Something About Mary

Luke 1: 39-55

December 13, 2009
Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

I don’t know if it’s because she was southern or just eccentric, but I’ll never forget my ninth grade health teacher.  You couldn’t really call her a southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara style, but Patsy Hodges did believe fervently in the power of a little flirtation and much attention to personal appearance.  We ate it up.  Back then, health class was a single sex endeavor and so during our semester together Mrs. Hodges provided us girls with all sorts of arcane information about the human body and, more importantly, helpful hints as to maintaining a romantic relationship.

At the same time, Mrs. Hodges realized that some things in life are beyond our control and so she tried to prepare us for a few of the pitfalls that awaited us.  To this end, she told us the story of a woman who took great pride in her own appearance as well her neat and orderly house.  This woman also had several sons.

Now, I’ve learned from hard personal experience that when you have sons, neatness and order are crucial if you hope to stay sane, so I empathize with her.  Neatness and order are also very hard to come by when you have several sons.

Anyway, this woman had several sons, let’s say three, and she was determined that none of them would ever see her disheveled or disorganized, which was no mean feat, but she did it.  She made sure that she was always up and dressed, with make up on, before anyone else in the house was out of bed, and she didn’t go to be until the rest of her family was asleep.  And that’s how her boys grew up experiencing her:  neat, organized, everything always under control.

Until the night when fate and faulty wiring conspired and fire broke out in the house.  The woman roused herself from sleep, woke her family, and led them to safety.  “And just think,” Mrs. Hodges lowered her voice for dramatic effect, “her sons’ most vivid memory of her will always be from the night of that fire when she was disheveled, didn’t have any make up on, and was wearing her husband’s moth eaten old bath robe.

Well, this story has stuck with me over the years, mainly to remind me that it’s futile to try to control someone else’s perceptions of who we are.  At some point, it’s all going to fall apart no matter how hard we try.  This story has also provided me with justification in my decision not to aspire to such order and neatness. 

But then along came Luke’s account of Mary, her encounter with Gabriel, and her astonishing poem, and I saw Mrs. Hodges’ cautionary tale in a new light.

The disheveled woman who rescues her family from the burning house is a perfect metaphor for God’s love for us:  urgent, immediate, not counting the cost, utterly lacking in pride.  The same God revealed to us both in Jesus’ parables and his life.  The prodigal son.  The one hundredth sheep.  His death on the cross.

We see these same qualities in Mary’s response to God’s call.  Her answer is swift and sure, utterly lacking in pride, unconcerned with consequences.  Not counting the cost that must be obvious to her as she accepts the call to give flesh to God’s love for the world.

Mary’s response reveals the strength and courage that are hallmarks of one chosen by God: “Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord.  Let it be done according to your word.” Here I am Lord.  Send me.

Over the years, visual artists have tried to capture the essence of Mary, but they seem to have been drawn more from idealizations of femininity and motherhood than from what we actually know of the woman herself.  The paintings show us a serene woman, dressed in rich fabric, holding a luminous and equally serene infant.  She doesn’t look strong enough to put in a full day of work in the fields much less survive the stresses and heart break of her life.  She looks utterly inward turning.  As though she never did much more than ponder events in her heart.

But Mary’s own words paint a far different picture.  “My soul magnifies the Lord…for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant…he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts (and) helped his servant Israel… according to the promise he made to our ancestors.”  This is a woman of intellectual depth, who knows the history of her own people and their relationship with this God who brought them to birth.

She is also politically astute, understanding the realities of her day: the way the wealthy lord it over the poor and defenseless.  She grasps the significance of the messiah that God is sending to them.  That his arrival signals the turning of this old order and the values that supported it, upside down:  "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;  he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty." 

Mary’s confidence in God’s promise is so strong that she puts this portion of her poem is in past tense, even as she refers to it as a future reckoning.  She describes what is to happen as though it has happened already, because when God promises something, it’s as good as done.

Not that she hasn’t felt normal human fear and uncertainty up to this point. She wonders and asks questions – even of the angelic presence standing in front of her:  How can this be?  And the verb used to describe Mary’s hasty visit to her cousin Elizabeth following the Annunciation, denotes great emotional upheaval and distress.  In other words, she isn’t an icon but an aware, shrewd, and above all real human being.  She is like a lot of the women I know today – none of whom would invite an automatic comparison to the traditionally understood Virgin Mary.  They’re too feisty, too fierce, too difficult.  Too complicated.  Too real.

But, like Mary herself, they are part of a female tradition that goes back, at least to the Hebrew midwives in the time of slavery in Egypt.  When they defied Pharaoh’s orders to kill all the male babies and hid them instead. A tradition I saw lived out by the mother of an Israeli friend, who, as a young girl, dragged her even younger brother all over Europe, staying one step ahead of the Nazis for four years.  Thanks to her they survived and made their way to Israel.

You see, the traditional feminine characteristic of nurturance is often accompanied by the unrecognized characteristic of defiance.  And isn’t that what Mary did too?  Defied the mores of her day in her willingness to bear a child with no reasonable explanation as to its paternity?   Why do you think God had to explain things to Joseph in a dream?  No one would have believed her then anymore than they would now.

We see this nurturing defiance all throughout history.  Think of the slave women of our own country who cared for their children as best they could in circumstances we cannot imagine.  Abolitionist Frederick Douglass gives witness to their struggle as he speaks of his own mother:

“I never saw may mother to know her as such more than four or five times in my life.  She…lived about twelve miles from my home and made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot after the performance of her day’s work.  She would lie down with me and get me to sleep, but long before I waked, she was gone.  She died when I was about seven years old.  I was not allowed to be present during her illness, at her death or burial.”

Like Douglass’ mother, Mary’s son  is not her own.  She brings him to birth knowing that there are other claims on him.  But she continues to mother him as best and as long as she can.  Can you imagine the strength and determination that takes?  Can you imagine being the parent of Jesus?

And what about the tangle of humanity and divinity Gabriel describes when he makes his announcement to Mary?  What does her virginity have to do with it?  After all, this baby of hers is fully human.  Fully divine.  Not a demi-god from Greek mythology.  Fully human, with a full set of human chromosomes.  His blood tests would have come up the same as yours or mine.

So whatever the virgin birth was, it is beyond our ability to really understand it.  It goes far deeper than the simple equation of God as father and Mary as mother. I am not addressing the truth of that understanding.  Only saying that we are nowhere close to comprehending it.  Even our most carefully word-smithed creeds only partially explain the mystery of God becoming one of us.

Unfortunately, because of the mystery surrounding the physical embodiment of God, we tend to understand Mary primarily in terms of her virginity.  At least in the conventional sense of untouched, physical purity.  But that understanding misses much of the point.  For a change, here’s where the Greek worldview is actually helpful.  Their understanding of virginity was different than the Jewish one.  For them, a virgin was an independent woman.  Not owned or controlled by husband or father.  Which could also be said about Mary.  Mary was independent of human ambitions and plans for her.  She had to be if Jesus came into the world through God’s will rather than due to human action or accident.

Which is why I believe that it is more helpful to understand Mary’s virginity as an expression of the independence and strength a person has to have if they are going to embrace the new life generated by God’s Holy Spirit.  This understanding tells us that Mary is not a passive, yielding vessel, to be respected as Jesus’ mother but essentially irrelevant following his birth.  She is alert, aware, ad tough-minded. Fierce.  Like an eagle that sirs up its nest, that flutters over its young, spreading out its wings, catching them, bear them on its pinions.  What other kind of person would take off over rough country in an advanced state of pregnancy?

What other kind of person would God want for a mother?

What kind of person does God always call?

Someone like Mary.  Willing to be a servant.  Who’s willing to do the work, even when it’s dirty work.  Difficult work.  Someone who will grab a child and run for safety in the middle of the night; or plod up a dusty road beyond exhaustion.  Someone who will brave disapproval or even death to do what they believe to be the right thing.

Someone like Mary.  Blessed among women.  And men.  Are we blessed enough to be servants like that?  Courageous enough to answer God’s particular call to us, no matter what the cost?  We have a good role model in Jesus’ gentle and fierce mother. Amen.