I may always think of Rachel Held Evans in May, the month in which she died last year. May is also Mother’s Day month. One of her last tweets in April of last year was this:
I’ve written four books, hundreds of blog posts, and dozens of articles, and only once have I used a feminine pronoun for God. People still point to that as a reason I should be killed in order to quicken my eternal torment in hell. No joke.
Using She or Her for God seems to be one giant step beyond experimenting with mother language for God. But behind that discomfort is the question, can God hold a female persona like Mother to the extent that we change the masculine pronouns? It’s one thing to say sometimes that God is like a mother, but for many of us, that’s as far as it can go.
To use the metaphor of She is to say definitively that God is not a man. It implies there is a bendability in God’s gender, which freaks people out. (Psst…reminder…God is Spirit according to John 4:24). And the belief in God’s basic masculinity is an unstated but heretical part of church doctrine, that stems from exclusively masculine language for God. So, in this post, I’d like to explore four reasons I think God is saying, “It’s okay to call Me Mother (too).”
1. She’s Already Done It Herself
The mother metaphor weaves in and out of the Old Testament and even the New Testament (especially John’s writings). Father is only a slightly more favored metaphor in the Old Testament, being used twelve times vs. 9 times for mother. However, there are even more female metaphors, such as mother eagle or hen, or midwife.
Job goes so far as to give God a womb, for example (Job 38:8-9, 28-29). Likewise, the author of Deuteronomy has God giving birth to the Israelites (Deut. 32:18). The author of Proverbs sees God as the mother of Wisdom (Prov. 8:23-25). God speaks as a woman giving birth twice in Isaiah (Is. 42:14; 46:3-4) and twice more as a mother in Isaiah (Is. 45:19; Is. 66:12, 13). And there is good evidence that El Shaddai means Breasted One (Gen. 17:1–see my post on that here). That’s just the beginning. Read all the verses for yourself.
2. What’s a Metaphor For, Anyway?
The nature of metaphor is that it is describing one aspect, one likeness of something or some person, to another thing or person. A metaphor can’t say everything there is to say about anything.
So, God is a rock, and not a rock.
Jesus is a shepherd, and not a shepherd.
God is a father, and not a father.
God is a mother, and not a mother.
God is spirit, after all, so cannot actually be a rock, a shepherd, a mother or a father. So…we can relax about offending God. We are describing one aspect of the ineffable yet immanent God, and it’s okay to relate to that aspect as needed.
3. God Isn’t Really a Father, Either
Jesus referred to God as His Father, and for his time and place that was revolutionary. Jesus drew from the Old Testament in depicting God as a loving, forgiving Father. Jesus’ image of God was more like a mother (the approachable Abba) than the public image of the honorable and authoritarian Middle Eastern father.
But no one was personally calling God Father, or Abba, like Jesus did. It was important for his hearers to understand a new and better way to relate to God. The term was not to describe a literal man who could copulate and seed a child.
For John, Jesus’ close friend, God could be a birthing God just as easily. The metaphors abound in John’s gospels and his letters. (See them here). Again, he draws from the Old Testament. There was nothing shocking or new to Jewish readers in these metaphors when John wrote. They didn’t believe God was literally a mother but the metaphor was acceptable as was the father metaphor.
Today to be “born again” says nothing of the motherhood of God because that rocks our boat. But it’s there in the texts to be seen by willing hearts.
4. God Wants To Bring Healing to Women
By calling God Mother, we break new barriers in understanding that women are made in God’s image, too. In the very resistance we feel, and in the balking of our hearers, we have to face anew the fact that we do not see women as made in God’s image. There have been too many messages and actions to make us question the worth of women over the centuries and today.
But calling God Mother implies that women too can represent God. The idea is in the Bible, but unfair gender roles keep us blind to it. Calling God Mother invites us as a believing community to see with new eyes that God created women in Her image. And if God is Mother sometimes, God can be She and Her sometimes, too.
This will enrage people, as Rachel Held Evans experienced when she dared cross that threshold even once. But it’s a truth whose time has come in the church and the world.