Three Mothers

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on March 30, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Exodus 2: 1-10

It’s often said, and invariably but surely wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, that ‘The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you found out why.’ I’d like to explore with you the difference between the two familiar and often interchangeable terms, ‘Mothers’ Day’ and ‘Mothering Sunday.’ I’d like gently to suggest Mothers’ Day corresponds to the day you’re born, while Mothering Sunday corresponds to the day you find out why.

Mothers’ Day is a very complex day in the calendar. Whatever its origins, and however much it’s been balanced in recent years by Fathers’ Day and Grandparents’ Day and First Cousins Once Removed Day and Annoying Stepbrothers’ Day, it’s still swathed in unfortunate heavily gendered assumptions about mothers doing the majority of the parenting, shouldering most household responsibilities, and finding their primary identity in hidden tasks and domestic subservience. The assumption is that Mothers’ Day is the day the rest of the family gives something back, having spent the other 364 days of the year taking things away. At the same time, Mothers’ Day also bears more than a hint of self-congratulation, of locating the principal vocation of a woman in bearing a child, of consequently othering and diminishing women who through wish or circumstance never have that experience, of airbrushing the stories of those for whom motherhood has been an encounter with struggle, trial and grief, and of drawing a veil over children whose recollection of their mothers has been troubled and painful.

Mothering Sunday is potentially a rather different moment of recognition. It takes a village to raise a child, as I’m very confident Mark Twain never said, and mothering is by no means an activity restricted to a biological mother. That’s not just a statement about adoptive mothers, extended families and idealised villages where children play in the street and no one ever locks the front door. It’s a recognition that a network of formal and informal relationships, medical professionals, toddler groups, playschemes, schools, uniformed organisations, artistic ensembles, sporting teams and church activities all cluster to have a hand in the mothering that brings a tender, emerging young person from the day they’re born to the day they find out why.

I want to take a look at the story in Exodus 2 that’s usually called the finding of Moses. What fascinated me about this story growing up was that I knew there was something called a Moses basket that was made in a wicker style, and when I read this account of Moses’ mother placing him in a wicker basket on the Nile, I couldn’t work out why it didn’t sink. The story talks about bitumen and pitch; but I wasn’t convinced. It turns out there’s more to the story than hydrodynamics. It should really be called the story of the three mothers. Mother number one is called Jochebed. She’s Moses’ birth mother. Pharaoh was nervous and suspicious of the Hebrews. He was so alarmed by their growing power and numbers that he ordered each new-born boy to be cast into the Nile. Jochebed did throw Moses into the Nile, but in a papyrus basket. Mother number two is Pharaoh’s daughter, known in the tradition as Thermoutis. She sees baby Moses in the basket amid the reeds, gets her maid to fetch it, realises he’s crying, and sees to it he’s brought up as her son. Mother number three is Miriam, Moses’ sister. She places herself at a strategic vantage point, observes and overhears the whole story, and steps in with the inspired suggestion that Thermoutis might be looking for a midwife from among the Hebrew women – a midwife who turns out to be none other than Jochebad, Moses’ mother in disguise.

See how all three of these women make the journey from Mothers’ Day to Mothering Sunday. Jochebad is the most poignant. For her, becoming a mother is an instant entry into tragedy and loss. She has to face the death of her new-born child. But then she gets a chance to be a different kind of mother – a foster mother to her own son. She has her child taken away and then miraculously given back – but on one condition – that she never confesses it’s really her own biological son. She has to choose between the whole life she’s known and her own dear son. And she chooses her son. Sound familiar? Maybe it’s supposed to. She makes a rapid journey from the day she becomes a mother to the day she realises why.

Then there’s Thermoutis. She isn’t a biological mother. But she adopts Moses as her son. Like every adoptive mother, she really has no idea who this person coming into her household really is, and she doesn’t know if this child will grow up to identify with her and her father or with his birth mother and her people. But her motives are the best possible: she’s moved by compassion and she’s serious about this being a lifelong not just a sentimental, impulsive commitment. Because of her, Moses is fully Hebrew and fully Egyptian. Sound familiar? Maybe it’s supposed to.

And so to Miriam. She’s the embodiment of the recognition that mothering isn’t restricted to those who call themselves ‘mother.’ For her, love, loyalty and hope converge in her willingness to continue to watch what must have seemed destined to be the ghastly death of her brother. But by her commitment to bear witness, she’s on hand when a surprising development leads to her brother being plucked from the river. And her imagination, spirit and playfulness impels her to one of the great scriptural moments of improvisation. And like many acts of utter faithfulness, it only works because she’s prepared never to breathe a word to anyone about it. She’s the advocate before the seat of the almighty who enables her mother to lay down her life that her son might give life to many. Sound familiar? Maybe it’s supposed to.

Mothering Sunday shouldn’t be a day when we talk up biological motherhood as if it were the only vocation that matters for a woman. And Mothering Sunday shouldn’t be a day when we try by a series of sentimental gestures to assuage our complex memories of the largely unspoken and often unresolved feelings about our upbringing. But it absolutely must be a day when we recognise our profound dependence on one another, certainly those that brought us into existence, but also those who kept us in existence, those on whom we rely today, and those who brought us to realise why we exist. In other words, it’s a day to be thankful not simply for our mothers, but for all whose mothering has made us alive and shown us what to live for.

I want to tell you a story that shows me what that kind of mothering is really about. It’s a scarcely believable story, but it’s based on real events over the course of the twentieth century. The 1990 film Awakenings, based on Oliver Sacks’ 1973 book, tells the story of an epidemic of sleeping sickness that sweeps New York in the 1920s. A series of children enter a catatonic state, and are taken into hospital in the Bronx where they are cared for. They spend the next 40 years there. While they can be engaged through certain actions such as careful touch or catching a ball, they have no life experience outside the hospital. But in the 1960s a psychiatrist who has experience using drugs to address Parkinson’s Disease tries out a new treatment on one of these unusual patients, who are by now in their fifties. The film portrays how first one, and eventually all of the patients emerge from a comatose state to discover a world that has changed beyond recognition and has not waited for them. But the story turns out to be a tragedy. The drug’s effects are not permanent, and, after a few months of recognition and discovery, each patient subsides back into a catatonic condition.

Before tragedy takes hold, we see images of profound grace. In an astonishing scene, one patient, Leonard Nelson, comes round from his catatonic state and wakes up. He slowly begins to comprehend that he’s been asleep for 40 years. He then becomes aware of a woman in his line of sight, bending over him. He dimly perceives that this woman is his mother. And then the awesome mystery begins truly to unfold. He realises, and we realise with him, that this woman has remained faithfully with him throughout this almost unimaginable 40-year period. She has come back and shown up, day after day, year after year, with very few signs of life or hope, until this precious moment when he has finally awakened. This is the mystery. What wondrous love is this, that could continue to appear and be present and be beside this man for more than half a lifetime, for 15,000 days?

Perhaps appropriately, we never learn this woman’s name. She’s just Mrs Nelson. But I want to suggest to you that she draws together everything we’ve seen in the three mothers in the Moses story. Like Jochebed, she thought her son was utterly lost, and she’s been willing for her love to go unrecognised and unknown, simply so that she could give him life and be with him even when he wasn’t with her. Like Thermoutis, she’s had compassion and she’s changed the shape of her life to accept that her love means not an impulse but a lifelong commitment. Like Miriam, she’s needed wisdom and courage to look into and beyond the horror to be present at just the moment when everything hangs on her being there.

And in these three ways, Mrs Nelson shows us the face of God. God is the one who gives us life, of course. But mothering is about what God and Mrs Nelson are really about. Mothering Sunday is the day we realise we’re the ones with the malady that makes us withdraw, we’re the ones who are oblivious to the constancy, devotion and tenderness of God’s everlastingly being with us. Mothering Sunday is the day we open our eyes from our long slumber and see the one who’s been with us through tragedy and grief, through hardship and sorrow, and is still with us when we’ve come to the other side, and who responds to our wonder and astonishment with a gentle, insistent gaze that says, ‘Yes, I’ve always been with you; and I always will.’ Mothering Sunday is the day that we celebrate, not that we were born, but that now we know why.