Can God be a mother? Yes! In fact, the Bible portrays a wealth of feminine images of God.
For instance, the first nine chapters of Proverbs, which centre on wisdom, say much about God’s femininity. Lady Wisdom “is your life” (Prov. 4:13). The person “who finds me finds life” (Prov. 8:35). Lady Wisdom “decree[s] what is just” (Prov. 8:15). She was there before the foundation of the earth because wisdom comes from God and was created by God (see Prov. 8:22-31). She is the maker of all things. Lady Wisdom is perfection multiplied by perfection. She is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving, good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing all, penetrating through all other intelligent spirits (see Wis. 7:22- 8:1).
Lady Wisdom “orders all things well” (Wis. 8:1). “She pervades and penetrates all things” (Wis. 7:24). Lady Wisdom also “renews all things” (Wis. 7:27). She shares God’s throne. In other words, Wisdom is really the source of all things new (see Wis. 7:10-14).
The Biblical God births children. Deuteronomy says: “You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth” (Deut. 32:18). Job states: “Who shut in the sea with doors, when it burst forth from the womb” (Job 38:8). In the same book, God fathers the rain and begets ice from her womb (Job 38:28-29). The prophet Isaiah says of God: “I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant” (Isa. 42:14). Moreover the same prophet presents God as saying to the house of Jacob, the house of Israel: “[You] who have been borne by me from your birth, carried from the womb; even to your old age” (Isa. 46:3-4).
In the New Testament, God births the believers. In the Johannine Gospel we find: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12). In the first letter of John we find the bold affirmation that “he who loves is born of God” (1 John 4:7). Back to John’s Gospel, Jesus likens God who is bringing forth a new humanity by using the metaphor of the pangs of a woman in labour. “When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the world” (John 16:21).
The Acts of the Apostles reminds us that “in him [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). The Letter to the Galatians says that God, through his Apostle Paul, is in travail till the time the Galatian believers are matured in Christ. “My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!” (Gal. 4:19). Finally, the Letter to the Romans says that “the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now” (Rom. 8:22).
Sustained by this biblical tradition Christian witness of God nicely portrays him as Mother in the person of his Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ. It was St Anselm of Canterbury who proposed this powerful insight. In his 10th oration, St Anselm writes: “And you, Jesus, are you not also a mother? Are you not the mother who, like a hen gathers her chickens under her wings?” And then, he continues by saying that Jesus is a mother to us in a more profound way than is Paul or the other apostles.
“You have died more than they, that they may labour to bear. It is by your death that they have been born, for if you had not been in labour, you could not have borne death; and if you had not died, you would not have brought forth. For, longing to bear sons into life, You tasted of death, and by dying you begot them. You did this in your own self, your servants, by your commands and help. You as the author, they as the ministers. So you, Lord God, are the great mother”.
Jesus, my sweetest and most tender Mother, transform me by your maternal love for me. Amen!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap