A sermon preached by the Reverend Sarah Grondin at St. Jude’s Church, Oakville, on the Commemoration of Julian of Norwich, Spiritual Teacher, c. 1417, Wednesday, May 8, 2024.
I speak to you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Today we commemorate Julian of Norwich, who is a great favourite of mine… and if you follow Lenten Madness, which is a bracketed challenge that pits saints and other holy people against each other for public voting during the season of Lent, you’ll know that Julian won the Golden Halo this year.
I’m going to read you part of the write-up for Julian in For All the Saints: Julian was a fourteenth-century Englishwoman who is known for her book, The Revelations of Divine Love.
This work records sixteen visions which were granted to her on May eighth and ninth in 1373, with the fruit of twenty years’ reflection on their meaning. Written in the English dialect of fourteenth-century Norfolk, her book is one of the undisputed masterpieces of mystical theology.
In The Revelations of Divine Love she tells us that she experienced her visions when she was thirty years old and they came to her during an illness which brought her to the brink of death.
The heart of Julian’s visions was the knowledge of God in the crucified Christ. Because the Saviour bore and nurtured a new humanity on the cross, she took up an image often employed by other spiritual teachers in the Middle Ages and likened him to a mother.
This image of Christ, and all else in her book, found fulfillment in the divine love. For in everything that God showed her, Julian wrote, “Love was our Lord’s meaning. And I saw for certain, both here and elsewhere, that before ever he made us, God loved us, and that his love has never slackened, nor ever shall.”
Her book The Revelations of Divine Love is quite wonderful, and she found much peace and joy in the revelations she received. But she wanted to know what these visions meant. What was God trying to say to her? It wasn’t made clear to her at the time of the visions what the reason for them was, and she would spend many years devoted to understanding God’s meaning.
Julian wrote in her book: “From that time I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning, and fifteen years after (yes, 15 years later!) I was answered (when an inner voice said to me): ‘Do you want to learn the Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well.
LOVE was his meaning. Who showed this to you? LOVE. What did he show you? LOVE. Why did he show it? For LOVE. Hold yourself in this love and you shall learn and know even more.’ Thus it was,” wrote Julian, “that I learned that LOVE was our Lord’s meaning.”
This was the message and the meaning behind her visions: they were all about LOVE. God was revealing to her how deep and broad and rich the love of God was. God was showing her how much God loved the world and everything in it, and God was showing her that nothing was stronger than this love, there was nothing in the world that could overcome it.
I’d like to share another little excerpt from the book with you. In one of the earlier visions that Julian recounts in her writing, she speaks about seeing Jesus and then seeing his mother Mary. And then Jesus shows her something, and this is what she writes:
And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, it seemed, and it was as round as any ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and I thought, 'What may this be?' And it was answered generally thus: 'It is all that is made.'
I wondered how it could last, for I thought it might suddenly fall to nothing for little cause. And I was answered in my understanding: 'It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.' In this little thing I saw three properties; the first is that God made it; the second is that God loves it; and the third is that God keeps it.
So, in this vision she imagines a small, round object in her hand, as small as a hazelnut, and she wonders what it is. The voice tells her, It is everything that has been made – in other words, everything and everyone who has ever existed. Julian then wonders how it survives because it’s so small and vulnerable.
And the voice responds by saying, It lasts and always will last, because God loves it and because it is God sustaining it and caring for it. God’s love is sustaining and supporting everything that exists in the universe – every person, every plant or living creature, every mountain or river or sea, every planet or star or sun, every moment of every day. All of it is held together, sustained and supported by the God of Love.
Love – God’s love – was all around, and Julian saw it like no one else. It was almost like God lifted the blinders off her eyes (the blinders that the world puts over our eyes that prevent us from recognizing God’s presence and activity in our world) and God showed her how things really were…That everything and everyone was being held and sustained and given life by the hand of God, and that God was full of LOVE and it was LOVE that was holding everything together.
If we turn to our Gospel reading from today, we hear some more about that immense love. The passage is part of Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples. He is speaking to them about how in a little while they will no longer see him, and then in a little while they will see him again. The disciples predictably don’t understand what Jesus is talking about.
But we know that Jesus is speaking about his death, and his resurrection. This part of Jesus’ mission is the living example of Julian’s third understanding that God keeps the things God loves. God shows his love by sending it incarnate in the person of Jesus, and after Jesus has died, he ascends back to the Father so that we too might one day share in that resurrection.
This paves the way for us to have this experience of entering more fully into relationship with God as creator and created, where God rejoices in our presence, just as we rejoice in God’s presence.
During this conversation with the disciples Jesus also tells them that when the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide them into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to them the things that are to come.
The experience of Julian’s vision of Jesus handing her the hazelnut is helpful I think in trying to unpack what Jesus is telling the disciples. When Julian first receives the hazelnut she doesn’t understand what it means. On the surface, it’s just a smooth round ball.
She isn’t able to comprehend the full meaning of it on her own, it has to be revealed to her. And the revelation that she receives is that of God’s immense love. She also doesn’t receive this revelation right away. She is left to ponder, pray and meditate on the visions before their meaning is fully revealed to her. We can’t hear the truth until we’re ready. Before that it will just fall to the ground.
As mentioned in her biography in For All the Saints, Julian had some pretty radical things to say. One of the things she insisted on was that God was both our Father and our Mother, and that Jesus also was a mother to us. This can still be pretty radical to say even today, but it was really radical in Julian’s day.
“To the property of Motherhood,” said Julian, “belongs kindness, love, wisdom, and knowing; and it is God.” Many other mystics of the mediaeval period also used this language of God as mother as a way to try and convey the love that God has for all of Creation.
Julian of Norwich is someone who points us toward the loving presence of Christ. May her testimony make us want to encounter God in new and profound ways, so that we can come to believe for ourselves that “though sin is inevitable, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
The next time you see a hazelnut I pray you’ll remember that our Lord’s meaning is love, and in all things God offers us that love—God created us, God loves us, and God keeps us. Amen.
