Rachael weeping for her children—slain, tortured, or lost: the anguished mother is the continuing image throughout Scripture. From Eve, the mother of our sin, to Mary, the mother of our salvation, we follow the trail of tears. Eve’s punishment for her transgression was the curse/blessing of childbirth. In the paired image of Cain and Abel we see the fruition of this prophecy, not only in the travail of physical birth but also in the greater pain of spiritual birth. The triumph of an evil man over a good one in that scene of fratricide echoes through the history of the patriarchs. The angry quarrels of brothers must have wrenched mothers’ hearts asunder. In some of the scriptural families, the mother’s love itself proved to be a malign influence on the children, in the case of Rebekah encouraging one brother to steal another’s birthright.
The women of the Old Testament, who, with certain notable exceptions, are generally noted only for the romance of their selection as wives to patriarchs, are judged primarily for their fecundity. Apparently, long barren women (Sarah and Rachel), though perhaps beloved while childless, are triumphant only when they bear children. Such long awaited children were especially prized. When women so clearly live through their children as many Old Testament women do, they focus their attention on these projections of self, especially on the males, who can perhaps achieve the impossible goals of the mothers. Thus the mothers’ influence for good or evil on their children is a significant reflection of their own values. The evil woman may pervert the young Jezebel, the devoted mother may dedicate to God her tiny Samuel. In either case, the mother’s faith finds expression through the child’s life.
Mary, far more fully described than these consorts to patriarchs, echoes the Jewish traditions as she travelsthe archetypal path of motherhood. From the anguish and joy of the annunciation to the numbing pain of the crucifixion, she lived out the traditional role of the good mother: the blessedness of birth (and its myriad complications), the responsibilities of nurturing (the flight into Egypt), the pride and pain of adolescent independence (the separation at the Temple), the mature youth’s assumption of manhood (during the wedding at Cana). We perceive Mary’s as the universal maternal experience: loving the child, cherishing him, and finally releasing him to be an independent person with his own calling. At Cana and later, we see Mary willing to learn from the son and to accept his leadership, able to follow to the cross, to participate in the joy of the Resurrection, and to unite with other Christians in the blessedness of the Pentecostal fire.
In this portrait, we see that motherhood is but one role of the woman. Mary accepted it as God’s will (with Elizabeth’s help perceiving her “blessedness”). She brought Jesus up in her faith, observing the holy days like a good Jewish mother; yet apparently she was able to understand that he “must be about his father’s business.” What a moment for a mother: when the child moves outside the home, no longer reliant on her for guidance. Mary seems to have adapted to this new relationship with her son over the years, and she seems to have found in his leadership a new sense of herself. As a child of God, one of the saints, she found a new “blessedness” that provided comfort in the face of her son’s death, and faith that would carry her beyond the cross to the Easter experience and then to the upper room.
No longer do we women see the child-bearing function as absolutely and unquestionably primary; no longer are we burdened and blessed with the large families and unending household chores of our ancestors. We are free as never before in history, free to make choices that Mary and Sarah and Rebekah never contemplated. Most women even today apparently still believe from the moment they cuddle their first dolls that their greatest joy will be in motherhood. Yet without the tidy tyranny of the arranged marriage and polygamous households, many women share Sarah’s early barrenness without the joy of her unexpected late gift from God. Others choose barrenness on ethical or personal grounds.
While Mary would have given her day to her role as wife and mother, nurturing the body, mind, and spirit of the child in her home, many of us—with mixed results—leave the child’s body in the hands of daycare centers, the mind to the schools, and the spirit to the Church. (I for one want to express my gratitude to the loving teachers, babysitters, and friends who have served as an extended family to my youngsters, who had patience when I lost mine and advice when I was at wits’ end. For me, these people have been enormously supportive.) Thus, for good or bad, today’s mother often has less influence on her children than her counterparts in previous generations had on theirs. The woman is liberated from the child to pursue her own education, career, or other activities. In short, for good or ill, motherhood is no longer an obligatory, single, central role and purpose of life for women.
Many women feel that this freedom to choose motherhood rather than having it thrust upon them gives a new richness to the experience. The alternatives to housekeeping and babysitting can make child-rearing less confining, more interesting, and more fun. For many of us, barrenness is no catastrophe when adoption is possible. Even for unmarried women with a calling to maternity, adoption is increasingly a possibility, along with the more traditional nurturing patterns of nursing and teaching. More and more we are discovering that blood ties are by no means essential to the maternal response, and we are redefining our child-mother relations to echo Paul, who spoke of us as those whom God adopted, and Christ, who assigned his beloved comrade to his mother at the cross.
Such realignments of families and reassessments of values have been important means toward the redefinitions of roles. As Carl F. H. Henry said recently in his “Footnotes” column in this magazine (January 3, issue), many Christian women who continue to find their calling in traditional forms of homemaking also need to reassess their values. Rather than providing only good meals and clean houses, such women have a larger calling: to raise “sons and daughters strong in faith and piety.” And no Sunday school can substitute for the nurturing in the faith available daily in the Christian home. But increasingly, we realize that we are responsible for children beyond those who carry our own genes.
When we participate in infant baptism or dedication, we vow to become participants in the nurture of the child. How often do we accept the responsibility to serve as godparents to the children of our church and community? As Henry said, “Instead of merely deploring communal child-care centers, can we probe new possibilities of the extended evangelical family? Jesus once asked, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ ” As Jesus (and consequently Mary) realized, we arerelated to all people because of our unity as children of God and brothers in Christ. We need to look beyond our cozy but perhaps selfish family circle.
We can discover a number of helpful household hints in the Bible:
1. From Mary and Jesus, we find that motherhood first of all demands the preservation of the child from danger and from evil.
2. From them we also learn the responsibility to help a child move from pabulum to solid food of the faith, and to experience outside the home, into a world apart from parents. To fail to feed the child spiritually is to create spiritual cripples, unable to walk in the Spirit as free men and women in Christ, unable to stand straight in the outside world.
3. Although Scripture tells us that discipline is the responsibility of the good parent, it also teaches us that the sensitive parent listens to the child and learns from him as well (as did Mary at Cana).
4. From Mary’s example, we see that the greatest pain and the greatest joy are not necessarily at birth; they may come at maturity, when the child grows into selfhood that demands independence of the parent, a second cutting of the umbilical cord.
5. In Mary’s ability to follow Jesus, when he became an adult, we see that truth may on occasion be the possession of youth, and that the wise person follows wisdom’s call without embarrassment—even if it comes from the mouths of babes.
Mary learned to accept Jesus as the Son of God—not as a psychological or physical extension of herself, not as an inferior creature whom she could pervert or dominate, not as an animal needing nothing but nourishment, not as a tool having no will. She came to know him as a separate, free, precious being.
For other mothers, such as us, living in a fallen world among fallen children, there are other scriptural lessons as well: that we have tremendous power to enrich or to corrupt the small child; that our love, like God’s, must mix discipline with regard. Proverbs repeatedly admonishes parents to take the rod to the foolish child, and children to obey and respect their parents.
The child will learn from his parents how he is to respond to others—whether with superiority and insensitivity, with suspicion and hostility, or with love. Again, Scripture points the way to rearing a child in the way he should go: he will learn about God first from us, from our explicit and implicit attitudes toward Scripture, worship, and fellow Christians.
Human efforts sometimes backfire: the loving mother can create the rebellious spirit. If the mother sacrifices herself eagerly, the child may treat her as a doormat or as a tiresome domestic saint. Some scriptural guidelines about respect, anger, and discipline are helpful to the parent, but few rules hold in every case; balance and sensitivity to individual relationships are more important than fixed rules. As God sees each of us as an individual, so we must know our children. One child needs a spanking; another needs the more positive reinforcement of the forgiving hug. The parent must discern which is which. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” says Solomon, and the good parents must discern “the way he should go” and the means to “train him up”—both demanding love and prayer. The ideal wife/mother furnishes the climactic encomium for the writer of Proverbs, for she is the good woman described in chapter 31:
Strength and dignity are her clothing,
and she laughs at the time to come.
She opens her mouth with wisdom,
and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
She looks well to the ways of her household,
and does not eat the bread of idleness.
Her children rise up and call her blessed;
her husband also, and he praises her:
“Many women have done excellently,
but you surpass them all.”
Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain,
but a woman who fears the LORD is to be praised.
Give her of the fruit of her hands,
and let her works praise her in the gates.
No one but Mary has ever known the miracle of Christ’s growing within her body. But countless have known the miracle of birth and the greater miracle of love. God in his infinite wisdom has provided mankind the means to multiply without his constant intervention. The regularity of the creation of new life has deadened our awareness of this recurrent miracle. That God also established the infant as a creature demanding nurture forces us to accept responsibility for our young. We need no psychologists to educate us on the wearying and rewarding role of motherhood. The greater responsibility of the role is reflected in the image of Christ, weeping over Jerusalem as a mother over her children.
Both men and women are called to help bring children of God into a relationship with Christ. The mother role is not just for women of child-bearing age; it is the responsibility for love and nurture in the faith that every Christian woman and man, single or married, with or without physical descendants, must assume.
Mary first appears in Scripture as a mother-to-be, concerned with the physical experience of birth. By Pentecost, she has become the mother to the larger community of Christians—“Woman, behold thy son,” says Christ from the Cross. Apparently Mary was able to walk through the valley of the shadow of death into the blessedness of God’s transcendent love by faith and trust and love. So may we all.
