"Emmanuel: Glimpses of God Incarnate," December 3

Friday, December 3

Isaiah 49:1-6

“God as Mother”

ADVENT CELEBRATES THE EXPECTATION of the birth of Jesus into the world.

In 1966, Renée Cox gave to the world her art-photo, “Yo Mama’s Last Supper.” The montage presents a Da Vinci-style arrangement of the meal with the artist herself standing in the Jesus place, arms open, presenting herself to the viewer, naked. As Jesus offered himself naked on the cross, so she offers herself—he to death, she to life. The table is suggestively laden with fruit. Of the disciples, only the Beloved Disciple is looking at her. The others are about their own distractions.

Here is Jesus, the woman, the mother, who brings life into the world in the most intimate and taxing way, through her own body, soul, and strength, with labor both painful and joyful. She then nurtures that which she has birthed, again with body, soul, and perseverance. Her body is both a thing of beauty and a vessel of power that shows the wear of heavy use.

The first commandment in the Bible is to be fruitful and multiply. Commonly this is taken to refer to progeny, but its larger meaning is that our own work, our primary work, is to bear life, the fruit that is Presence.

I have known several men who have been grasped and graced with the startling vision/commandment to give birth to Jesus, to bring Jesus out from their own selves into the world. Men! What do we know of such things? We all, though, women and men, may be summoned to be the means of the exhibition of Jesus to others, not by words or actions—the common ways that we think to represent Christ—but in totality, with all the labor, pain, joy, physicality, and mindfulness that must require, vessels of beauty and power.

How do we embody Christ in such a way as to know such a completeness of Presence? How do we then share that Presence? How do we be the bearer of the living Christ in the fullness of our living being?

–Rev. Dr. Whit Bodman, Associate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion