The Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D., Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity. File photo by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Gazette
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By the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Ph.D. '13
Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church
Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, May 14, 2023)
Today is Mother's Day. Happy Mother's Day, to all of you who are mothers to you who are celebrating your mom's blessings. It's a special day here at the Memorial Church for a couple of other reasons too. First, we're going to be doing some baptisms here in a few minutes, which is always great news for the church. Alma, Danielle, and Eric will be baptized here today and we're excited about that. And it's also a special day here because as was noted in our greetings, we are celebrating the anniversary of this vision, which came to an unnamed woman who's now known as Julian in East Anglia, England, 650 years ago last Monday. Julian was a woman who was an anchorite, which means that she was at some point in her life, they built a little cell into the side of a church called St. Julian's, which is why she's named that. And they walled her in and she lived there for the rest of her life. She had a little window and she would receive visitors and give them advice and counsel, and she would pray.
And around 1373, and early May of 1373, she had this profound vision of Jesus, which came to her. Julian, it's a special anniversary just because it's around number 650, but she's also my favorite theologian. I'll try to capture some of why in this sermon, while also it's risky to preach a sermon about theology when you have babies in the pews. So I'm going to not go too deeply into it, but sometimes I wonder if we had spent the last 600 years listening to Julian rather than to other theologians, I think our church might be in a different place. We know very little about her other than that, she was walled into this cell and she had these visions. We know that the 14th century in England where she lived was a terrible, terrible time. It was the time of the Black Death, between a third and a half of the people died from plague. This led to massive unrest. There was war, there was insurrection, uprising. There was a small ice age in the beginning of the century, which led to widespread famine.
In England where Julian was from, at the beginning of the 14th century, the average life expectancy was 35 years. At the end when she was alive, the average life expectancy was 17 years. So she lived in this terrifying time, and she also had this really terrifying vision of the crucified Jesus coming to her in all his suffering, which she describes really graphically and disturbingly. And yet, in spite of all this, in spite of this vision that comes to her, in spite of the terrifying world around her, the meaning of it all, she says, as was read in our first lesson, the meaning of it all she says, is love. What was the meaning of all this? Love. Who sent this to me? Love. Why did they send it? Love. And she undertakes this task to rethink the whole Christian tradition as if, imagine that, as if the meaning of it all were love. She has this great line. She's ready, Alma's ready.
She has this great line where she says, you know, many of us Christians believe that God is all powerful and can do all things, or that God is all knowing and may do all things, but that God is all loving and is willing to do all things. That's where we stop short. We're perfectly fine thinking about God's power and God's might and God's knowledge, but we imagine how much God might love us, what God might be willing to do to save us. That's when our faith falls short, and that's where she wants to start over. I've described this from the pulpit before, but one of my favorite moments in her vision, Jesus is talking to Jesus... I mean, excuse me. Julian is talking to Jesus and she's just seen how much he has suffered and she's pleading with him.
Having seen all his suffering, and she says to... She wants to know like, God, the Father must have given you some amazing reward for what you went through. God had must have given you something absolutely unimaginable. Can you tell me what is their crown? What is the glory? What is the crown? What is the reward that you received for all you have done? And in one of my favorite moments from the vision, Jesus just looks at her, confused like he doesn't understand what she's asking. And Jesus says to her, "You were my reward. You are my glory. You are my crown. I would do anything for you. You were lost. And so I came to where you are because that's what love does." Throughout her visions, Julian exposes this stilted backward way in our thinking, and this is a great example. We think of the work of Jesus as a negotiation between the Father and the Son, figuring out what they're going to exchange in order to save these humans, when actually it's just about how much God loves us.
And interestingly, this re-imagining Julian saying that it's all about love, that we need to think about how much God loves us rather than try to think about the economics of exchange between a father and a son somewhere, that leads her to buck the traditional genderings of God and of Jesus at various points in her writings. It's appropriate for Mother's Day because Julian refers to God as our mother, and Julius refers to Jesus as our mother. It's not God the Father, it's God our mother. It's not Christ the Son. It's Christ our mother. And she's doing this because she's trying to turn our attention away from these men ordering things and making rules and suffering and sacrificing and obeying each other. And instead, she wants us to reflect upon who these are to us. And in thinking about their unconditional love, their boundless love, she uses a metaphor of motherhood, which some of us, at least I hope maybe you can find a useful metaphor.
As some of you may know, my mom died last fall, late November last fall, and we made the spring preaching rota, the schedule for preaching shortly after my mom died and I decided to preach on Mother's Day. And to be honest, I'm not sure why I did that. I didn't have anything I wanted to say about my mom or about mothers in general. It just felt like something I ought to do in the year after her death. And when I started preparing the sermon, I still didn't know why to be honest. But as I was looking at our gospel passage for this morning, the passage from John, I thought maybe of a reason why I don't just remember my mom every day, but why it makes sense for me to remember her today from this pulpit on this Mother's Day. The passage from the Gospel of John we have is from what's called the Farewell Discourse. It's the Easter season, and we're celebrating Jesus' resurrection. But this passage actually comes from the Last Supper.
It comes from the night before he died, and he spends several chapters in John, John's not a very long gospel, and it's four or five of the chapters he spends on this Farewell Discourse. He's saying goodbye to them. We'll say more about farewells next week in our last Sunday of the term when we bid goodbye to our graduates. But I think it's worth paying attention to the manner of Jesus's farewell here because Jesus says, "Those who love me will keep my commandments. You will keep my commandments. And if you do, I will abide in you and God will abide in me and I in you," and all this stuff that John does all the time. And it sounds like a list of commandments. Jesus describes it as a list of commandments, orders to do, orders to complete and fulfill. If you love me, you will keep them.
Like a list of tasks. My kid's mom, Colette, is traveling right now. She's overseas on this Mother's Day, and there's a list of things we need to do. We have to do the laundry and take out recycling and feed the fish and all these things. This is kind of how Jesus' farewell address sounds read in one way. I am going away. Here are the things you need to do when I am gone. Make sure you do them. And that's maybe one way to read it. But when we read it that way, when we interpret it that way, I think we get something essentially wrong about what Jesus is saying in this farewell, because the command Jesus gives, it's not in this passage, but the last commandment Jesus gives to the disciples, the thing that he wants them to do is not to take out the recycling or feed the fish or any of that stuff. Jesus says, "Love one another." This is the last thing. This is the thing I need you to do for me. Just love one another. When I am gone, love one another.
When my mom was dying, I had all these ideas about how we ought to remember her. What we ought to do with her ashes, where they ought to go, what our remembrance of her would be like. And I talked to her about it, of course, and she didn't really care. She actually said to me... I asked her some of these things. She said, "I don't care." She really only wanted one thing. And she said this to me almost every time we talk during the last few months of her life, she said, "Take care of each other, love each other." When my dad would walk out of the room, she'd say, "Take care of daddy when I'm gone." And she said that because she knew she wasn't going to be around to do it, and that was the only thing she really cared about. She didn't care where her ashes went or any of that stuff. She just wanted us to love each other. "I'm not going to be around," she was saying, "So you have to do it for me."
Jesus loves these disciples. As Julian knows, it's all about love. And this I think is what Jesus is doing in this lesson. He's saying goodbye and he loves these people and he wants them to live into that love. So he says to them, "Love each other. Please love each other. This may get worse before it gets better, and I'm not going to be around to help you in the way that I was before. So love each other, and when you do, you will be doing my work. I will abide in you because the thing that I most want of you and from you will be in you and I'll be there too." There are a lot of ways that I used to love my mom that I don't have access to anymore. And that's hard. I don't like it a lot of days, but I can still love my mom. I do still love my mom and I do it in loving the things and the people she loved and the dogs she loved. She loved dogs.
And it's not always easy because I want that other stuff back, but even though it's not always satisfying, it's real. There is still this way. Today is Mother's Day, and it's also Julian's day, but more than anything else, it is a baptismal day. And since this love is what Jesus asks us to do, since this really is what Christian life is all about, what it really amounts to in the end, then that's what baptism is about, also. We have this tradition of wrong-headed thinking about baptism I think. We think that baptism is a blessing that spares people who are baptized from God's wrath and God's judgment.
And I know what Julian would say about that. I know what she would say about the idea that anything we might do could make anyone, could make Eric and Alma and Daniel any more precious to God than they already are. That's not what baptism is. We're not making these ones lovable. Baptism is about them. These who are baptized today embracing the dying wish of Jesus, to love this broken world. And it's about us embracing these people who are baptized as already and always beloved of God. It's about us doing what Jesus asked when he said goodbye. It's about us fulfilling his last wish. It's about us finding Jesus in our hearts and in one another as we do all. Amen.