From Nativity to Pietà

Sermon for the Mothering Sunday – 23 March 2025 – All Saints Church Kesgrave

Text: Woman, here is your son,’ ²⁷ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ 

God give you peace my Sisters and Brothers.     (John 19v26-27)

Now please don’t tell my wife Lesly-Anne, I don’t want to ruin it for her, but we are about to come up to episode in which Sister Evangelina dies.  (This episode was aired, coincidentally on 6 March 2016, also Mothering Sunday.)

If you get the chance to watch it again take note of the scene where her sisters lay Sister Evangelina out on her bed in her cell.  One would have thought they would be wearing Sunday best or even full funereal habits.  But no.  They are silently and solemnly wearing their midwifery gowns, as if they were delivering a child, as they gently wash their sister’s body. 

Sister Evangelina, who most probably did not bear a child herself yet helped many many mothers bear their babies, is borne by her sisters and delivered into the life-after-life.

Mothers are always midwives.  Many of us come from the generation when a home birth was the only option.  It went hard on old Mrs Harvey down Badgeney Road in my home town of March, when both I and my first brother Mark were born in the new nursing home up the wealthy end of town – for the rest of her life my mother was accused of being ‘posh’ by her friends and family.  Childbirth belongs in the community for it is the whole community that bears the child and the whole community, when working well, that bears them through life.  Hilary Clinton’s book ‘It Takes a Village’ to raise a child will always be good reading for a pregnant family.

No where often enough do I find the time to play with clay.  When I do, like Henry Moorewhose ‘abstract’ school of sculpture is the only one I can pretend I belong to.  And like him I find there are some themes to which I keep on returning.  The picture at the top of this page is a very rough version of a favourite theme of Mary holding the baby Jesus and again holding his dead body.  

It’s called ‘From Nativity to Pietà’ and what challenges me most when moulding them is that I always use the same amount of clay for both models.  Motherhood transforms you but you only have the one body with which to bear your child.  And, whether they be a new-born babe or a crucified Saviour, mothers always end up bearing their children.

When they carry them in the womb they bear them.

When they carry the new born babe in their arms they bear them.

When the toddler takes their first faltering steps it is to fall into their mother’s arms and they bear them again.

When the growing child learns to stand and walk and run and play they bear them as they watch over them from a not-too-far distance.

On that first day of school the tears of parting are as much the mothers as the child’s as they learn that the way they bear their child is changing. 

(My heart always goes out to the mums of those children who take to school like a duck to water and don’t look back into the loving tear-filled eyes of the one who bore them).

And then hormones and adolescence arrive together, and mothers (knowing the pain that this brings) have to learn to bear their child by keeping ‘eyes on them and hands off them.’

If life is kind, which it very rarely is, in the end the roles are reversed and at the last it is the child who will bear their mother on the final journey.  It is often said ‘When you give birth to a daughter you meet the person who will hold your hand when you die’.

Motherhood involves a heck of a lot of  ‘child’ bearing!

And what I’ve described is what happens when things go more or less to expectation.

What of those mothers for whom there is a still-birth whose arms are full of emptiness?

What of those mothers who, for many different reasons, can’t hold on to their child? A child who is born away to be cared for by another.  They now find that even though they may have no child to carry they bear a burden of a different kind.

And then there are those mothers, like Mary the mother of Jesus, who find that they end up bearing the dead weight of a child taken to soon by disease or war, natural disaster or hatred.

All mothers know that there will come a time when the cord is cut and they face the grief of ‘losing’ the child they bore?  (And don’t get me started on those people, mostly men, who name Postpartum Depression as ‘just a case of the “baby blues!”’)  But those mothers who have this grief twice – as did my mother when my 17-year-old younger brother was killed in a road accident – have surely borne far far too much?

What does Jesus have to say to mothers who bear their child and then have to bear a double portion of grief?

What does Jesus have to say to any of us who carry our grief around us as if it were cocooned in swaddling clothes and tucked away in the dark recesses of our heart?

Then we remember that God knows this pain.

We remember that Jesus weeps, as would any mother or father, over the wilfulness of God’s people and longs to gather us under His wings as a mother hen does her chicks.

We remember that Jesus bears our own sorrows and sins by giving away His life, and mother-like bears them all the way to the cross of Calvary.  And even then, at the very end He stops and cares for His bereft mother and a grieving friend.  Even when it seems He can no longer bear us He calls us to imitate Him and, as the apostle Paul would later write; 

Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ (Galatians6v2)

We remember that it is as the stone of the Easter Tomb is rolled away that He, having… ‘shared in our humanity by His death broke the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil— ¹⁵ and frees us whose lives were held in slavery by our fear of death’ (Hebrews 2v14-15 ed.)

Jesus, with His own body, defeats the power of death and sin and bears us all into the promise of the Life after Life. Jesus is our Midwife and like a mother looks on us every day with love.

How do we respond to such love?  Well, today, if you are fortunate to have her with you still, say ‘thank you to your mum’.  If she has got home ahead of you take one of our Mothers’ Union posies to place on her resting place.  If relationships have been hard, or non-existent, take a first step to mending them.  And if we do not have any mother figures in our life lets decide to go and find someone to mother.

This is what Christ did for us.  How can we do any less for those who bore us throughout our life?

May we learn this Mothering Sunday to live the Apostle Paul’s words and leave this place strengthened to bear the Good News of God’s love to all around us

[This blog ‘From Nativity to Pietà’ is copyright © Andrew Dotchin 2025 and may be reproduced without charge on condition that the source is acknowledged.]

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