Methodists, Mothers, and Messiah’s Ascension [Firebrand Big Read]

Icon of the Ascension, Novgorod, 15th Century (Source: Wiki Commons)

This May, one of the most popular holidays on the civil calendar falls on the same Sunday that celebrates an underrated holy day in the church year. Mother’s Day coincides with the Sunday after Ascension. What are we to make of this convergence? I propose that we seize the chance to explore how these two commemorations fit together—and their links to our Methodist heritage. First, we’ll look at how Scripture unexpectedly connects the themes of motherhood and Christ’s ascension. Next, we’ll take note of how the ascended Christ has elevated women (both biological mothers and others) across Christian history, not least in the Wesleyan tradition. Finally, we’ll consider implications for our churches at a time when motherhood and womanhood are contested and the Ascension is neglected. Thinking about them together promises to enrich our appreciation of them both.

Lady in the Sky with Dragon

Mother’s Day comes with its own set of associations: cursive scripts, pinks and lavenders, and flowers. If we think of the Ascension at all, we’re liable to imagine Jesus peacefully floating away into a pale blue sky with the clouds while his followers look on. But these placid, pastel presentations of motherhood and ascension clash violently with how they’re depicted in tandem in Revelation chapter 12. There at the heart of the Apocalypse we encounter an awe-striking and terrifying heavenly vision of “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars . . . crying out in birth pangs” (Rev 12:1–2; all quotes NRSV). Crouching before her is “a great red dragon” intending to “devour her child as soon as it was born” (Rev 12:3–4). The woman delivers “a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away” from the menacing dragon “and taken to God and to his throne” (Rev 12:5), resulting in the dragon’s eviction from heaven (Rev 12:7–12). Frustrated, the dragon persecutes the woman and “the rest of her children, those who keep the commandments of God and hold the testimony of Jesus” (Rev 12:13–17).

What does this surreal spectacle mean? Fortunately for mystified readers, the author clearly names the dragon as a symbol of “that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan” (Rev 12:9). The child is also reasonably easy to identify as Jesus: not only does the reference to a son who rules the nations with an iron rod echo Ps 2:7–9, a messianic psalm (compare Acts 4:25–29), but later Rev 19:11–16 reapplies this language in its portrait of the ascended Jesus as the returning king. That leaves the celestial mother. If Jesus is her child, wouldn’t that make her Mary? The answer is not quite so straightforward, though. Her adornment with sun, moon, and twelve stars takes us back to Israel’s origin story (Gen 37:9–10), and later prophets personified the people of Israel as Daughter Zion, whose sufferings were the birth pangs preceding salvation (Isa 26:17; 66:7–13; Micah 4:8–10). In short, the woman symbolizes Israel as a whole, whose national history is recapitulated and fulfilled in the experience of one Jewish mother, Mary. Her labor and delivery happened in Bethlehem, not heaven, but her child was indeed the Messiah. He faced the devilish dragon’s hostility, beginning with King Herod’s attempt on his young life and extending through his wilderness temptations, the opposition from religious leaders, neighbors, and family alike, and finally his execution by Rome before his mother’s own eyes (John 19:25–27). Yet he rose from the dead and forty days later ascended to the right hand of God in heaven. Was Mary there to see him off? Perhaps. Luke indicates that those who saw the Ascension were not only the eleven surviving apostles but also those who were with them (Luke 24:33, 50–51), and after the Ascension, Mary definitely was with them (Acts 1:9–14). Eastern Orthodox icons of the Ascension traditionally have included Mary among the eyewitnesses to the Ascension. Whether or not she was present for Christ’s exit, she may well have been affected by the dragon’s revenge on the church in Israel: the early believers suffered a scattering under Saul’s persecution (Acts 8:1–3), and roughly thirty years after the Sanhedrin had condemned Jesus to death, Mary’s (step?)son James endured a similar fate. Through the wide-angle lens and ultra contrast filter of Revelation 12, both Jesus’s departure and the travail of Israel, Mary, and the early church take on cosmic proportions as interconnected episodes in the saga of salvation. Those links between motherhood and the Ascension keep playing out across the church’s further history. 

Daughters of the Most High

Charles Williams was C. S. Lewis’s friend and fellow Inkling. He also authored a rather unusual history of the church entitled The Descent of the Dove. He starts with Christ’s ascension, which “gave the signal, as it were” (1) for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit that inaugurated church history. What was the true nature of this new churchly reality? To answer that question, Williams bids us listen to a pregnant enslaved North African martyr of the early third century A.D. who “in a sentence defined the Faith” (28). Felicitas was her name, and like the visionary woman of Revelation 12, she cried out in her birth pangs as she delivered her baby in the presence of her enemy. Williams continues the tale:

The jailers asked her how, if she shrieked at that, she expected to endure death by the beasts. She said: “Now I suffer what I suffer; then another will be in me who will suffer for me, as I shall suffer for him.” In that, Felicitas took her place for ever among the great African doctors [i.e. teachers] of the Universal Church. (28) 

In Williams’s telling, an ascended Messiah initiated the church’s life, while a faithful mother interpreted it. 

Felicitas knew that ascension did not equate to an absolute absence of Christ, but instead his unfailing presence in his followers’ lives. That presence brought them not only transcendent hope but also transcendent purpose and dignity. One can only imagine what the gospel meant personally to Felicitas. In the Roman Empire that was her world, her gender and slave status left her low on the social hierarchy. She was exploitable and expendable. But she believed that the king of heaven had laid aside his divine prerogatives, taken the form of a slave, and suffered a most torturous and humiliating death for her before ascending to a position high above every earthly master or emperor (Phil 2:6–11), yet without abandoning her in life or in death. Small wonder, then, that early Christianity spread rapidly among the underprivileged, the afflicted, and women, despite and even due to persecution (see Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity, chaps. 5–8). In The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, John Behr sums up the benefits that the gospel brought to women, including mothers:

In a culture where female infanticide was normal, where girls were often married at the age of twelve, and if they did not die as a result of childbirth or abortions, were often widowed at a young age and encouraged to remarry, sometimes under the pressure of a penalty, so that they could again be productive members of society, while their inheritance would pass to the new husband, Christianity offered a radically different alternative. The respect in which virgins and widows were held, and the willingness of the churches to support those virgins and widows who were less fortunate, gave women a real choice to remain single, and if they inherited an estate, to keep it and dispose of it as they chose. If they decided to (re-)marry, the prohibition on abortion and infanticide . . . prolonged their life-expectancy and also increased their fertility rates, while the rejection of male double-standards concerning fidelity opened up further dimensions in the marital relationship (62).

Charles Williams’s own approach to church history holds that we may catch glimpses of the Ascendant One’s Spirit-mediated reign over his people even amid their frequent faults and outright treasons. If so, then many of those glimpses must be of other courageous women like Felicitas. Despite the church’s long-standing tragic taint of sexism, in these women the promise of Pentecost has been fulfilled that they, too, would receive God’s Spirit and even prophesy (Acts 2:17–18). Just as Scripture honors Deborah, the prophet and judge who was a “mother in Israel” (Judg 5:7), and Hannah, the woman of prayer who devoted her son Samuel to the Lord (1 Sam 1), so too we should honor the “Cappadocian Mothers” who reared and instructed the greatest theologians of the Eastern church, as well as Monica, the North African mother whose prayers won the soul of her son Augustine, the West’s most influential theologian. We also should remember the gifts of leading and teaching displayed by Byzantine empresses like Pulcheria, Theodora, and Irene, and medieval mystics such as Hildegard of Bingen, Claire of Assisi, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, and Joan of Arc. The Roman Catholic Church itself recognizes Hildegard and Catherine, along with the modern saints Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, as Doctors of the Church—a title reserved for only a handful of the most elite Christian teachers of the past two millennia. Many of these women saw themselves as following in the footsteps of the Virgin Mary. Her own life story became increasingly embellished in the church’s imagination until Revelation 12 seemed to be all about Mary in her eternal state: the immaculate Mother of God exalted as Queen of Heaven, an ascended Lady to complement the ascended Lord as the epitome of womanhood.

The Reformation ignited challenges to the excessive elevation of the Blessed Virgin and the consecrated virgins who modeled themselves after her. In Protestant territories, Marian devotion declined, convents were closed, and married life came to be held up as no impediment to holiness. Out of these changed circumstances arose the Wesleyan tradition, which itself owes a foundational debt to an Anglican priest’s wife: John and Charles Wesley’s mother Susanna. Later generations of Methodists have heaped praises upon her as the “Mother of Methodism”—even “the Madonna of Methodism”!—who trained her children theologically, led religious exercises for her parishioners while her husband was away, and persuaded her son John to accept Methodist lay preachers. Yet Susanna stands as merely the first in a series of women of influence in Wesleyan and Wesleyan-affected circles. In John and Charles’s own lifetime, Hester Ann Rogers led class meetings, while Sarah Crosby and Mary Bosanquet Fletcher often preached. After the Wesley brothers’ deaths, they left behind the evangelical ferment in which female novelists like Jane Austen, Hannah More, and Anne Brontë deployed their Christian faith to challenge then-regnant marital conventions for the sake of womanly welfare. Phoebe Palmer became the “mother of the holiness movement” and wrote The Promise of the Father, a lengthy defense of women’s privilege to preach the gospel. Her advocacy influenced Catherine Booth, “mother of the Salvation Army,” whose daughter Evangeline eventually became the Salvationists’ first female General. Other notable Wesleyan women have included Holiness Quaker evangelist Hannah Whithall Smith; the prolific blind hymnist Fanny Crosby; ex-slave preachers and social activists Sojourner Truth and Amanda Berry Smith; Women’s Christian Temperance Union president Frances Willard; pathbreaking ordained Methodist minister and suffragette Anna Howard Shaw; Iva Durham Vennard, founder of Holiness evangelistic institutes (at one of which, Vennard College, I taught for nearly a decade); “General of the Kentucky mountains” Lela G. McConnell (in whose schools my grandparents, parents, and I were educated); Methodist- and Salvationist-influenced Pentecostal superstar Aimee Semple McPherson; Rosa Parks, the “mother of the civil rights movement”; Jacquelyn Grant, co-founder of womanist theology; Wesleyan Church General Superintendent emerita Jo Anne Lyon, Free Methodist Bishop Linda Adams, and Nazarene General Superintendent Carla Sunberg. All these and many more besides have answered the call of the ascended Christ to shepherd his flock, seek the lost, and “serve the present age” in his name. They have mothered our movement by many means that both include and go beyond the bearing of biological children.

Mother’s Day emerged from this Methodist matrix. Ann Jarvis was a nineteenth-century Methodist preacher’s kid and herself a lifelong Methodist churchgoer who organized mothers in her rough-and-tumble region of Appalachia to promote basic sanitation. She also provided healthcare to wounded soldiers from both sides during the Civil War. Her daughter Anna once heard Ann express to the Sunday School class she was leading the wish that a day would be set aside annually to honor mothers. Anna Jarvis took this wish to heart. Through her efforts, in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson designated the second Sunday of May—Ann’s death date—as Mother’s Day. (Fittingly, both Ann and Anna derived their names from Hannah, the biblical mother of extraordinary faith.) The holiday spread internationally until today over fifty countries celebrate it, though not all on the same date. But as Methodist liturgical historian James White has noted in his Brief History of Christian Worship, Mother’s Day became a fixture of American civil religion at the same time that Ascension Day was losing ground. When John Wesley revised the Anglican church year for American Methodists, he excised its remaining Marian feasts and all other special holy days save six. Ascension Day survived his culling along with Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost, and Trinity Sunday. In the nineteenth through mid-twentieth centuries, however, horizontally oriented commemorations like Mother’s Day, Homecoming Sunday, and Sunday School Rally Day tended to eclipse the sacred days dedicated to the vertical themes of Ascension, Pentecost, and the Trinity. Only with the liturgical renewal sparked by Vatican II (1962–1965) has more attention gradually begun to be paid to reclaiming a more robust church year, including Ascension Day. 

A Way through the Waves

The year after Vatican II first convened, Betty Friedan’s publication of The Feminine Mystique triggered a succession of “waves'' of feminism (second-, third-, and fourth-wave; the first wave had been the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s suffrage movement). Second-wave feminists rightly perceived that women were meant to be more than Stepford wives, docile domestic creatures whose sole purpose and value centered around pleasing their husbands. Sadly, rather than finding true purpose and value in their equal creation in God’s image (Gen 1:27) and equal share in salvation and spiritual gifting (Gal 3:28; Acts 2:17–18), many second-wavers sought it in pleasing themselves through an economic and sexual autonomy secured by unrestricted access to abortion. Motherhood handicapped liberated womanhood. The second wave ebbed in the 1980s, and by the following decade a third wave swelled that was pro-porn, pro-prostitution, and pro-lesbian relations—so long as the women involved gave consent, anything was fair game. In the past decade and a half, the fourth wave has flooded the cultural shoreline with a theory of gender that untethers it from biology: one is now a woman if and only if one so identifies, and at one’s disposal lies an array of radically revisionary linguistic, chemical, and surgical procedures to reinforce that self-identification. To their credit, the third and fourth waves have called attention to the stubborn persistence of sexual harassment and rape culture, as the #MeToo movement most recently has attested. After four waves of change, though, the outlook appears gloomy. Unanchored by any transcendent or biological realities, adrift in a choppy sea of endlessly shifting social expectations and personal aspirations, in constant peril from the undertow of misogyny and manipulation, it’s no surprise that America Ferrera’s viral speech from The Barbie Movie (2023) confesses, “It is literally impossible to be a woman.”

The church’s response to these waves has swung between the extremes of either broad acquiescence or else a reactionary ontologizing of female subordination under the guises of “biblical womanhood” among evangelicals and, among Catholics, alter Christus (the priest as “another Christ,” hence necessarily male). Meanwhile, scandal after scandal of the sexual exploitation of women and children has swept up both unwed Catholic priests and married Protestant pastors, both complementarian denominations and egalitarian freestanding megachurches, both culture-warring school presidents and mild-mannered global apologists. Among Christ’s people, as in society at large, the dragon prowls to devour woman and child alike.

The Descent of the Dove describes European Christendom in the throes of its own crisis in Charles Williams’s day. Watching the Continent from his position in England in 1939, he witnessed geography and ideology coalesce: on his far left, a Marxist purge of the churches under the blood-red banner of revolutionary liberation; to the right, an aggrieved populace drunk on the cocktail of God, blood, and soil served up by nationalistic fascism. As Europe’s churches were bowing to competing totalitarianisms, Williams ended his Ascension-based church history by prescribing contrition, humility, and doctrine. The same three-dose regimen holds promise for our own ills in our own times. Contrition summons us to deep sorrow and repentance over our churchly complicity in sexual sin and our hypocrisy in scowling at some of its manifestations while winking at others of them. Contrition deplores not only the individual choices to abuse or abort but also the social conditions that abet such decisions. Contrition calls for remorse for the mistreatment of women in our midst—a remorse that provokes not simply tearful admissions but substantive accountability and change. Humility commits to transparency and asks for help in addressing these endemic problems. Humility undermines the walls of male ego and privilege and invites female participation in the halls of power. Humility likewise teaches women to look to their good Creator instead of to their own self-creation for their meaning and mission in life. 

And what of doctrine? While every historic church teaching has some medicinal virtue for curing our current malady, let us focus on three that relate directly to the convergence of the Ascension’s Sunday with Mother’s Day. First and most obviously, let’s begin with the doctrine of the Ascension itself. As mentioned above, the post-Vatican II liturgical renewal has reminded us to celebrate the Ascension. A contemporaneous rise of interest in the theology of the Ascension has taught us why to celebrate it. Theologians like Thomas F. Torrance (Space, Time and Resurrection), Douglas Farrow (Ascension and Ecclesia), Gerrit Dawson (Jesus Ascended), and Edwin van Driel and his collaborators (What is Jesus Doing?), along with biblical scholars like Peter Orr (Exalted Above the Heavens), David Moffitt (Rethinking the Atonement), and Patrick Schreiner (The Ascension of Christ) are helping us to appreciate more fully how Christ’s ascension affects everything from cosmology to pastoral ministry. For instance, just as Christ’s physical body is hidden from us in heaven, so too is the fullness of his kingdom. Neither the church nor the world is yet what it will be when he appears again. We must live with their present imperfections while we await the glory to come. But the fact of Christ’s glorified physical presence at the right hand of God establishes our hope. The guarantee of God’s promises is not the earthly toil and temporal successes of the church militant but the heavenly rule and eternal intercession of the Christ triumphant. It is he who holds all things together (Col 1:17) as he sits on the throne of the cosmos. (For a potent pop-cultural nod to this reality, see the climax of Loki Season 2.) Although Jesus is absent in the flesh, he is present in the Spirit to sustain his people in their struggles and to create foretastes of his kingdom’s final state. For this reason, church structures and leaders must nourish justice and mercy here and now as answerable to the one who will “rule all the nations with a rod of iron” (Rev 12:5).

We turn our doctrinal gaze next from the heavenly body of our ascended Lord to our own earthly bodies. In response to the chaos and confusion unleashed by the sexual revolution, both Catholics and Protestants have begun to draw upon Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body (TOB). This approach avoids treating the sexed body as either a sinful problem to be loathed and legalistically suppressed or else a value-neutral lump of pleasure putty to be manipulated however one desires. Rather, humankind’s createdness as male and female bears a positive, transcendent significance. The marital union of man and woman prefigures the ultimate union of heaven and earth, Christ and the church, while singles’ celibacy signals that the final consummation far exceeds this-worldly wedlock. Motherhood, together with fatherhood, is a living parable of the future fruitfulness of life in the new heavens and earth, even while presently procreating and preparing the persons who will dwell there. Popularizers of TOB include evangelical-friendly Catholics Christopher West (Our Bodies Tell God’s Story) and Abigail Favale (The Genesis of Gender), Reformed author Aimee Byrd (The Sexual Reformation), and Asbury Seminary’s departing president, Timothy Tennent (For the Body).

Finally, we need to theologize afresh about the mother who gave the Messiah his body, his birth, and much else besides. Too often we Protestants only make mention of Mary at Advent. This reticence keeps us from being mistaken for Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox but doesn’t quite do justice to the rest of her appearances in the New Testament, nor to how she serves as a role model for us. As a recent joint Methodist-Catholic statement has put it, 

Her virginal conception of Jesus highlights the grace and wonder of God’s new creation in Christ. She is Jesus’ mother, the Mother of God (Theotokos), holy exemplar of contemplation, advocate for the poor and lowly, and first among the disciples. Every aspect of her life plays an important part in our salvation. . . . Her exemplary discipleship invites others to heed God’s call to them.

Wesleyan theologians like Tim Perry (Mary for Evangelicals) and Frances Young (God’s Presence) have begun to flesh out a Methodist-minded middle way on Mary between Catholic dogmatic maximalism and a “Christmas only” minimalism.

As we honor the mothers among us this month, may we not forget the long line of foremothers from Mary forward who through faith have birthed and nurtured children, converts, congregations, and whole movements in the power of the Spirit. And “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,” may we take heed to the subject of their collective witness: “Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who . . . has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God” (Heb 12:1–2). As Susanna’s son taught us to sing,

Jesus, the Saviour, reigns,
The God of truth and love;
When He had purged our stains,
He took His seat above:
Lift up your heart, lift up your voice!
Rejoice; again I say, “Rejoice!” 
(Charles Wesley, “Rejoice, the Lord is King!”)

Ascended Lord, be yours the glory! Amen.   

Jerome Van Kuiken is Professor of Christian Thought at Oklahoma Wesleyan University. He serves on the editorial board of Firebrand.