A Mothering God

It is not uncommon for us to see the eagle as an image of God. Linda and I will be rushing off after service today so that we can attend our daughter’s graduation from Asbury College. Their mascot is the eagle, chosen because it is an image of God. What we often don’t consider is that the eagle in that image is female. It is the mother eagle who bears the young eaglets and teaches them to fly. In this passage from Deuteronomy 32 God is like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions. Or this passage from Exodus 19 - You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

Isn’t it odd that God is represented as both an eagle and a hen. Those two seem so different. The eagle is associated with light and sunshine. It is majestic, and mobile, and soaring. It is adventure and courage. The hen is associated with the dark of the hen house -- a protecting mother in a quiet refuge from a hostile world. Mothers understand that those are two sides of the same coin. Sometimes mothers are providing support and encouragement for their children as they embark on great adventures. Sometimes those same children have been bruised by the world, and need to find a quiet place where they can be comforted. God cares for us in those two ways as well.

And while we are in the animal kingdom, Hosea compares God to a mother bear who is fierce in her desire to protect her young. The image of God as a mother bear robbed of her cubs may be a feminine image, but it is anything but passive.

In Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, the phrase that we translate as Holy Spirit is grammatically feminine. While one should not draw too much from this grammatical happenstance, that may be why the Holy Spirit often is associated with feminine images. The Holy Spirit is comforting, consoling, groaning in child birth, warm, and inspiring.

I have left for last the images of God as a human mother. God is a women in labor in Isaiah 42. God is a mother suckling her children as in Numbers 11. God is a mother who can not forget her children in Isaiah 49. God carries Israel in the womb in Isaiah 46. God is a mother who comforts her children as in the passage we read from Isaiah 66. And there are more.

We do a disservice to the nature of who God is when we focus on a few selected aspects of God’s character and ignore the others. We need to present the entire Biblical image of who God is. For too much of our history, we neglected the female images. That was wrong. So where do we go from here?

There has been a strong push in recent years to use gender neutral language when referring to God. To a point, I agree with that. When we talk about God as God or God as creator, there is no reason to associate a gender.

Still, I think that we have, at times, gone too far. I don’t want to pray “Our Parent who is in heaven” when the Greek really does say “Our Father.” And while I think it is a good idea to include songs with female images in our hymnal, or even to add verses with female images to existing songs, I object to the extent to which we have changed the words to familiar hymns in order to make them conform to modern sensibilities of political correctness. And there are those who would have us go farther. I have actually had a Disciples minister suggest to me that we should never use hymns written in 4/4 time because, no matter what the words say, such hymns are marches which are inherently militaristic and masculine.