A Prayer of Thanksgiving for our Mothers:
Thank you God for the love of our mothers:
thank you God for their care and concern;
thank you God for the joys they have shared with us;
thank you God for the pains they have borne for us;
thank you God for all that they give us;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
There is a line in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians that many readers overlook. Paul is in the midst of a complex argument about worship, gender, and the order of creation, and he pauses to say:
For as woman was made from man, so man is now born of woman. And all things are from God (1 Cor 11:12).
The verse is almost like a parenthetical aside to Paul’s argument, yet it carries the weight of the entirety of human history. The first woman came from the first man. Every man since then has come from a woman, which means that behind every great man who has played a prominent role in the story of redemption stands a mother who carried, bore, nursed, and loved him long before the world knew his name. When we tell the story of redemption, the tale is, for reasons appropriate to the story, very male-centric. Men take the predominant role in the story, at least as we normally tell it, so, in honor of Mother’s Day, what follows is an attempt to tell the story of redemption with a special focus on the women and mothers who play key roles in it.
In the Beginning
The story begins in a garden with the first mother. Adam names his wife Eve, which means “living” or “life,” because she was “the mother of all living” (Gen 3:20). Eve’s name comes after the fall, which means it is a defiant act of hope on Adam’s part. The ground has just been cursed. Death has entered the world. But Eve is Life.
Life will continue because of her, and one day, one of her descendants will be life itself (John 14:6). That offspring of Eve will finally crush the serpent’s head (Gen 3:15), and the curse will at last be undone. Motherhood, from the very beginning, is not a comfortable, domestic role. It is a calling that God has woven into the fabric of redemptive history so that life can flourish even in the face of death.
Dead Wombs and Living Promises
As the story unfolds, Eve’s descendants quickly experience a recurring issue: barrenness. Sarah’s womb is described later by Paul to be “as good as dead” (Rom 4:19), and Rachel exclaims, “Give me children, or I shall die” (Gen 30:1). The pattern is clear: God often works through wombs that are unlikely to produce life. The path of redemption does not follow fertility and abundance; instead, it moves through barrenness and sorrow.
God does not promise that every barren womb will be filled, but he does declare that he is the God who gives life where there is no life, sometimes through the womb, sometimes through the beauty of adoption, and sometimes through filling our lives with sons and daughters of a different sort. In every case, the point is the same. God brings life where there was no life, which is exactly what the empty tomb on Easter Sunday was all about.
Courage Against Empire
The story continues in Egypt. Pharaoh has issued a death sentence against every newborn male Hebrew child (Exod 1:15). The empire has activated its machinery of death, and the people of God seem to have no answer.
But two mothers do.
The mother of Moses hides her child for three months (Exod 2:2). When she can no longer keep him hidden, she makes a basket, places him in the Nile, and trusts God with what she can no longer protect, as mothers must often do. Pharaoh’s daughter finds the child, takes pity on him, and raises him as her own son, unwittingly hiring his mother to nurse him (Exod 2:9). The man who will lead the exodus from Egypt survives because two women, two mothers, one Hebrew and one Egyptian, decided that a child’s life was more important than the empire’s decree. They chose life in the face of death.
Notice that Exodus doesn’t try to explain their behavior with a lengthy speech from either woman. There’s no extended discourse about the ethics of civil disobedience or God’s providence. The text simply shows them acting as mothers do, and their actions carry the full weight of the argument. Motherhood here isn’t passive. It’s resistance. It’s the subversion of empire through love.
A Mother Who Would Not Stop Praying
As the story progresses, we come to the hill country of Ephraim, where a woman named Hannah prays desperately. She’s barren, just like Sarah and Rachel had been before her. Year after year, she goes to Shiloh weeping and fasting because the LORD had closed her womb (1 Sam 1:5–6). Her prayer is so intense, so silent and trembling, that Eli the priest thinks she is drunk.
But she’s not. She’s praying fervently, and God hears her. She bears a son, names him Samuel, meaning “heard by God,” and then does something that only makes sense for a woman who means every word of her prayer: she gives her son back to God. She tells Eli:
For this child I prayed, and the LORD has granted me my petition that I made to him. Therefore I have lent him to the LORD. As long as he lives, he is lent to the LORD (1 Sam 1:27–28).
The same God who opened her womb now receives back the child he had given her. This again is what faith looks like in a mother, trusting God to provide for, take care of, support, and protect the life that she had held in her womb.
Hannah’s song would echo through Israel’s story for centuries, until another young woman in desperate circumstances opened her mouth and sang Hannah’s melody again.
A Revolution in a Song
In Galilee, an angel appears to a young woman named Mary. She is unmarried, poor, living under Roman occupation, and by any worldly measure, a nobody. And yet God chooses her to be his mother.
She reaches back to Hannah’s song, back to the themes of empire and resistance, and sings:
He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty (Luke 1:51–53).
Her song is no lullaby. It is a manifesto. Mary is not singing about her feelings as a mother. She is announcing what God is doing in history through her. She uses Hannah’s words because she knows the story she has been placed into and all the mothers who have brought the story to this climactic moment. Hannah sang it first. Now Mary sings it over the child in her womb, whom she will carry, deliver, nurse, raise, and one day watch die.
The Sword
When Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple, an old man named Simeon takes the child in his arms and blesses God. Then he turns to Mary and plainly tells her what it will cost her to be this child’s mother.
A sword will pierce through your own soul also (Luke 2:35).
Some would argue that Mary is the first and greatest disciple, not because she is Jesus’s mother, but because she hears the word of God and keeps it (Luke 11:28), even though she knows from the very beginning just how much it will cost her.
At the cross, most of the men are gone. John is there, and so are the women, including Mary (John 19:25). As she watches her son die, the word Simeon predicted has finally come true. The sword has finally pierced her soul. Her grief is unimaginable to most, yet painfully familiar to too many. In the Stations of the Cross, as Jesus is laid in the arms of his mother, we link the words of Lamentations directly to Mary’s sorrow and say:
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow (Lam 1:12).
There is no love like a mother’s love, which means that there is no sorrow like a mother’s sorrow.
No explanation is given for why Mary is present at the cross when others are not. The text simply places her at the foot of the cross and leaves it at that. Whatever it cost her to be there, physically and emotionally, she paid it. The same love that sustained her as she carried her child in her womb carried her to that hill where the sword pierced her soul.
Motherly love doesn’t end when love becomes costly. That is, in fact, where a mother’s love is most fully revealed.
Not Only for the Biological
To be clear, the category of “mother” is larger than biology. It always has been. Pharaoh’s daughter adopted Moses, raised him, gave him a name, and placed herself between him and death. Centuries later, Paul greets an unnamed woman, identifying her as someone who “has been a mother to me as well” (Rom 16:13).
When we talk about the love of Christ and the Church, the New Testament points toward marriage and calls it a mystery. But right alongside that sign stands the sign of adoption. When Paul wants an image of just how much God loves his people and how much he has done for them, he reaches for the imagery of adoption. There are many examples, but one will stand for all:
You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8:15).
God chose us, took us in, gave us his name, and made us his heirs. When a family today opens their home to a child who has no one, they are acting in a way that resembles the gospel more than almost anything else in everyday life. That love is given freely, not out of obligation. It creates a new family that is not biological but chosen. Adoptive love is grace made visible in a spare bedroom and a new last name.
All Things From God
To circle back to where we began, Paul concludes his aside with a phrase that grounds everything:
All things are from God (1 Cor 11:12).
If you were raised by a mother who loved you, you benefited from something that God embedded into the fabric of creation itself. That love was not accidental. It was not merely the result of instinct or cultural habits. It was, even in a limited and imperfect form, a reflection of God’s love, who himself, in the words of Isaiah, comforts his people as a mother comforts her child (Isa 66:13).
If you had a mother who did not love you well, is gone, or whom you are grieving today, you are not outside this story. The ache you feel is a witness to what motherly love is meant to be. And the God who designed that love became the child of a woman so that he could become the Father of the fatherless and motherless and the comforter of all who mourn.
A Vocation, Not a Sentiment
What I take from this story, the story of motherhood and the redemption of the world, is that motherhood is not a Hallmark category. It is a vocation, a calling. It demands something from us. It takes courage. It challenges empires by refusing to let children perish. It stands at crosses when everyone else has fled. It opens homes to children who have no place of their own.
So this Mother’s Day, whether you are a biological mother, an adoptive mother, a spiritual mother, an aunt, a grandmother, or a mentor, please remember that you are part of something God has been doing since the garden. You are pushing back the curse. You are bringing life in the face of death. You are keeping the story going.
And for those who have been touched by a mother’s love, in whatever form it came, take a moment today to accept that love for what it truly is: not just kindness, not just instinct, but a costly and irreplaceable reflection of the love of the God who created you, redeemed you, and has adopted you as his own child.
Paul says that all things are from God, to which we say, “Yes, and especially our mothers.”
Amen.
Life Group Discussion Guide
Opening Prayer
Heavenly Father, we gather today with gratitude for the gift of mothers and the love they embody. As we open your Word together, we ask that you prepare our hearts to receive what you want to teach us through this discussion. Help us stay open to your Spirit’s guidance and to recognize your hand at work in the stories of the faithful women who came before us. May our time together strengthen our connection to you and to each other. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Ice Breaker
What is one of your favorite memories involving your mother, grandmother, or a mother figure in your life?
Discussion Questions
Eve’s name is given after the fall, which means Adam names her “Life” at the very moment death has entered the world. How does reading her name as an act of defiant hope change your understanding of her role in the history of redemption?
Scripture returns repeatedly to the pattern of barren wombs and unexpected life—Sarah, Rachel, Hannah, and Elizabeth among them. Where else do you notice this pattern of God bringing life from barrenness, either in Scripture or in your own experience?
Moses’ mother and Pharaoh’s daughter defy Pharaoh’s order without giving any speech or detailed reasons. The text simply shows them acting. What does their example suggest about standing up for life, and what does the lack of explanation add to the strength of the story?
Hannah’s prayer is so intense and silent that Eli mistakes her for a drunk woman. What does her example teach us about fervent, desperate prayer? Have you ever experienced or witnessed that kind of earnest prayer?
Mary’s song echoes Hannah’s and reinterprets the birth of her son as a political and cosmic event rather than just a personal one. What does the Magnificat reveal about God’s character and the kind of work he does in history?
Mary stands at the cross when most of the disciples have fled. Simeon had warned her from the beginning that a sword would pierce her soul. What does her presence there say about the nature of love when it becomes costly, and how might that speak to your own life?
How does the concept of adoption—chosen family, given name, shared inheritance—deepen your understanding of what God has done for his people?
For those who have not experienced the warmth of good motherly love, what does it mean that God himself is described in Isaiah as one who comforts his people as a mother comforts her child? How does that promise go beyond just being sentimental?
Life Application
This week, reach out to a mother figure in your life—whether it’s your biological mother, adoptive mother, spiritual mentor, or someone who has shown you motherly care—and express specific gratitude for how their love has reflected God’s love to you. If that person is no longer living, spend time in prayer thanking God for their influence and asking him to help you show that same kind of life-giving love to others.
Key Takeaways
Motherhood is woven into God’s redemptive plan from the very beginning, with Eve being called ‘life’ as an act of hope after the fall.
God often works through unlikely situations, including barren wombs, to show his power to bring life where it appears there is none.
Motherhood requires bravery and resilience against forces of death and empire, as exemplified by the actions of Moses’ mother, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Mary.
The concept of motherhood goes beyond biology to include adoption and spiritual mothering, reflecting God’s own loving adoptive nature for his people.
Motherly love is costly and doesn’t end when circumstances become difficult, as demonstrated by Mary standing at the cross where ‘a sword pierced her soul.’
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of mothers and for all who have shown us motherly love. We praise you for including motherhood in your story of redemption, from Eve to Mary and beyond. Help us see your love reflected in the sacrificial love of mothers, and give us courage to be life-giving in our own spheres of influence. For those among us grieving the loss of a mother or carrying wounds from difficult relationships, we ask for your comfort and healing. Deepen in us all an understanding of your adopting love that makes us your children, through Christ our Lord. Amen.