A Mothering God

Since the last post in this blog, Mothers’ Day has come and gone. Worshipping in church on Mothers’ Day offered me the time to reflect on the Bible’s myriad description of God in maternal language. Many of you have requested a blog post addressing the feminine nature of God in Scripture, so this will hopefully keep your conversations going!

As a caveat, this feminine language for God is specifically maternal, not generally feminine. Unfortunately, even as it elevates women, this language has the potential to alienate some women who cannot or choose not to bear children. Here, it is helpful to remember that all these passages are metaphors—ways of revealing knowledge about God through comparisons with other things. As such, everyone who does the work of nurturing, protecting, and laboring on behalf of others can be included in this comparison with God’s own motherly work.

In the OldTestament, it is interesting that maternal language for God shows up in all three parts of the TANAKH (a Hebrew acronym for Torah, Prophets, Writings). In other words, in Israel’s book of instruction, in the call to return to God’s principles, and in the worship and wisdom documents, God’s role as a mother consistently shows up. Here is a sample:

• Numbers11:10-15 Moses addresses God as mother who has given birth and now must nurse her newborn children. (The Candler Foundry offers a TheoEd Talk by Dr. Wil Gafney on this very topic! Watch it here.)
• Psalm131:2 The psalmist describes being in God’s presence like a child snuggling in its mother’s lap.
• Isaiah 66:13 This is one of the “thus sayeth the Lord” passages. God in first person states that God will comfort the people as a mother comforts her baby.
• Hosea 11:3-4 God self-identifies as a mother figure: bandaging skinned knees, nursing, carrying children, and teaching babies to walk.

In the New Testament gospels, Jesus describes his own prophetic role and mission in motherly actions.

• Luke 13:34 Here, Jesus expresses a fierce desire to do what mother birds do when there is danger: gather the little ones under her wings and keep them safe.
• John 16:20-21 Jesus narrates the gospel activity as childbirth. What Jesus is doing, and what his disciples are required to do, is accept pain and suffering for a while so that new life may be brought into the world.

Someone might ask, why would it be important for us to discuss the motherly metaphors used for God? First, they are present in Scripture. If we belief Scripture to be important and holy, then these descriptions deserve our attention and exist to reveal something about God’s nature and identity that we might otherwise miss. Second, over half the population of the earth is women—a majority of which become mothers.

I’ll never forget the first time I sat in a seminary class that investigated this divine maternal language. There was a woman (probably in her fifties or sixties) who began to cry as we read the passages I surveyed. She said that she had spent decades worshipping God, loving God, serving God. But she had never identified with God. And in this moment of bathing in biblical metaphors for a mothering, nursing, birthing God, she had discovered a new and beautiful friendship with God.

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