Forum Thread
Pentecost Prose Poem

What a beautiful and moving image.

Thank you David.

Hi Roger.  I am not nervous.... but I think we should be careful not to read into scripture things which are not there.  As I said, I cannot imagine the apostles calling Jesus Christ "mother" and he taught them to pray to "our Father in heaven".......   I cannot see on what authority we can start calling God the Father or the Son "mother" or "sister".  Jesus Christ was not hidebound by his culture and he was not afraid to challenge his culture to teach the truth about God....... but, even if we want to challenge patriachy in society, I want us to pray to our Father as Christ taught us - because his authority is clear (John 1:18) 

This is very helpful Roger - clear and typically gracious.

We do well to remember that throughout church history an over exclusive use of male imagery and language for God leads, all too easily, to a view of feminine, of women and women's experience as second best, outside God - or even some sort of dangerous distortion. All too often this has led to women being devalued, silenced  and excluded.

On a more positive note I remember a wise guide talking to my wife when she was still breast feeding our first child at all hours and too exhausted to pray or concentrate on God in the way she had always been taught - and of course feeling very guilty and unable to sense God's presence as a result. She was encouraged, as she watched Josh feeding happily and trustingly at her breast, to contemplate this as a picture of God's holding, nurturing and feeding of her. She found this wonderfully transforming - and so did I. I often remember that when I read Jesus speaking of his love as like a mother hen and wanting to gather us in ....

Hello Roger,   I am not nervous about anything but I do want to see the biblical authority for langugage used to describe God. If we do not look for such authority, we will end up reading in our own views rather than listening to what scripture is teaching us.

Jesus Christ was not "hidebound" by his culture and religion and challenged it many times with the truth about God, but he taught us to pray to "our Father"..... on what authority can anyone pray "our Mother"?

I still cannot imagine Peter, John and the other apostles calling Jesus Christ "mother"..... what motivates people to do so today?  If it is in essence some broader fight against patriarchy in history, I think we should stick to "our Father" as Jesus Christ taught us to pray because  "No one has ever seen God;the only God,who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known."  (John 1:18)     I do not see good authority for adopting any other language than that taught by Christ.... he knew who he was talking about.....and I don't think he was hidebound in his teaching or constrained by his time  or culture...... was he?

Nersen, I wonder why you are seem so nervous of the maternal, feminine, female imagery the Bible adopts in relation to the Godhead.  Forgive me if I've misread you.  Clearly, our triune God is neither male nor female in the gendered sense of our humanity.  Essentially, we make a category mistake if we say God is like a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, in that the fatherliness, motherliness, brotherliness or sisterliness of God are beyond our understanding of these words.  And yet, of course, these words, when applied in their best sense, do have some resonance for us and help us in our relating to God and one another.

As I understand it, Karl Barth addressed this dilemma when he talked of an ‘analogy of being’ and an ‘analogy of faith’.  The former is where we extrapolate from our human experience to God and the latter is where we allow biblical imagery and teaching about God to inform and shape our understanding.  From this we can argue that we need to study, reflect, contemplate and listen to God, revealed through Word and Spirit, seeking to learn what the fatherliness or motherliness of God means for our lives as fathers, mothers, sisters or brothers.

These words are limited in our comprehension of God’s ways with us, not least because of the stereotyping we adopt, consciously or subconsciously, in our use of gendered language.  And yet the Bible clearly uses much imagery that evokes our feel for what’s best in being fatherly, motherly, sisterly, brotherly.  The ‘feminine’ side of this is shown in such language as ‘God’s only begotten Son’ when we ask who, in our human lives, does the ‘begetting’.  The image Jesus uses in Luke 13 mirrors the God, under whose wing we shelter (Ps 17:8).  Isaiah talks of God’s deeply maternal offer of comfort (Isa 66:13) and of a long and compassionate memory (Isa 49:15).

I agree that we find Jesus and the early Christians using the word ‘Father’ rather than ‘Mother’ of God but to be too hidebound by this can miss the wonder of a God who is above and beyond gender and yet shows the best of what we call motherliness, as well as fatherliness.

Christian Scientists have a prayer that begins "Father, Mother God, loving me..." that is given especially to children. It ends with "guide my little feet...straight to thee," if I remember correctly (an aunt of my husband's was a Christian Scientist and we still have the little prayer plaque she gave our children in the early '60s).  I remember being struck by the gender mix as Nerson is when it first appeared.  I do think of things on that issue the way Nerson does,  and an easy way out of the difficulty--and perhaps the correct way--is to simply follow Jesus' example, and the examples of the disciples, in forms of direct address, although there is plenty of scriptural imagery that shows the "feminine" side of the persons of the Trinity.  However, very subjectively speaking:  I've always wondered if I were more "religious" than the average person because my father died when I was 4, my anxiety about where he was was relieved when I was told he was in heaven and I could imagine his having his office there instead of a few miles from our house, my mother had loved him very much,  and I had all happy memories of him.  "Our Father in heaven," perhaps, was often confused in my growing up mind with my earthly father:  a loving male, in heaven, always accessible in a spiritual sense.  Since there was no adult male in our household until my mother remarried 15 years later, I think God  answered a specific emotional need for me--a need for a father--in addition to the need we all have for God.  When I took a correspondance course at 12 in the Roman Catholic church (offered by Knights of Columbus in an ad in the Sunday paper), I enjoyed getting my completed questionnaires back along with the corrections of the kind priest whose job it was to do it.  My mother took this as an indication that she wasn't adequately mothering me, since I seemed to be in need of "Mother Church."  What I told her then was I had a very good mother, but what I didn't have was a father!  --Anyway, I have a strong sense of the need for both a masculine and a feminine parent, and when the genders are confused in some revised liturgies, I don't feel comfortable with it. 

David - sure, the Lord identifies himself with maternal love and uses the picture of a hen (a beautiful picture)...... but it does not follow that we can call him "mother" (or a hen) as a result. We can appreciate the picutre of maternal love we get from the picture of a hen with chicks ..... but the question is why does he use it?  He was not making a point about his feminine side but was teaching about the love of God for his people, was he not?    

Clare - I agree, the apostles would not have called him "father".....he taught them to pray to our Father in heaven.  I cannot imagine them calling him mother, father, sister...... even brother may be too familiar as we see the apostles recognising him and saying things like, "My God and my Lord"..... "rabbi" might have been their usual term for him..... we do not have to impose a feminine identity on the Son for him to be just the same Jesus Christ for us all regardless of our gender or anything else.

I am not wanting exclusive male language for the sake of it....but I think we must be careful not to read into texts points which are not there or not there strongly.  The hen is a classic example -  asserting a feminie identity for God the Father (or the Son) was not the main point of Christ -  the main point is so much more wonderful for us all regardless of our gender.

I would have no problem at all praying "Our Mother....." if the Lord or his apostles did so.....did they do that?    

Personally I find this image recorded by Luke quite subversive of my own instinctive understanding of Jesus - this passage of scripture challenges me quite deeply.

I do find it interesting that it is common to refer to Jesus as 'the vine' or God as 'our rock' and this has deep cultural roots, not least because of he way that these images infest our songs. God is not a rock and nor is Jesus a vine. Some of the confusion here is that we are mixing different ways of using language.

Further, Jesus uses this image of the mother hen to reflect a strong desire to save the people of Jerusalem - it reflects a deep passion for saving action.

Some of that was behind my comment that this image needs to be an appropriate part of our Biblical understanding of Jesus - rather than, as has been the case for me most of my life, a non-existent part.

Recently there have been liturgies and hymns which draw on this particular image - it is very easy to label them as feminist rather than biblical (of course they may be both).

Nersen I don't think the apostles called Jesus 'father' either. Yet in some sense he is our father, our mother, our brother. There is a difference between how we speak about Jesus as the (male) incarnated human and Jesus as the pre-existant logos.  All our talk about God is metaphorical and this potenitally misleading.  This is why the Fourth Lateran council declared that “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude'.  This is a very important discovery that our tradition made and something we need to hold onto.

Whatever at all we say about God is always more untrue than it is true.  Is God our Father - well yes in some ways he is and it is also true that in many ways he is totally unlike earthly fathers who are limited not only morally but in their finitude, so to call God our father and say that is absolutly and irrudicibly true is false.  And so on with every other word we use to describe God.  Is God love?  Well our notions of love are so mired in our own distorted desires that when we say love and apply it to God, our application is more false than true, not because God is not love, but rather that we do not yet know what true love is. so of course it is untrue that God is our mother in the same way that these other two examples are also untrue.

What is more, when we use metaphors to describe God, there is the unfortuante collateral damage that occurs by people then using the metaphor the other way round.  So if we say 'chess is like a war' then we come to see that 'war is like a game of chess' (with dangerous consequences for those we see as 'pawns').  If we say 'God is our father' then we will also begin to think that Fathers are gods - with the corresponding history of oppression of women.  Part of the reason many of us want to affirm that it is no less true (or untrue) that God is our mother as well as our father is that it begins to undo the evil consequences that this reverse metophor has wrought.  having a range of images mitigates against one image being misused in the worng direction. But the 'major dissimilitudo' still holds-everything we ever say about God is more wrong than right.

Nersen,

What appalling logic! Jesus is clearly identifying himself with the maternal care he sees in the mother hen with her chicks. Yes he is offering  a visual aid for his listeners - but for this to teach anything true his identification must have some basis in reality. We really do glimpse divine love in the smallest and most mundane of God's creatures - male and female.

If you are insisting that no female or maternal imagery should be applied to God or Jesus  - that God is only to be known on ‘male’ terms  - I think you have to ask in what way women are made in God's image at all.

In earlier (less anxious?) periods of the church it was quite common to use maternal imagery - Anselm and others would speak of being 'nourished at the breast of Jesus'. (This is poetry I hasten to add Nersen in case you think I am saying Jesus actually had breasts - as well as beak and feathers). They were not revisionist or dangerously radical – they were using, as Jesus did, images of life around to pray with and contemplate the character of God. In every age, as in scripture itself, we learn aspects of God's character and being though contemplating the gift of what we call the feminine and maternal (as well as male). Is that really so inappropriate or surprising?

But let me offer one scriptural link reflection ........
Jesus calls us to be compassionate as God is compassionate.
The Greek word is very gutsy as I'm sure you know - splangchnizomai.
Compassion then comes from the deepest core place of our being - and of God's.
The Greek word is actually a translation of the Hebrew word for compassion - Rachimim.
This word is linked to the word for womb.
The compassion of God, as one commentator writes, is nothing less than a movement of the womb of Yahweh.

I find that utterly and profoundly moving.

(I could add that Yahweh- I AM - is a non gendered name for God that ends up as the gendered ‘Lord’ in English translations.)

Mark -  do we not have to keep in mind that he spoke those words as a man?  I think it is stretching things to go from the verses you mention to call him "mother" and I cannot imagine that any of the apostles did so.  

If you really want to push the "mother" language from those verses, does the logic behind your position not  lead us one more step to pray to "Our chicken....." ?  We can get into a pickle by stretching pictures too far and not focussing on the primary teaching point behind the use of the picture.  The meaning of those verses is more important than the picture.....do you think the Lord was really making a point about his feminine side?  I think he was illustrating the love of God for his people with a picture they would understand.