Scripture: Luke 1:26-38
Mary mother of Jesus. Protestants like us tend to diminish her role in the work of our Lord and savior. In our effort to not elevate her as high as we believe Catholics have, we regard her as important only for having birthed Jesus. After that, meh. She’s just another woman, just another mom, just another person in the story. We claim to love mothers, but we often foo-foo their roles away.
One of my favorite shows, The Office, has an episode where a new boss comes in and has made a list with two columns: one that the Office crew sees as “winners” and the other they see as… well, we’ll just say “less than winners.” The primary romance on the show revolves around the characters Jim and Pam, who, by this time in the narrative, are married and pregnant with their second child. Jim and Pam get put into different columns, Jim a “winner” and Pam… not a winner. Upset with this designation: Pam says:
“I used to be young and cute and sort of funny and, I could do those cute little cartoons and everyone who came through here was like, ‘who’s that receptionist? I like her.’ Now I’m just a fat mom!”
Pam, The Office
Pam, finding herself on the “loser” side of the list immediately identifies her role as a “mom” as the problem in others’ perception of her. I think many working mothers whose professional plans have been delayed because we wanted to also have a family can relate to this. The value and roles of women, especially if they are also moms, have historically been diminished. There’s a reason that in seminary one of the first things they tell us is, “Whenever a woman or child is mentioned, especially by name, that’s our clue to pay very close attention to their story.”
Women were not valued highly in first century Rome and that distinction, the distinction of being ignored and reduced, has remained throughout most of history with few exceptions here and there. Being “just a mom” isn’t enough for us to lift up a woman as being exceptional. Of course, we know that Mary was exceptional, but if we follow the accepted protestant view of her “just a mom” we miss out on a fuller understanding of Mary, this woman who, at 14 had her life turned upside-down. Mary was the first person to have her life turned upside-down by Jesus’s presence and work, but she wasn’t the last.
That Gabriel comes to Mary, a 14-year-old virgin woman engaged to a descendant of the house of David, is no mere coincidence, of course. None of this story is. John the Baptist’s birth narrative echoed what has gone before in Israel, born to infertile aged parents as Isaac was, fulfilling the role of Elijah, the one who would be sent before the coming “Day of the Lord.”
John’s birth narrative is tradition—Jesus’s, however, evokes the idea that God is doing a new thing! Jesus is created not by fully human means, but by human participation with the creative Spirit of God which overshadows her, much as the Spirit of God did in the creation of the world. In Genesis, the eternal God does a new thing in hovering over the waters and calls there to be light. Luke’s narrative gives us that feeling that something special, something new, something extraordinary is about to happen.
When we stop to consider Mary’s role here, we find that she becomes the first disciple. Jesus is identified as the son of David and the Son of God after which, having heard the good news, Mary goes on to share this news with others! She visits Elizabeth and, on her visit, John the Baptist leaps for joy, the first of his many acts of alerting us to the presence of the Messiah.
It’s really remarkable to me, the ways in which the Gospel called Luke really signals us to the significance of each word and phrase used here. Words matter.
We talk about “the disciples” and think very specifically about those 12 who followed Jesus in his life—maybe throwing in Paul a little later. But when we only focus on them, we miss this entire world of disciples who had been following Jesus since even before his conception.
When Gabriel says, “Greetings, favored one!” he signals us to Mary’s grace-filled being and her significance as the first disciple in saying, “The Lord is with you.” And though the text tells us Mary is perplexed, it also tells us that once she understands the mechanism of virgin conception, she is immediately on board. She tells Gabriel, Here I am, Mary, servant of the Lord, ready to put my trust in the Lord and follow wherever this may lead. Her “how” must have been different than Zechariah’s how, perhaps because even with God, a virgin conceiving seemed so ridiculous. And then it is Gabriel’s reassuring words, “nothing will be impossible with God,” that brings comfort and hope in a confusing moment for Mary. We should let them be that for us as well. If this 14-year-old virgin can trust in the miracle child in her womb even before her belly begins growing, well, then, I’d wager we ought to be able to as well.
In the church, we love a martyr. We love to talk about the costs of discipleship, perhaps more than the joys. We love to wax poetically about the ways in which our Christian freedoms are being encroached upon and liken ourselves to those who have really suffered for their belief. Perhaps this kicks off with Jesus, we want so much to follow Jesus so that we would be saved, that we think we must justify ourselves in grasping onto any kind of perceived suffering for the gospel we might be challenged by.
But the truth is, none of us has suffered as Mary would for her discipleship. There’s nothing glamorous about pregnancy, let me tell you. Ask any woman who’s been through pregnancy and birth, even with the kinds of medication available now, and she will tell you that even numbed up, it’s pretty gruesome and difficult. Mary went through all of this in a time when these advancements didn’t exist and when the maternal mortality rate was far higher than it is today. She traveled a long, lonely road with her husband, who was not the child’s biological father, to flee potential infanticide. She gave birth in a barn surrounded by animals with only Joseph there to hold her hand. She knew Jesus’s status as Messiah would guarantee that his life would be in danger before he was even born. She had to stand by and watch her own son be despised, arrested, tortured and crucified. And she had to do all of this while trusting in the messages of this angel and the faith in which she had been raised.
No matter how strong your faith is, there’s no way being the mother of Jesus was easy. I’m sure that she didn’t always feel favored. Witnessing all that she did for the sake of the gospel, I don’t think we can possibly comprehend the depths of pain Mary the mother of Jesus lived through. It must have been crushing.
Our 14-year-old virgin certainly would have had to grow up fast, shocked at the state of her life. But what we get through Mary is not that status of being “just a mom,” as Pam exclaimed—we get the mother of God and an example of perfect faith, of obedience and trust in the Lord, which is not blind, but is informed by her lived experience. No, we shouldn’t worship at the feet of Mother Mary, but we should learn from her as much–if not more–than we learn from the other disciples. Hearing the good news of the coming of the Messiah, Mary becomes the first disciple and, even through the challenges of motherhood, models for us how to be believers in “The Way” of Jesus.
The author Madeleine L’Engle remarks in her book Walking on Water, that Mary models “humble, courageous obedience.” She writes:
… she was little more than a child when the angel came to her; she had not lost her child’s creative acceptance of the realities moving on the other side of the everyday world. We lose our ability to see angels as we grow older, and that is a tragic loss.
Madeleine L’Engle
Friends, today is the third week in advent, traditionally reserved for joy, but this year, joy is a hard sell. I saw a tweet floating around about house with a big Christmas decoration in the yard that proclaimed in giant letters, “J-O-Y,” except that soon after it was put up, the “J” had fallen down and all that was left standing was “O-Y.” Oy. Nothing could better describe the mess that has been 2020.
I think perhaps it would be tempting to leave that as is, to let the “Oy” stand in solidarity with all of us for whom “Oy” has become a rallying cry. But–I think we’d do well to put that “J” back in JOY, friends.
We’d do well to remember the joy of John and Elizabeth at the coming of Mary and her unborn child.
We’d do well to remember the example of that 14-year-old virgin who stood in the face of the unimaginable and believed, joyfully, what Gabriel said when he told her nothing is impossible with God, because, my friends, nothing is.
Amen.
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