Lent, Day 26

Lent: The Divine Feminine, Day 26

It is certainly true that the New Testament, like the Hebrew Scriptures, presents God in an overwhelmingly masculine imagery. But, by placing on the lips of Jesus himself several important feminine metaphors for God, the Gospels make quite clear that the male metaphors are not to be literalized or absolutized. Again, it is perhaps in what is unexpected, in what cannot be explained by cultural influences, that we find the most important revelatory aspects of the Word of God. It is not at all surprising, and for that reason not especially revelatory, that God is presented in male terms by, in, and for a patriarchal culture. The female metaphors appear in spite of overwhelming cultural bias. They tell us something very important about God, something we may well not have discovered for ourselves in a male-dominated community, that God is neither male nor female, that God is both feminine and masculine.