When Christ wanted to convey the depth of His love and the lengths to which He would go to deliver us from all of our troubles, the closest example He could give was that of mothers.
“Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee.” (Isaiah 49:15).
Mothers have a unique understanding of the sweet joy and the bitter pain that accompanies delivering their children. I speak not only of the delivery involved in childbirth. The word deliver has many additional meanings. To deliver means to set one free, to surrender up or convey to the charge of another, or to come through for.
A mother's compassion and sense of urgency to deliver their children from harm’s way is unparalleled. A mother bear will tear and maul her way through just about anything that separates her from her kids. Such ferocity reflects the deep and visceral love and compassion that a mother has for her children.
Children bring a lot of joy to their mothers, but the thought of their fragile little bodies being exposed to all of the dangers and evils of this world must also bring them a lot of pain. But the reason that a mother can find the strength to lift a car off of their child is because they place the needs of their children so far above their own that they don't even pause to calculate how much harm they will suffer themselves, so long as they can deliver their children from harm.
But such incredible depth of feeling and the almost instinctual urge to stop anything bad from ever happening to their children, no matter the cost, makes the next kind of delivery that much more difficult.
One of Michaelangelo's most famous statues is called the Pieta. It depicts the Virgin Mary holding the lifeless body of her precious son, her face filled with immeasurable. John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son...” But God was not the only one that delivered up His son to be killed for the sins of the world. Mary also had to surrender her will, her compassion, her intense desire to tear apart the Roman Soldiers and the jeering mob and everyone who felt that they could harm her little boy without her putting up a fight.
As much as mothers love their children and would stop at nothing to keep them safe forever, mothers have to deliver their children up to the world's dubious mercies and the cruelties of fate. They have to let their children grow up and make mistakes and fall down and learn to pick themselves back up. Yet again, mothers know the unique combination of pride and terror that our Heavenly Father must feel as He allows us the freedom to exercise our agency and to learn from our mistakes and hope against hope that we won't hurt ourselves so badly that we will refuse to return to Him and make Him a part of our lives.
Christ is the deliverer not only because He allows us to find our own path and to free us from the tangled messes that we often make of our lives, but most importantly, Christ is the deliverer because He delivers. He comes through. We rely on His grace and He never lets us down. It can sometimes be hard to believe that such goodness is possible, but that's why God gave us mothers.
God gave us mothers so that we could find it easier to believe in His love for us, because we receive so many daily examples of such pure love from our own mothers. Our mothers delivered us on the day we were born and they have been delivering ever since. We can look at the incredible examples that that have given us and we can strive to emulate their examples in our own lives, and see the echoes of our Savior's love in the countless, selfless, tireless acts of service they shower upon us every day.
