Christ Our Mother

Solemnity of Corpus Christi. Br Bede Mullens meditates on the eternal presence and power of Christ’s once-for-all sacrifice.

A powerful strain of medieval spirituality liked to address Jesus as Mother. You can find it in writings of St Bernard of Clairvaux, St Hildegard of Bingen, and, most famously, Julian of Norwich. But maybe not mother in quite the way we immediately imagine… What they have in mind is not so much Jesus’ tenderness and care, nor his forgivingness and open arms – truly though he has those qualities. For the medievals, it was much more biological. Christ is our mother because he makes a space for us in his Body; he nurtures us from his own lifeblood. As St Paul so often says, we Christians are ‘in Christ’. Christ is pregnant with us; he suckles us; he ensures our growth into his own manhood.

In the Passion Christ opened up his Body: lacerated by the scourging, pierced by the nails and the lance. ‘Deep in thy wounds, Lord, hide and shelter me,’ we pray. St John tells us that Blood and water came forth from his side, the waters of Baptismal rebirth and the Blood of the Eucharist. One of the most common icons of the Eucharist in the Middle Ages was the image of a mother pelican: it was believed the pelican with her own beak would pierce a hole in her breast, from which her chicks would sup the trickling blood.

‘This is my Body’; ‘this is my Blood’. Catholics believe that the sacraments do what they say: we take Jesus at his word, because he sealed his word by his death. It is by the sacraments that the power of Christ’s Passion makes its way to each one of us. By these signs and rituals, our life-stories become involved with his life-story, and the love he poured out for us once for all is experienced time and again in the here and now. The power of Christ’s sacrifice transcends all time, and therefore it can make itself felt at any and every moment.

Moses mediated a covenant between the people of Israel and God: they were included because they were present at the sacrifice and sprinkled with the blood. But what about the next generation? And the next? And the next? The sacrifices had to be renewed; the Law had to be rediscovered by each generation, or sometimes by the same generation after it fell away. Christ’s covenant is not like that: as the Letter to the Hebrews puts is, ‘he has entered the sanctuary once and for all, taking with him not the blood of goats and bull calves, but his own blood, having won an eternal redemption for us’. We, like the Israelites, remain fumbling and imperfect, but Jesus is always faithful: faithful to God, on our behalf, and faithful to us, on God’s behalf.

So we come to Mass each week, indeed we celebrate the eucharistic sacrifice everyday, not because God needs anything more, not because there was anything lacking in Christ’s sacrifice. We have no other sacrifice than his! But his sacrifice must take hold of us: we are the ones who are lacking, we are the ones who need to feel its effects. That is what we asked in the opening prayer: ‘grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption’. Today, we ask God for a livelier perception that that we are Christ’s Body; today, we ask to live more intensely by the pattern of his outpoured blood.

However biologically we may wish to express it, Christ’s motherhood is of course spiritual. The eucharist is no ordinary meal, but spiritual food and spiritual drink. The harvest of this Body is our union together, shown in peace and forgiveness; the vintage of this Blood is the same spirit of loving sacrifice that led Christ to die for our sakes. We take this food, not to turn it into our mortal flesh, but so that we may be converted into Christ’s incorruptible, glorious flesh. What is promised to our bodies in the Resurrection of the future, should become a reality of our spirit even now. The Eucharist is a challenge, as well as a gift: are you willing to live by what you receive? Are you willing to let your body become his Body? That’s the promise of this sacrament: in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘this jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond is’ – really is – ‘immortal diamond’.

Readings: Exodus 24:3-8 | Hebrews 9:11-15 | Mark 14:12-16,22-26

Image: from an altar in the Cathedral of Saint-Brieuc in Brittany, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP