The Blessed Virgin Mary – it’s complicated.
It’s been complicated for a long time, ever since Christian men started telling Christian women to be like Mary – passive and submissive.
It’s complicated, not least because Mary’s traditional title includes the word “virgin,” which has cast a Christian spell of suspicion over human sexuality for centuries. (And this is certainly odd since I’m pretty sure Jesus’ brothers and sisters were not delivered by storks.)
So is Mary the model for humble obedience to the will of God? Or is she the fierce pioneer of God’s intervention into human history with radicalized love?
Yes, both; it’s complicated.
Christians arrive to the Fourth Sunday of Advent and Mary greets
us. What she says ought to provoke in us what happened to her cousin, Elizabeth: our insides should twist and tumble and tweak (Luke 1:44).
Mary greets us in this week before Christmas having done quite a remarkable thing indeed: saying Yes to God. This is not easy.
This Yes is not passive submission, but deliberate, engaged, active participation in a divine encounter. This woman had precious few opportunities to chart her own course or even ponder it, yet she not only questions God’s own emissary but then boldly says Yes – as if that mattered, and it does.
Mary greets us as the One-Who-Says-Yes-to-God, and then tells us what this Yes means:
God has scattered the proud in their conceit.
God has cast down the mighty from their thrones,
and has lifted up the lowly.
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich are sent away empty (Luke 1:51-53).
Mary’s exclamation ought to send shivers down the spine of all those who wield power, whether through votes or by force or in the mechanisms of social privilege.
But no, not quite. That would be the rhetoric of the opposition party countering the power of the ruling class. Mary’s greeting is more revolutionary than that.
Mary echoes the words of Hannah, from centuries before her own time. Hannah lamented not having children of her own and dared to present herself in the Temple, repeatedly, to demand a divine remedy. The male guardian of that holy site even worried that she might be drunk. But then God answered her fervent prayers, and the prophet Samuel was the result. Hannah’s song of praise lingers in Mary’s exultations:
Talk no more so very proudly,
let not arrogance come from your mouth…
The bows of the mighty are broken,
but the feeble gird on strength.
Those who were full have hired themselves out for bread,
but those who were hungry are fat with spoil (1 Samuel 2:3-5).
Mary, in solidarity with her ancient sister Hannah, greets us, not with cozy platitudes but a challenge: God is found among the least likely; God attends to the forgotten, the outcast, the throwaways, the utterly insignificant. God pays heed to the ones not even the most “progressive” among us try to feature in our programs of charitable assistance. Mary voices the astonishing solidarity of God with the absolutely voiceless.
Where God is, most cannot hear – but Mary does.
And so I think of my own mother, Rosemary, who died this year at the end of March. That faithful, pious woman who refused to let God off the hook. Like Hannah, she fretted over not having children – and complained bitterly to God about it (whether she complained about the result is another story…).
My mother was tender and tenacious, stubborn and strategic, frivolous and fierce. She was complicated; and so was Mary, the mother of Jesus. Mothers do and speak and live what few take as important, significant, or laudatory. Most of us don’t even know the half of it.
Our complicated mothers are our complicated selves in countless ways, even as our social systems reduce us to the neatly drawn categories of gender, race, and religion. Mary said No to all of that by saying Yes to God – the God whom she encountered as our Uncanny Comrade.
Mary, too, is our comrade, who points to the outrageous God of Jesus by pointing at her own body – her rounded belly, the charges of scandal, the forced migration, the painful journey, the lack of any hospitality, the bloody, messy stable. Mary’s life and witness, her words and her body, are as complicated and as glorious as your body and mine. There, she says, in all that bodily complexity, right there is God.
But “comrade”? Why risk evoking a revolution? Because Mary voiced what Hannah voiced and my own dear mother voiced, each in her own way: take God seriously, and the world will not stay the same. Take God seriously, and your own world will turn upside down. Take God seriously…seriously enough to complain and cajole and insist and demand that God make good on God’s promises. That’s what mothers do.
Yes, it’s complicated, but not so terribly much. Because we are the story of Mary and her Child, a story of God’s unending, passionate love for God’s own creation.
So may Mary, the mother of a precious and vulnerable child, help us see the piercing love of mothers for their terribly vulnerable children – on the streets of Ferguson, in flimsy boats on the Aegean Sea, on the beaches of Greek islands, in our schoolyards playing, and in our backyards laughing.
May Mary’s brazen Yes animate our own affirmations of God’s justice, especially when it seems risky and unreasonable.
May this blessed and ancient comrade in divine mysteries inspire us to see and treat all bodies as blessed – all of them, without exception.
Collect for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, 1979 Book of Common P
rayer
Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation, that your Son Jesus Christ, at his coming, may find in us a mansion prepared for himself; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Thank you for this, today, when I needed it. Absolutely beautiful.