A World Transformed Excerpt: Jesus our Mother

Last week I took a break from the blog because my article on medieval pilgrimage and spiritual journeys was published. Now I’m back with an excerpt from my book, A World Transformed: Exploring the Spirituality of Medieval Maps, which is scheduled to release next month.

This excerpt is about the Ebstorf Map (ca. 1300):

Look closely at the map, especially the edge, where Jesus’ head, hands, and feet appear. Jesus does not just hold the world; he embodies it. Round and full, the earth becomes his torso, from which his extremities (somewhat awkwardly) protrude. The map is actually a full-length portrait of our Lord.

Ebstorf Map - wikimedia
Ebstorf Map, ca. 1300. By User:Kolossos (own work (related to the stiching)) Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Jesus’ body contains the world but also swells with the world. To my mind—and I believe this was the intention of its makers—the Ebstorf Map pictures a pregnant body. It is round and swollen. It completely subsumes the normal proportions of the human form. And at the center of this pregnant body lies Jerusalem, which, in Jewish and Christian traditions, was often called the navel of the world. In the early fifth century, Saint Jerome wrote, “Jerusalem is situated in the middle of the earth. This is affirmed by the Prophet, showing it to be the navel of the earth, and by the psalmist expressing the birth of the lord: ‘Truth,’ he says, ‘rose from the earth’; and next the passion: ‘[God] worked,’ he says, ‘salvation in the middle of the earth.’”

Of all the names and concepts for Jerusalem that we’ve examined in this book—geographical center, pilgrimage destination, heavenly city—I find “navel” the most evocative. In many geographical texts, “navel” simply means “center.” But of course, it also carries connotations of gestation and birth. It describes wonderfully the place of Christ’s death and resurrection. In Jerusalem, Jesus gave life to the world, much as the umbilical cord carries sustenance to a new human being through the site of the navel. The city of Jerusalem signifies that our earth is forever linked, as if by an unbroken cord, to the one who carried it and brought it forth.

Together with Jesus’ swollen torso, the navel gives us a new and perhaps a challenging image of our Lord. We think of God as our father and Jesus himself as our friend and brother. By picturing Jesus with a pregnant body, one that delivers nourishment through the earth’s navel, the Ebstorf Map presents Jesus as mother—a mother to the world. The map may have been made by the nuns in the Benedictine convent in which it was displayed. Yet its theology does not spring from a “female mind.” In the Middle Ages, men of the church also thought of Jesus as a mother. This arresting tradition, so foreign to the way we address Jesus today, was quite widespread at the time the Ebstorf Map was made.

Watch my website for news about the release of A World Transformed!

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