Jesus & Sophia: A Personal Reflection On The Feminine Aspect of Christ
It was a cool summer night, I sat in my bed reading one of my new favorite books “Treasure in The Earthen Vessels: Prayer and The Embodied Life” by Decon Stephen Muse. I had been studying and studying all about Sophia “Holy Wisdom”, The Feminine aspect of God in Christianity. But I couldn't exactly figure out where She fit in for me. I desperately wanted Her. But where did She fit into the Godhead for me and how? I had read in many places by many mystics that Sophia and Jesus are one in the same and that in fact, Jesus is the “Sophia of God” incarnate.
But it just didn’t click for me, till while reading the book I came across these transformative words “From the very beginning, Christ is here, right in the middle of everything. It is extraordinarily important to realize that the Cross is the Tree of Life and exists not because we are bad boys and girls so that Jesus has to be punished as an atonement for our sins to appease an angry God. The Cross is the Father's willingness to take the risk of suffering and death for His creation to open up the possibility that we become persons capable of loving Him (and one another and all creation) in return as He loves us. The Cross is also hidden in the mother's love who, with a child in her womb, when she gets sick and it hurts and she is stressed, reconfigures every movement as a reminder of carrying the divine life and so she willingly and joyfully bears it. Christ's yoke is the easiest of all, even though He carries the heaviest burden, because He loves us completely and is pregnant with Creation.”
He loves us completely and is pregnant with Creation! It was like I always knew it! I broke down into tears and wept such deep healing tears! After years of never being able to really shake the judgmental image of Jesus dying on the cross all because I was a “bad little boy”. These sweet words broke the chains! It was like Christ finally lift up the veil and showed Himself to be my true Mother. After years of putting the mask of an angry particarical God over the tender face of my jesus, with these words He finally ripped it off and looked at me clearly with the sight of the Mother who see straight through us with the most tender compassion and I balled like a child at His feet, Chist, The Sophia of God, Our Mother incarnate as one of Her own willing to go to hell and back to save Her children.
The great Chrisian mystic Julian of Norwich tells us “Jesus is our true mother; in whom we have our being. In Christ the ground of motherhood begins, with all the safekeeping of love which endlessly follows. As truly as God is our father, so truly God is our mother. Jesus is our true Mother in grace by taking on our created nature. All the fair work and all the sweet, loving offices of beloved motherhood are appropriated to Christ.” she goes on to say “I understood three ways of regarding the motherhood of God: the first is how he is the foundation of nature’s creation; the second is his taking on of our nature (and there the motherhood of grace begins); the third is the motherhood at work, and in this, by the same grace, all is one love. Our great God, the supreme wisdom of all, made himself ready in this humble place [Mary’s womb] and dressed himself in our poor flesh, himself to perform the service and the office of Motherhood in everything. No one might nor ever could perform this office fully, nor ever did, but Christ alone. We know that our mothers bear us and bring us into the world. So he sustains us within himself in love and was in labour for the full time and when he had finished he had given birth to us into bliss.”
This is a profoundly different Jesus than the one I grew up with and one that I can much more gladly call my God, my “Mother, Brother and Savior”. I love the way she casually uses male pronouns to describe Jesus (a man) as performing the perfect office of motherhood. Clearly Julian’s idea of motherhood is something more transcendent and less tied to gender than what is imagined by most people. It is also important to note the way she associates the pinnacle of the Gospel narrative (the crucifixion) with the most sacred act of child birth. There is something clearly divine about pregnancy. When a woman creates new life inside of herself she is embodying the cosmic firmament. When her waters break she is embodying the life giving rains of heaven, the due of holy baptism. When she cries out in agony she is embodying the sacrifice of Christ. And when the child is born it embodies the resurrection of new life. As Archbishop Elpidophoros of America states “When they pierced the side of Christ blood and water gushed forth... The blood and water that comes forth from our mother’s womb when we are born into this life is a most sacred embodiment of the means through which we are reborn into eternal life through the blood of Christ and the waters of baptism.”
Christ Our Mother within the context of Christian theology is a profoundly balancing truth to behold. As Saint Athenasius states “The only-begotten Son, the Wisdom (Sophia) of God, created the entire universe. Scripture says: You have made all things by your Wisdom (Sophia), and the earth is full of your creatures. Yet simply to be was not enough: God also wanted his creatures to be good. That is why he was pleased that his own Wisdom (Sophia) should descend to their level and impress upon each of them singly and upon all of them together a certain resemblance to their Model. It would then be manifest that God’s creatures shared in his Wisdom (Sophia) and that all his works were worthy of him. For as the word we speak is an image of the Word who is the Father’s Son, so also is the Wisdom (Sophia) implanted in us an image of the Wisdom (Sophia) who is The Father’s Son. It gives us the ability to know and understand and so makes us capable of receiving him who is the all-creative Wisdom (Sophia).”
It is very important to realize that Christ The Sophia of God is in no way the wife of The Father, but Like His Mother Mary, is the divine daughter, the Cosmic Child, as Thomas Merton says “She (Sophia) is the 'feminine child' playing before God the Creator in His univers, "playing before Him at all times, playing in the world (Proverbs 8)” Above all, Sophia is God's love and mercy coming to birth in us…. She is the divine Child who sleeps in all people. She is the Love in God that unites people, always and everywhere.” She is a Co Creator with The Father, She is Christ, playfully birthing Creation from within.
Merton later states “She is Christ, our Brother, who is still crucified, disfigured and silenced in people everywhere and in the sufferings of the Earth.” We are in The Womb of Christ, Sophia, Our Mother. Who bears all out pains and suffering within Her womb, slowly birthing us into new life. “Sophia moves through the world with creative power and grace, reaching "from end to end mightily” and breaking into human consciousness “with a liberty that knows no law of man"; on the other, she appears constrained and disfigured, imprisoned by the fallenness of human freedom”
