Listen now Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

The American playwright, Nora Ephron, once wrote: ‘When your children are teenagers, it’s important to have a dog, so that (at least) someone in the house is happy to see you.’

And the actress and producer, Reese Witherspoon, is reported to have said: ‘If you aren’t yelling at your kids, you’re not spending enough time with them.’

Mothering Sunday often arrives with us carrying more than one story at once.

For some, it is full of gratitude. For others, it is threaded with grief, longing, or unanswered prayer. And for many, it holds love and pain, inseparably, together.

The Scriptures offered today do not give us a simple or idealised picture of motherhood. Instead, they tell the truth: that care is costly, that love involves risk, and that faith often means letting go as much as holding on.

Hannah

In 1 Samuel, we meet Hannah – a woman whose longing is not hidden from us. Her desire for a child is intense, prayed through tears and misunderstood by those around her. Scripture does not rush past this. It lingers. Hannah’s prayer is raw enough to be mistaken for drunkenness. And when her prayer is answered, the story does something unexpected.

Hannah gives her child away.

She does not do so lightly or without sorrow. She keeps him until he is weaned. She names him Samuel, which means ‘asked of the Lord’ or ‘God has heard’ – and then she brings him to the temple and says words that are almost unbearable in their honesty: ‘For this child I prayed; and the Lord has granted me my petition.’

And then she lets him go.

This is not a story about reward or triumph. It is a story about trust that costs something real. Hannah’s motherhood is not defined by possession, but by offering – offering her deepest love back into God’s care.

Mother(s) of Moses

This pattern has echoes from earlier in Scripture. In Exodus, we really have three women mothering one baby. There’s Moses’ birth mother and two very different girls in the weeds of the river who also look after him in their own way. One was his big sister, and the other was someone from a different nationality and a very different part of society, who adopted him at no small risk to herself.

Moses’ birth mother places her child into the waters, not knowing what will happen, entrusting him to God’s mercy and to the courage of others. In both stories, motherhood is shaped by release, by faith that refuses to cling when clinging would close off the future.

Mary

In the Gospel, we see this same pattern at its most painful and most holy. Mary stands at the foot of the cross. She cannot protect her son. She cannot intervene. She can only remain. And in that moment, Jesus entrusts her into a new relationship – not erasing her motherhood, but widening it:

‘Woman, here is your son’ and to the disciple: ‘Here is your mother.’

Love is being re-formed in loss. Care is being entrusted beyond blood. A new community is being born in the shadow of grief. Archbishop Rowan Williams once said: ‘To be with another in their vulnerability is the beginning of love.’

The community

This is where Colossians speaks so gently and so firmly to us. Compassion, kindness, patience and forgiveness. These are the practices of a community that knows vulnerability. They are the habits of people who understand that love cannot be controlled, only offered.

Mothering, in this biblical sense, can include all of us. It is not limited to biology or gender. Later, we’ll have an opportunity to put a candle on the altar to thank God for anyone who may have shared these qualities with us. It is a way of being that includes:

• praying honestly
• waiting patiently
• offering care without ownership
• and trusting God with what we cannot hold forever

That is why Mothering Sunday was never simply about celebrating mothers. It was about remembering the mother church – the place where faith is first received, nurtured, and slowly released into the world.

Ask for grace

Today, we honour:

• those who have given life and let go
• those who have prayed and still wait
• those whose care has been unseen
• and those for whom this day carries pain as well as gratitude

And we ask for grace to become a group of people shaped by Hannah’s courage, Mary’s endurance and the quiet faith of all who entrust what they love most into God’s hands.

Because the deepest act of mothering in Scripture is not holding tightly –
it is letting go and giving back to God what was always God’s first.

Faithful love is never only personal

After Hannah leaves her child at the temple, the story does not end in silence. Hannah sings.

And her song is not sentimental or small. It does not dwell on her private happiness or her private loss. Instead, it lifts its eyes to God’s wider work in the world: ‘The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble gird on strength. Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread, but those who were hungry are fat with spoil.’

Hannah’s song tells us something vital: that faithful love, offered and entrusted to God, is never only personal. It participates in God’s work of turning the world the right way up. Out of her own vulnerability, Hannah speaks hope for the poor, the hungry and the overlooked.

The Magnificat

Her song will echo centuries later in Mary’s Magnificat, sung by another woman who knows that joy and fear, promise and cost, can coexist in the same breath:

‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked with favour on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name.
He has mercy on those who fear him
in every generation.
He has shown the strength of his arm,
he has scattered the proud in their conceit.
He has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.’

Giving back

So, Mothering Sunday does not end with possession, but with praise. Not with certainty, but with trust. Hannah and Mary gave back what they loved most – and in doing so, they found their voices enlarged, not diminished.

Someone once wrote that: ‘Motherhood is discovering that love and exhaustion can occupy the same body at the same time.’

Like those that we have heard of today, may we learn to pray honestly, to entrust bravely, and to sing – to sing even when we’re weary and when love has cost us much more than we might have expected. Amen.

‘Given back to God’ was delivered by Ian Banks on Mothering Sunday, March 15th 2026, at St John with St Mark’s, Bury. It was based on Exodus 2:1-10, 1 Samuel 1:20-end, Colossians 3:12-17 and John 19:25b-27