Day 26 - Are we nearly there yet?

How you respond to that question depends, I suppose, on the distance you’ve already travelled and the number of times the question has been asked. Today marks the half way stage in our Lenten journey. How should we mark the half-way stage? Maybe it is time for a break from the fasting, a time for celebration. And so we arrive at Mothers Day or do we? I’ve been taken to task more than once for giving today that title! It’s Mothering Sunday. Dating back to the middle ages when people who were forced to work far from home were given the opportunity to return to their ‘mother church’, the church of their baptism, and join their own families for a day. No matter what the origins or the name of the day, I will be thinking of my own mother, and I will be quite pleased should my sons and my grandchildren remember their mothers too. And not a few people will be celebrating.

I’ve grown to like that older title, Mothering Sunday. It makes me think of the importance of ‘mothering’, the intimacy of a love that laughs with those who laugh and weeps with those who weep and feels their every emotion. Hold on to that thought for a moment. I want to return to the question I began with.

According to Luke, Jesus was on a journey that begins in Luke 9:51 ‘when the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem’. He was not alone. He was accompanied by his disciples, men and women (see Luke 23:55). As he regaled them with tales like the one about the Good Samaritan or the one about the Prodigal Son, I wonder whether they ever asked impatiently, ‘Are we nearly there yet?’

The journey reaches its destination as Jesus finally ‘went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem’ itself (Luke 19:28). What happened, I wonder, at the halfway stage on his journey? It is around the halfway mark in the journey that we come upon words of Jesus that speak so powerfully to us today of all days.

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.’ Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’ ” (Luke 13:31-35, NRSVue)

There is heart-ache in Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem. He sees the city’s violence, and he longs to mother its children, and gather them together ‘as a hen gathers her brood under her wings’. This ‘Mothering Sunday’, I cannot get out of my head the image of children in Jerusalem, Israel, Palestine, the West Bank, Gaza. Still the powers that be are ‘not willing’, still they ‘do not recognise the things that make for peace’, still Jesus weeps (Luke 19:41-44).

This mothing Sunday, let’s remember in our prayers and actively support in our actions, those like the partners of Embrace the Middle East who are bringing the mothering love of Jesus into our hurting world. A prayer from their Lent Course, Hope in Hard Places.

Loving God, you promise to be with us to the end of the age.

In hard and uncertain times give us hearts and minds to trust you,

feet to follow you, and hands to do your will.

Amen.

Richard Cleaves