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Feminine Images of God Faith in God is the cornerstone to our existence and informs all of who we are and what our lives amount to. Yet it seems that if we are to have faith in God we need to have some understanding of God’s character and so we ask the question: What is God like? We are told in the Bible that we have been made in God’s image. So it would seem that we human beings display some of the traits of God. Jesus came down to earth to reveal who God is and so in his humanity we find some of the traits of God. So it is that we talk of God as Our Father. Let’s take this a step further: If we are to talk about God in human terms, is it ok to speak of God using female as well as male images? These are questions that people have asked through the ages and are still asking today. God gave the people in the Hebrew Scriptures an intimation of who God is in the Exodus story where he reveals to Moses: “I am who am”. Martin Buber translates this divine revelation to Moses as “I shall be there as the one who will be there.” Suzanne de Dietrich enlarges this to encompass a nurturing connotation: “I shall be there for you. I shall remain the one whom you can experience, the one who acts, the one who comes to meet you.” So, God is revealed in the Bible as the one who promises to be there for us. But this is often not enough for us. We are a visual people and so we desire to know what God looks like. We want to capture God with our eyes. However the second commandment contains a warning for us. It states: “You shall not make a carved image for yourself.” This commandment warns us against idol-making, shaping God according to human or any other image. God is God and we must never forget that and while God may display emotions of love, compassion, mercy and truth which we as humans can relate to as a part of our humanity, God is more than we can ever be or understand. This commandment affirms the truth that God is transcendent, beyond human comprehension and any image we may use will only reveal to us a small part of who God is. Human language may attempt to gain insight into God through metaphor, but the truth of the matter is that all metaphors we use for God will always fall short of describing all there is to know and understand about God. As we reflect on the metaphors we use to describe God we become aware that every metaphor we use is both true of an aspect of God and yet false because it cannot contain all of who God is. Yes, it is true that God’s love for me is like a mother’s warm, unconditional embrace. But it is also true that God is so much more. And yet, in spite of the limitations inherent in metaphors, the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Scriptures on which we base our faith, express our experience of God in human images and metaphors. The Scriptures themselves use language, images and concepts to describe the Divine Presence of God that include both masculine and feminine qualities. As we have seen here today, the Bible uses a variety of feminine as well as masculine images to describe the experiences of God’s people with the Holy One in their midst. In the Bible we read that God is like a loving father, a courageous warrior, a good shepherd, a mighty king, a passionate lover. But God is also like a mother eagle, a woman in labour, a midwife delivering a baby, a nurturing mother feeding her infant at the breast. The wisdom of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is personified as a woman called Sophia. Needless to say, the masculine metaphors have been more commonly used than the feminine ones. This has happened for a variety of reasons. These include the fact that Jesus most commonly refers to God as father and so we follow his example. However he does on occasion refer to God in feminine terms also, for example, when he speaks of God as “a mother hen gathering her chicks” Unfortunately the feminine metaphors have been relatively unexplored. I say unfortunately, because these images reveal to us, just as the masculine ones do, very important aspects of God’s nature. They reveal to us
This is not to say that men and fathers do not also display these aspects nor is it to say that all mothers display them either. But nonetheless, these are some of the characteristics we most commonly associate with motherhood. So we see that when we consider God in terms of motherhood we immediately hook into a metaphor that is familiar to most of us and one that helps us understand some very important aspects of God’s nature:
It is good that this day when all of society reveres and remembers and honours the love that mothers bear their children, that we too consider the love of God in those terms also and that we give thanks for God as nurturing, loving, protecting and steadfast lover of each of us also. Genesis 1 tells us that in the beginning “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Today we celebrate the feminine face of God in the image of God as mother. |
