FOURTH SUNDAY OF LENT
14 March 2010

Home is special; as the song has it, Mid pleasures and Palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home.

Perhaps that’s why the idea of coming home is such an important one in scripture as well. We see that in our readings today: In our First Reading we heard how, after forty years in the wilderness, and four hundred and thirty in Egypt, the people of Israel are finally back home. They have crossed the River Jordan, which forty years previous they couldn’t bring themselves to do; and now they are in the Vale of Jericho keeping their first Passover in the land they left so long ago. And as a sign that they are well and truly home, the manna that has sustained them on their journey ceases, and they eat the produce of the land. One can only begin to imagine the impact of that moment.

And our Gospel too is about coming home, as the prodigal son returns to the father he left out of greed and self interest. He’s taken everything he was entitled to, and wasted it. And as he sits tending his pigs, he comes to his senses and realizes that even a servant’s lot in his father’s house is better than what his wealth has got him. And he determines to go home, even if it means being no more than one of the servants. And he works out his little speech (as we do when we know we’ve been foolish), and sets out on the journey back to his father’s house.

But before he has even reached the front gate, his father has spotted him, and rushes out to throw his arms around him in welcome. As for the speech, he can only get the first two lines out, before his father is organizing a party. There’s certainly no question of his being treated like one of the servants. Like the people of Israel, he too is home.

Now today is, among other things, Mothering Sunday, also known as Refreshment Sunday and Mid-Lent Sunday. But the mother of which the Church speaks is not, in the first instance, our earthly mum, but rather, that heavenly motherland which is our true home. Jerusalem, which is above, which is the mother of us all, as the Prayer Book had it; and the ancient Introit Psalm for this day calls us to rejoice with Jerusalem, and to be comforted by her as a child is comforted at its mother’s breast. Or in the words of a later hymn:

O mother dear, Jerusalem, When shall I come to thee?
When shall my sorrows have an end? Thy joys when shall I see?
O happy harbour of the saints, O sweet and pleasant soil!
O thee no sorry may be found, No grief, no care, no toil.

This, by extension, came to be applied to the Church, the sign on earth of our heavenly home; and thus arose the practice of visiting significant churches, especially cathedrals, on this day. Only later did it become something approaching “Mothers’ Day” as it is now popularly celebrated … partly in the Victoria era, when household servants were given the opportunity to visit their home churches (and by extensions, their families), and especially since the war, when the practice of American servicemen in Britain celebrating their Mothers’ Day in May was copied and applied to this day.

But the emphasis on our earthly mothers is not out of place, if we understand where it comes from. Because if we are celebrating our heavenly motherland, our heavenly home; then we are also celebrating the loving care of the One who welcomes us home, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. Jesus taught us to call God our Father, and we must not allow anything to push that special way of addressing God intimately aside. But God is more than earthly fatherhood; and scripture also tells us of his maternal side: As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you, says Isaiah; and Father Faber reminds us in our opening hymn,

No earthly father loves like thee, No mother, e’er so mild
Bears and forbears as thou hast done With me thy sinful child.

Over and over again in the Bible, the image of the family, and especially of the mother, stands as a sign of that heavenly home to which our readings today point. We rejoice today that the family, blessed by God and shared by God in his Son Jesus, can be a way in which we can know, here and now, something of the love of our heavenly motherland. And in particular, we think of our own mothers, and the role they have had in shaping us by their example and teaching.

We think also of the Church, which guides and shapes us in our journey as Christians; and of Mary the mother of Jesus who, if we are Jesus’ brothers and sisters is, in a special way our mother too … and we remember how Jesus committed his closest friend John to her care from the cross, and her to him.

But above all, we think of our heavenly motherland and home, in the confidence that the God whose love surpasses all human love, will one day receive us there with joy, as his adopted sons and daughters in Jesus. To return to the words of Father Faber already quoted,

Father of Jesus, love’s reward, what rapture will it be,
prostrate before thy throne to lie, and gaze and gaze on thee!