Lent 4 2026 (Mothering Sunday)

Luke 2.33-35

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary. “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed”.

It is an odd kind of blessing that ends with a prophecy that the child being blessed will grow up to be opposed. This is not what we usually wish for our children. Indeed, Simeon goes on the tell Mary—mother of the blessed child—that a sword will piece her soul on account of this child. Whatever it is that blessings are meant to accomplish, we don’t imagine that it is this sort of thing. 

What this means, of course, is that our notion of blessing requires interrogation and revision. To bless something is not to engage in ritualised wishful thinking about the thing. It is not white magic that brings good luck. In some ways, intercessory prayer is a more appropriate occasion for our well-wishes. Some people think it impious to pray for what we want, especially when what we want is a bit frivolous: but, to the contrary, there is virtue in honesty in our prayers. If we want silly things, it makes little sense to hide it from God, who knows us better than we know ourselves: and, perhaps, by articulating our misaligned desires, we might see their shortcomings more clearly. 

Blessings differ from prayers at least in that respect. They are not so detachable from goodness, and not so attached to our particular desires, whatever they may be. This is why we have such strong intuitions about what objects are amenable to blessing, what things are blessable. Consider, for example, the Church of England’s provisions for same-sex couples: we have been happy to draft a whole set of prayers for same-sex couples, but are at great pains to avoid permitting blessings for them and for their relationships. Perhaps this will soon change, but the point is that it has been and remains a matter of great controversy.

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To bless something is first to recognise its goodness. Our impasse in the Church of England over the blessing of same-sex relationships is, in part, caused by an inability for us to agree about whether same-sex relationships are good. Those of us who think it obvious that they are, also think it obvious that we should bless them. Those who think that they are at worst disordered and at best concessionary, are concomitantly less keen to confer blessings upon them. 

But there is more going on than the mere recognition of goodness and declaration of approval. A blessing is also a kind of commissioning, a calling and setting apart for the thing blessed to fulfil a certain purpose, which is in keeping with its nature and thus its natural goodness, but also which perhaps goes beyond it. It is the endowment of an expectation towards excellence, towards being more than just any old thing. And so, we bless buildings to be places of divine worship. We bless tables to be altars. We bless water to be the reagents of baptism. We bless couples to be more than the sum of two individual persons, and to embody love, not only the love they already share, but love itself, which is divine. 

And so it is also whenever we bless our children. 

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I don’t know if you are (or were) in the habit of blessing your children, or whether you bless your grandchildren. I don’t mean whether you pray for them: I mean, whether you pronounce God’s blessing upon them. These are theologically different acts, as we have been discussing: and they are grammatically different too. Prayers are always addressed to God, to whom we might make requests. Blessings are more often addressed to the object or person receiving the blessing. There is, as with prayer, no formula as such: but you may have heard me say at the altar rail, “Almighty God, who made you and loves you, bless you and keep you”, which is a concise imitation of the Aaronic Blessing in the Book of Numbers, and still used by Jews and Christians today. You will know it: “The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the LORD turn his face toward you and give you peace”.

I don’t know if you’ve blessed your children and grandchildren. But you are well within your rights to do so. It is, in most cases, the work of a priest or bishop to bless—but an exception is made when it comes to children. Our children, and by extension our grandchildren, are ours to bless; and we are the proper ministers of that blessing. This has been so since ancient times, as we see it told again and again in the Hebrew Bible. After all, the ritual act of blessing is, for parents, really a sign of parenting more broadly, which is as a whole itself a blessing, beginning from the gift of life through to the provision of nourishment and nurture, and all the manifestations of love given by parent to child. When parents pronounce blessings upon their children, this comes from a deep, deep well.

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We have not yet properly answered the question of the oddness of Simeon’s blessing upon the child Jesus and his parents, Mary and Joseph. 

It is, first of all, an act of recognition, which in the narrative appears as prophecy. Simeon sees Jesus for who he is, and what his role is in the divine economy. There is nothing generic about this blessing: it is for Jesus alone, this unique individual, who is of course like all individuals in our uniqueness. And so it is that when we bless our children, we must also recognise their own particularity: we must acknowledge that whatever purpose it is that God has set them apart for, it might not conform to our own preferences or those considered normative by wider society. 

And it is also, as we have already heard, a commission, and now not only to the child but to the parents too. If this is who Jesus is, who he must be, then the work for his parents is to discern how best to guide him in that direction. Children do not raise themselves, despite the modern rhetoric of “letting” children be who they will be. There is a laziness to this kind of determinism. Mary and Joseph were not passive spectators in the life of the child Jesus, and nor are we in the lives of ours. Or our grandchildren too, for that matter. And if we do bless our own loved ones, as we ought to, then we call upon ourselves to take some responsibility, not only for recognising the truth of who they are, but also for nurturing them towards themselves. 

All of which is say that it is no small thing to offer our blessing; precisely because it is no small thing to be a parent and grandparent. It is a high calling, and all who answer it need all our prayers for them, and our blessings too.