A Gathering Of Mothers

Sarah, preferred wife of Abraham
Ruth, beloved wife of Boaz
Hannah, barren wife of Elkanah
Gomer, troubled wife of Hosea
Mary, espoused wife of Joseph
The Voice of Gabriel, a messenger angel

Scene: An empty space, light, soft light, trees - palm perhaps - water, an oasis in the desert


Enter Mary carrying a water jar. She is pensive, as she approaches the pool.

Voice of Gabriel: Hail Mary.

Mary’s expression does not change, but her posture tells us she has heard the greeting. It is familiar.

Voice of Gabriel: Hail Mary, full of grace.

Mary kneels to dip her jug in the water. She is listening, and remembering.

Voice of Gabriel: Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou among women.

Mary lifts the jar and sighs as she does so.

Mary: Blessed among women. (Pause and then louder, as if she were challenging its truth.) Blessed among women. Am I? Am I indeed?

She starts to turn away, and then notices several other women appearing as if out of thin air.

Hannah: Of course you are, dear child. You are the Mother of God.

Sarah: Is that what makes us blessed, Hannah? Motherhood? It seemed that way to me once. I wonder now if we made too much of it. I don’t know. Oh we like to talk about the sanctity of motherhood and the holiness of our calling, but in fact, once we gave birth to our sons - for it was always a son that was looked for, not a daughter - we ceased to be important.

Ruth: I don’t think that’s quite fair, Sarah.

Sarah: Don’t you Ruth? Why?

Ruth: No one remembers me because I was a mother, but I am remembered just the same. After all, I have a whole book of the Bible named after me, and who was I but a Moabite nobody, a stranger that deserved no notice from the Jews. It’s amazing when you think of it that I, a Gentile, should be the subject of a whole book of the Bible. No one else can make that claim but Esther, and she was both Jewish and a queen.

Hannah: I know what you mean, Ruth. We don’t even know if she ever was a mother. What worth is a childless wife?

Gomer: You put too much importance on being a mother, Hannah. Look at me. I had plenty of children, but my husband, for all the notice taken of me, might as well have birthed them himself.

Hannah: Well if you’ll excuse me for saying so, Gomer, you hardly acted like a mother.

Sarah: Mother! You hardly acted like a wife!

Mary: Don’t judge her too harshly, ladies. I know what it was like to have my reputation questioned by every woman in town. It’s not a pleasant thing to be sneered at and shunned everywhere you turn.

Gomer: Don’t defend me, Mary, I can take care of myself. After all, Hosea did take me back, didn’t he? He didn’t try to hide me like Abraham did you Sarah. What a coward, pretending he was your brother and sending you off to Pharaoh’s bed like that. How did you stand him?

Sarah: (stung) He had to. He didn’t have a choice. He might have been killed, if Pharaoh found me to his liking. Believe it or not, I was once quite beautiful.

Gomer: He might have been killed? What about you? Weren’t you taking a risk too? When Pharaoh found out who you really were he could have killed you both, you know. Pharaohs have short tempers I hear ... and absolute power.

Ruth: We all had to take risks, didn’t we? I mean, I was certainly frightened when I went and crept under Boaz’s blanket. No one had to tell me what I was doing, and what it meant. He could have used me like any other slave girl and thrown me out the next day. How could I know what was going to happen?

Gomer: That’s the truth. How well I know.

Mary: Your mother-in-law would never have let anything bad happen to you. You know that.

Ruth: Yes, I knew Naomi, and I knew I could trust her. But we were desperate women, and sometimes desperate people do foolish things.

Sarah. Desperate, ah that’s the problem, isn’t it? Desperate to have a child, uncertain if it will ever happen, frightened if it does. Which one of us could know for certain what would happen to us when we found we were with child? My grandson’s beloved wife Rachel would go down into Sheol twice to bear him sons, and the second time she did not return.

Gomer: There’ve been times I wished I hadn’t returned.

Hannah: Oh don’t say that, Gomer. Look how Hosea loved you.

Gomer: He loved me all right, loved me like a pet monkey he kept tied to him with a rope.

Hannah: You put it harshly, Gomer. He suffered badly you know. You had no claim on him for mercy.

Gomer: No claim? I was the mother of his children.

Sarah: He could have gotten other children with other mothers. Abraham did.

Mary: But he loved you, Gomer! Only you.

Gomer: Then how could love feel like chains? Answer me that.

Mary: I don’t know. When God chose me to be the mother of his son, I felt those chains too. Think of it. Every watchful father worries about the health of his wife when she is about to bear him a son. But Joseph was not the father. What could I expect of him? Would he accept this child, claim him as his own, raise him fairly, love him?

Gomer: You needn’t have worried. Men are so proud of sons, they will claim them whether they are theirs or not.

Sarah: I worried. Would I carry the child its full time? Of course you weren’t as old as I, Mary, and your child’s father after all was God. Surely no harm could come to you.

Mary: Couldn’t it? What if I took some mis-step, fell, hurt myself or lost the baby. Would God be angry with me for losing his son?

Ruth: Or what if the people turned against you, struck you, rejected you, maybe even stoned you, for you were unworthy to be the mother of a Jewish leader’s child. I received frightful looks, and many a woman threw an evil eye at me. I was so lonely, and my husband did not always protect me. I even wondered sometimes if he wasn’t ashamed of me.

Mary: I feared that too. Of course Joseph was a kind man, always considerate of me and never would he have shamed me. For a time, he thought he would hide me from the suspicious eyes of the village, (he got unkind looks too, you know,). but he soon changed his mind. ‘This is God’s child,’ he’d say, ‘You’ll be the mother of the son of God.’  (Mary pauses a moment, remembering)  Even so, I still was afraid - God was asking so much of me when I was little more than a child myself..

Hannah: I was never worried, not a single moment. And do you know why? Because I had a secret. The child was not mine. I had already given him back to God. How could God not take care of my child for me?

Sarah: Have a son, have a son, that’s the point, isn’t it? The eternal commandment. Give your husband a son. Never mind that he can get them anywhere he pleases, you must do your duty. Don’t dare prove to be barren. You have no control over your own body. You are only a possession of your husband at the mercy of a God who may or may not answer your prayers. Be fruitful and multiply.

Ruth: Not to mention some women die from childbirth, like your granddaughter-in-law.

Hannah: You can’t think about that. Never think about that.

Mary: I didn’t, but I did think about the life that was growing inside me and how his life was bound to change mine. God would protect his son, but that life would still be out of my flesh. I felt it’s heart beat beneath my own and I loved it, loved it more than my own life. Who can put into words that kind of love, or the fear you feel for its protection?  (Mary gazes off, seeing herself long ago) When I first heard what was going to happen to me, all I thought of was the mystery of it all, and the embarrassment - although to tell you the truth, I didn’t let that worry me too much. Something too amazing was happening for me to spend much time thinking about the neighbors. But after he was born, I began to wonder. As dearly as I loved this child, I always knew he would never be truly mine But it wasn’t like you, Hannah. You had a choice. You gave your son to God freely. Jesus was never mine to give.

Ruth: He was like a sword in your heart.

Mary: Yes, Ruth. There was an old man in the temple who called him that. He knew there was pain in this child. Pain for him and for me.

Sarah: I know about that sword. My poor, blind Isaac, how frail he was, and duped by his own son. It can be hard to be a mother to such sons.

Gomer: I don’t suppose I thought much about my sons. They seemed to have been born just to be a label, not a person. ‘Come in little Jezreel, you little “punishment” you. Lo-ammi, stop hitting your sister, you little “Aren’t my people”. Heavens how I hated those names.

Ruth: But the cross ...

Mary: Don’t remind me Ruth!

Ruth: But you were there. You saw it. Those nails. They must have gone right through your hands as well as his.

Hannah: But it was for the good of all the people, you know. It was only a means to an end. My Samuel went through hard times too. That was God’s way to accomplish glory.

Mary: (sharply) I didn’t ask for glory for my son! Who needed glory? I was the mother of the Son of God. I needed nothing more than that.

Ruth: And I was the beloved wife of Boaz. We never knew that our great-grand son would be the great king David, mighty ruler over all of Israel. We only knew we’d found each other, and loved each other dearly.

Mary: Are you sorry you became a mother, Sarah? Did you think motherhood would somehow be different?

Sarah: I don’t know. I loved my son. And almost lost him, you know. Remember when Abraham set out to sacrifice him?

Gomer: I remember. Do I ever remember. I expected Hosea would do the same thing with my sons.

Sarah: He didn’t do it, or course. God saw to that. And I was grateful. But if he had, what could I have done about it? Nothing. Nothing at all. Yes, that’s what mothers are for. We provide the sons, and then we are forgotten.

Gomer: Didn’t Jesus practically do the same thing to you, Mary? When you came knocking at the door and the disciples told him his Mother was calling for him? He said, “I have no mother”. That’s all the thanks you got.

Hannah: Be fair, Gomer, he never did belong to Mary. She knew that. None of our sons ever belonged to us. We learned that early on.

Gomer: They may not have belonged to us but we had to bear them in our bellies, didn’t we? We had to suffer the birth pains. We fed them at our breasts. When did we become dispensable?

Mary: I never did. In spite of what he said, to the end of his life, he remembered me. I could not ask for more.

Ruth: Nor I. My son was never famous, like yours. You probably don’t even remember his name, do you? (Reflectively) Obed. That was his name. He was nobody; just the father of Jesse who was the father of the great King David. Why should anyone remember him, or me? But I remember him and I loved him. And that was enough.

Hannah: We all remember our sons, and think them worthy to be kings.

Sarah: My son was so frail. Hardly likely to be the vessel from which a great nation would spring. But to me he was greater than a king.

Gomer: When I think about it, I was more blessed than I realized at the time. I bore no king, but I bore something more than a king - I bore a sign from God, a living sign that meant more than rulers and princes. In a way, he, too, was God’s man-child, every bit as much as your son Mary.

Mary: Yes, and the punishment he promised, my son bore. But unlike your son, mine gave promise of a better future. Those who had been called “Not my people” were adopted. We are God’s people now; every one of us.

The Others: That’s true, that’s really true.

Sarah: And my blood was in him.

Ruth: And mine.

Gomer: Think of it; all of us were in him, one way or another.

Hannah: How were you in him, Gomer?

Gomer: In the hurting.

Hannah: And I in the loving.

Mary : A loving that did not grab, or refuse to let go.

Sarah: We were all in him, weren’t we? Blessed. Every one of us.

Narrator: And Mary Said,

Mary: My soul magnifies the Lor
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.

(Add Ruth and Sarah)

His mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

(Add Hannah)

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;

(add Gomer)

he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has healed his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

Sarah: to Abraham and to his descendants forever!

Mary Amen.