question about where he is going belongs to the question about who he is. He is going to the Father. It is the meaning of the life of the Son. His whole life is towards the Father. He places us in that motion of his love for the Father in the Holy Spirit. And it is where and what he is for us. It means the constant renewing of our understanding, the constant correcting or “reproving” of our minds. That is the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church.
We are placed upon a whole new foundation of understanding. The Holy Spirit convicts us of the atheisms of our sinfulness, reproving our consciences by recalling us to who we are in the truth of God. The Holy Spirit corrects our understanding about righteousness; it is found in God through Jesus Christ “because I go to my Father.” The Holy Spirit confirms us in God’s essential judgment over sin and evil. Everything is drawn into the primary relationship of the Trinity. Our unruly wills are set right in Christ, in our being where he is. He is always towards and with the Father. The Holy Spirit convicts, corrects and confirms us in the understanding of the victory of Christ’s resurrection; he has overcome all that stands between us and God and so between one another.
We have only to live it. We live it in the Church, our mother, who gives us birth into the life of God and nurtures us in the understanding of the divine love which creates the womb and which creates the Church. The Church is our mother where we are constantly renewed, reproved and restored into the divine fellowship of the blessed Trinity. Here we learn to receive that Word. Such is the nurturing, mothering love of God in the Church, itself the body of Christ.
We give thanks today for our mothers who have brought us to birth and have nurtured us. More often than not, it is from our mothers, perhaps, that we have first learned about the love of God in Jesus Christ. They have given birth and nurtured us in what they have received. Such is the mothering love of the Church. We give thanks above all else for the Church, the mother of our faith, where we receive ever anew “the implanted word [of God] with meekness”, acting upon what we have received from our mothers who have acted in turn upon what they have received.
“Receive with meekness the implanted word.”
Fr. David Curry,
Easter 4, 2017