God who mothers

And a corrective to the evangelical idolatry of motherhood

Sometimes I think one of the reasons Mother’s Day is difficult for many of us, is because we are not used to linking motherhood with what God is like. And while orthodoxy affirms that God the Father is not gendered, and the image of the triune God is reflected fully via the belonging and participation of both male and female, If a person were to utter the phrase “mother God” in a room full of southern baptists… it’s not going to go well 😆.

Yet it matters that we tell the truth about the idolatry of motherhood in evangelical culture because talking about good things without prioritizing the God things is a recipe for idolatry.

We can’t honor mothers,

without honoring women,

without honoring God first and foremost.

Not all women are mothers, and not all mothering is good. Not all of our experiences are the same.

But all of us benefit from understanding the mothering qualities of God that can be expressed through motherly nurture and care.

Mothering is a vestige, that points us to what the perichoretic love of God is like.

To be born again, for example is at its core a birthing metaphor. To be born again is to testify to what the fullness of God has birthed within our new nature as spirit indwelled believers.

God labored over each of our re-births, and that labor was messy, arduous, and risky.

But that is what the love of God is like!

But God does not merely birth us and send us on our way, God the Spirit comes alongside, caring for us compassionately, like a mother. Guiding, teaching, training.

In our spiritual infancy God taught us to depend on God, like a newborn learns to  rely  on their mother for nourishment, and comfort, and care.

And when we center God in our reading of scripture rather than ourselves, we don’t have to look hard to notice a God with the heart of a mother.

my point is this, the more time and attention we give to understanding what God is like in relation to motherhood, the less we will find ourselves susceptible to the cultural understandings of motherhood that leave us lacking. We need to see God as the ultimate mother more than we see ourselves as mothers, because our primary identity as transformed believers is that we are children in the family of God, first and foremost. And in the kingdom of heaven we are children and siblings of God’s forgiven family more than we are mothers.

I hope that on this Mother’s Day, we have a chance first and foremost to tell the truth about what God is like.

By keeping God the center of Gods own story, we get to enter into a spirit of worship and communion with God and God’s family. God is like a mother. A deeply loving mother, who would do anything and everything for her children, all of us.