The Motherhood of God

One aspect of God that you don’t often read about is his motherhood, probably because “his motherhood” sounds ridiculous. But it must be remembered that much talk of God is freighted with analogy, including his gender. God is neither male nor female (which may be why Paul can say that “in Christ there is neither male nor female”). Of course that’s not to say that masculinity and femininity have no relation to God. God created human beings in his image, so our maleness and femaleness reflect the image of a God who subsumes both, or even brings both into perfect union.

In the book of Isaiah, the motherhood of God is a word of promise spoken to exiled Israel. YHWH says to his people,

You will be like a child that is nursed by its mother, carried in her arms, and treated with love. I will comfort you in Jerusalem, as a mother comforts her child.

This unique role of women -- that of “nurse” to a hungry, dependent child uncomfortable in their new surroundings -- offers an insight into the character of God, and thus the actions he is prone to undertake. God nurses, God comforts, God carries, God treats with love. Picture a mother holding her newborn baby in her arms, feeding him when he is hungry, singing to him when he is upset, loving every little detail about this new creation; picture this, and you begin to get a fuller picture of who God is.

Jesus also creates a snapshot image of motherhood, but applies the image to himself. Lamenting over impenitent Jerusalem, he says,

O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

The picture here is one of a mother’s protection for her own. This echoes some passages in the Psalms, which speak of abiding “in the shadow of [YHWH’s] wings”. There the children find refuge in times of trouble, the strength of a devoted mother in times of weakness and vulnerability.

One of the interesting things about Jesus’s application of this maternal image to himself is how blurred it makes the lines between “gender roles”; how close it brings the “complementary” nature of “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood” together. Jesus as image of God brought the two into one. His maleness didn’t preclude him from embodying the characteristics associated with motherhood. In fact, for Jesus to really be the image of God -- “the exact imprint of His nature” as Priscilla writes in Hebrews (oh no he didn’t!) -- male and female had to become one in him, for God is one. And so they did.

None of this is to say that father’s should start breast feeding their children, of course. Nevertheless, the image of a child being nursed at its mother’s breast is one that God is not hesitant to apply to himself in order to reveal the kind of God he is and the kind of things he desires to do (nurture, sustain, love, etc). The man Jesus fully revealed this maternal instinct, and whether male or female we too are called to embody the motherhood of God, displaying all the compassion, care and comfort that a mother has for her beloved child.

Metaphorically speaking, you can milk anything with nipples.