God as Teacher
God as Teacher
him in love and travail, until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and cruel pains that ever were or will be, and at the last he died.
(Chapter 60) In chapter 60 Our Lord is both "our Mother in nature, our Mother in grace."
So in our true Mother Jesus our life is founded in his prescient wisdom from without beginning, with the great power of the Father and the supreme goodness of the Holy Spirit. And in accepting our nature he gave us life, and in his blessed dying on the Cross he bore us to endless life.
(Chapter 63) There is also nursing and nurturing as dimensions of God's loving.
However, motherhood is not merely a matter of loving protection. There is also a motherhood of wisdom and knowing: "To the property of motherhood belong nature, love, wisdom and knowledge" (chapter 60).
This guiding role brings the human soul to its proper fulfilment. The mother guards her child tenderly "as the nature and condition of motherhood will have" (chapter 60). As the child grows up, a mother never changes her love but acts differently. When the child is even older, a mother allows it to be chastised to destroy its faults. Sometimes she also allows the child to fall and to be upset in various ways "for its own benefit"
(chapter 61) but she never allows any real danger to harm the child. No mother wants her child to flee. So children, when distressed, run to their mothers and call for help. The basic point that Julian makes about both human mothers and God as Mother is that children do not naturally despair of a mother's love (chapter 63).
What is particularly important is that Julian takes the image of Jesus as Mother (and, through this, of God as Mother) to a new level of significance beyond previous writers who used such imagery. In the end, the image of motherhood summarizes Julian's whole theology of sin and redemption and becomes an essential attribute of God.14
God as Teacher The image of Jesus as Mother may be important but it is equally important to note that one of the most common images Julian uses for Jesus Christ throughout her Long Text is "teacher." Thus, "This is a revelation of love which Jesus Christ, our endless bliss, made in sixteen showings…with many fair revelations and teachings of endless wisdom and love"