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Reflections on the Seventh Sunday of Easter

By Rebecca Mertz

The readings for this Sunday:

Acts 1:12-14

1 Peter 4:13-16

John 17:1-11a

This Sunday marks my tenth Mother’s Day. As I look back at ten years of mothering, one of the sharpest memories I have is the incredibly scary and humbling feeling that came with recognizing that the tiny newborn nestled in my arms thought of me, the source of food, as his entire universe.

Giving birth and nursing a child are probably the closest earthly equivalent to experiencing God’s creative powers. When meeting other mothers, women will recount their labor stories the way war veterans discuss battles. For most mothers, the experience of giving birth remains the preeminent physical challenge of their lives. And coupled with the physical challenge is a mental one. The placid image of a nursing Madonna doesn’t depict bleeding nipples, colicky infants, exhaustion and worry. The “yes” that Mary said to God’s messenger is profound, but I’m far more moved by the personal knowledge of the “yes” she had to say every day of her son’s brief life.

In this week’s first reading we are told of the confusing time after Jesus’ resurrection when the disciples returned to Jerusalem and retreated to praying in the upper room. The disciples are carefully listed by name, but there at the end we get confirmation in the phrase “some women,” that there were females in attendance along with Jesus’ mother, Mary.

All these years later, that phrase could still be used to talk about big events in the life of the Church. At the recent papal enclave, there were “some women” in the crowd, and “some women” praying and “some women” attending to the needs of the Cardinals, all of whose names were carefully listed for the world to see. A sure thing besides being Cardinals that all the men who entered the Sistine Chapel had in common is that every single one of them had a mother. And everybody in the large crowds waiting to hear about a new pope had a mother, and every single person born into this world has a mother. In light of this, the exclusion of women from decision making in the Church seems not simply shortsighted, but downright insulting.

Yet, too often the official answer to such concerns is to point to those passages in scripture like this week’s second reading that encourage us to “rejoice to the extent that you share in the sufferings of Christ.”

Offer it up, as the nuns at school used to say. Offer it up.

Certainly, patience is a cardinal virtue of mothers, but so is courage. Mothers must feed and nurture their children, but they must also teach and lead. They are the first role models most children have for how to navigate in a complex and often confusing world and mothers remain mothers even when their children are grown. It is time to insist upon an equal place at the table, not by shrill demands or physical force, but in the same way good mothers have always done it: Marginalize such selfish behavior by ignoring it and setting a table that includes everybody, leaving those who would not agree to sit by themselves in “time-out.”