As a Father, Mother, Friend: Wenona Jonker

“When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home.” John 19:26-27 NIV

During Race Talks at the Wesley Foundation this year, we sang “God of Day and God of Darkness” by Marty Haugen weekly as a prayer for guidance into a deep, aching, compassionate love of justice. In the final stanza, Haugen writes, “Praise to you in day and darkness, / You our source and you our end; / Praise to you who love and nurture us / As a father, mother, friend…” Each time I sing this line, I am caught off guard by the sentiment. I’m not sure most of us conceptualize God’s love for us in terms of a mother’s love. We confess regularly that God is our father, and we are often comforted by the reassurance of his being our friend and companion, but do we ever think of God as extending a mother’s love? At least within the circles in which I was raised, almost never. I think, though, that we stunt our understanding of God’s character and his love and, by extension, limit our imagination as to how we might show compassion to those who suffer in our world when we exclude the dimension of his image revealed in mothers.

We often hear that there is no greater love than that of a mother; for those of us who were blessed by good mothers, being on the receiving end of compassion is as second-nature as being born. It was by this love that we were brought into being and by it that our mothers sacrifice for us even before they have seen our faces and our personalities or know what we will or won’t do. In Exodus 34:6, God describes himself as “compassionate” or in the Hebrew rakhum, which in this case, I recently learned, can be related to the Hebrew word for womb, rekhem. Might not the purest, strongest form of compassion, or empathy, be that of a mother to the child of her womb? And so, is it not comforting to know that God’s compassion for us springs out of love and deep yearning for those who bear his image?

These are all thoughts that had been rattling around in my brain as we approached Holy Week and especially Good Friday and John 19:26-27 this year. In the final moments before his death, Jesus recognizes his mother’s vulnerability and has compassion for her. The same God who the Old Testament tells us acts with compassion towards his people as a mother to a child took the form of a baby, availing himself to the womb of a woman; the God who bore the world and labored under our sins on the cross looks down with compassion on the woman who birthed him. Not only does he show compassion as the source and substance of our being, but he does so having been himself born. He dies a real, flesh-and-blood death having been born in a labored, bloody birth. Throughout his ministry, Jesus has derived his mission from the voice of his father, as at his baptism where a voice from heaven spoke saying, “This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased.” But now, in his final hours, he cries out to the heavens, screaming, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Alone and dying, he looks down in compassion on the vulnerable, the widow. Jesus does not have compassion for the vulnerable as a disinterested third party, a spiritual being outside the human experience; he does so having become subject to time and change and decay, descending to the depth of suffering, the fullness of vulnerability. He looks down with compassion on his mother, as a mother's womb yearns for her child. 

And this, I think, is where we might be both comforted and compelled: God looks down on us, too, in his most vulnerable hour, and calls us children, and in doing so, he invites us to have compassion, even (and especially) as we face our death. No longer is it necessary to fill our own cup before pouring into someone else’s; Jesus in his self-sacrificing, motherly affection has already given us enough and brought us into being—he does not leave us alone. He prompts us to fully inhabit our humanity so that we might, alongside him, reach out in compassion to those who are suffering. In him, it is possible to pray words like those of the prayer of St. Francis, which reads “grant that I may not so much seek / to be consoled as to console, / to be understood as to understand, / to be loved as to love. / For it is in giving that we receive, / it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, / and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” As we have been miraculously loved into being by mothers, so, too, does Jesus at his death, by the compassionate, womb-like love, deep and yearning, grant us the fullness to share in his flesh and reach out in compassion to the vulnerable in our midst. 

Wenona has been an important part of the ministry at Wesley ever since her freshman year. Even after graduating last Spring, she continues to pour into and love the people of the Wesley Foundation. She brings joy and laughter to all of us who have had the pleasure of knowing her.