Sometimes God is the invisible Mother in the Bible, like the moms at the park holding the kids’ jackets. God-as-mother appears in the pages of Scripture, but often in a way that modern readers don’t notice. This Mother’s Day, let’s take time to see and appreciate God’s motherhood in the Bible.
We can start with Jesus’ own words.
Nicodemus Understood
Dignified community leader, Nicodemus, didn’t understand the metaphor of being “born from above” that Jesus used in John 3:3. I’ve always believed Nicodemus was just a bit concrete. However, scholar Craig Keener says that Nicodemus felt perplexed because he believed the rebirth of baptism was for Gentiles only, and not for upstanding religious folk like him.
Interestingly, Nicodemus didn’t express puzzlement or shock about the Spirit’s motherly role in the new birth (John 3:5, 6). His acceptance might reflect the fact that in Aramaic, the word for Spirit (ruah) has a feminine ending. (See my post on that here). Yet more importantly, the metaphor of mother for God already had a history in the Jewish Scripture.
Here are the verses that would have been in Jesus’, Nicodemus’ and John’s minds already:
You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth. (Deuteronomy 32:18)
Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?– when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band. Has the rain a father, or who has begotten the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? (Job 38:8-9, 28-29)
I [Wisdom] was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be. When there were no oceans, I was given birth [by God], when there were no springs abounding with water; before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth. (Proverbs 8:23-25)
For a long time I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in labor, I will gasp and pant (Isaiah 42:14) [image of God crying out in the pain of labor].
Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb, even to your old age I am he, even when you turn gray I will carry you. I have made, I will bear; I will carry and will save (Isaiah 46:3-4) [God as midwife, eternal mother]
Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you (Isaiah 49:15).
John’s View of God as Mother
John recorded the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, and fully embraced this Scriptural way of thinking about God as mother. Here are the ways and times John describes God in feminine terms:
But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood, or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but born of God (John 1:12).
Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit” (John 3:5, 6).
If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that every one who does right has been born of him (I John 2:29).
Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God’s seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God (I John 3:9).
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God (I John 4:7).
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent [literally, the one having given birth] loves the child (I John 5:1).
…for whatever is born of God conquers the world. And this is the victory that conquers the world, our faith (I John 5:4).
Surprised? We are so used to this phrase “born again” that those times John speaks of being “born of God” seem almost clichéd. Yet each time he uses this figure of speech, he harks back to the Jewish Scriptural references to God as mother who gives birth to and nurses Her children.
Peter and the Mother Metaphor
At least one other disciple also understood this. Peter writes, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure, spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow into salvation–if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good” (I Peter 2:2-3). It is “the Lord” (Jesus) who is nursing His children here.
And this reminds us that mothering, birthing, and nursing are in the realm of metaphor and simile. We don’t have to be afraid to call Jesus a mother, just as Peter was not afraid to paint an image of Jesus nursing spiritual children with spiritual milk. We are not saying Jesus is or was a woman, any more than we can say that God is a man.
Seeing Scripture More Clearly
But we do have to pay attention to Scripture itself. We have been blinded for centuries, since perhaps the Middle Ages (see my post on the popularity of the Mother metaphor then, here).
The Bible is more woman-affirming than we have imagined, and so is God. Some around Jesus understood this better than others, like John. (In fact, some think he was particularly interested in featuring the female friends of Jesus in his gospel: see this wonderful book for that point-of-view.)
John, Nicodemus and Jesus implicitly believed that those who are born again must know God as Mother, as the Old Testament prophets wrote. And now you and I know it, too.