Day: May 8, 2022

“Your sorrow shall be turned into joy”

Jesus comes and goes, it seems, yet he is always in our midst. He is in our midst not as a static presence but in the dynamic of the true meaning of his life captured in the recurring refrain of Eastertide, “because I go to the Father.” That is the radical meaning, in its Christian form, of God as essential life. And while the Passion and the Resurrection open us out to the idea and the reality of God as essential life, they do so only because the joy of the Resurrection is greater than the sorrows of the Passion. Why? Because life and light are greater than death and darkness. The goodness of God and his creation is greater than all sin and evil by definition. It belongs to the good news of Easter to show how this understanding comes to birth in us.

The birthing image is a mothering image. Jesus explains the transformative nature of the radical meaning of the Resurrection by way of an analogy to child-birth. God in relation to us is like a mother; there are a number of mothering images in the Scriptures which signal the deep love of God for our humanity and our world in spite of ourselves.

God is not a reflection of ourselves in the endlessly divisive celebrations of diversity. That is the post-Christian religion of identity politics which endlessly divides us. Rather the wisdom of the Scriptures in the life of the Church is about the redemption of images which unite us and gather us into the essential life of God. We honour our natural derivations, the mothers who bore us, for instance, on this day in our secular culture, Mother’s Day. For there is none who is not born of woman. We honour our mothers best when we place them in the dynamic of God’s life. The image here is about the eternal motion of the Son to the Father. It is the motion of love and sacrifice which conveys joy and delight. It redeems us from ourselves by placing us in the life of God but not in a flight from the world.

We are confused about the images of revelation when we misconstrue them to become reflections of ourselves such as in the competing advocacy agendas of the culture of diversity. “There is,” as Paul so wonderfully puts it, “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ.” We are one in Christ in spite of differences of identity and not because of them. The Resurrection affirms the categories of creation; it does not negate them but neither does it reduce us to them. It seeks instead for us to know ourselves even as we are known in God. That is very different from seeking self-affirmation.

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