Holy Mary

This is the second of two Advent reflections. The first was focused on John the Baptist. This one is focused on Mary, the Christ-bearer. 

It has been my experience that when people start talking about “tradition” in church they are rarely referring to anything that goes back more than fifty years, let alone to that great river of tradition rooted in the holy catholic and apostolic faith. What we really mean when we speak of tradition is “the way we did things in my church when I was growing up.”  Far too often that is way more about nostalgia than tradition!

William Faulkner once wrote that the past "...is never really dead; it's not even past." 

So here's the challenge: if we turn the “tradition” into a yearning for the Eisenhower administration and the Church of our baby-boomer childhoods, then it can be a real challenge for us to hear the words of Holy Scripture through fresh ears. That is especially true as approach Christmas, because the ghosts of Christmas past loom large in our lives! If we think we already know what all of this means, then it is a challenge for the good news to break through.

If you were raised in the Roman Catholic "tradition" then you can perhaps close your eyes and see a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the front of the parish church where we grew up. If your family was really religious then maybe Mary was on the half-shell in your front lawn. On the other hand, if you grew up Protestant, then you may never have spoken a word about Mary; not ever! She was just way too Roman Catholic!  Of course these biases many of us have carried into adulthood take us back only about as deep into the tradition as those pre-Vatican II congregations that shaped and concretized many of our biases and prejudices. That past is not dead; it isn’t really even past.

For a while, Hathy and I were really into a television show called “Madmen,” set in the very early 1960s. Whether or not you’ve seen the show (or remember living through those days) perhaps you’ve had the experience of watching “Leave It To Beaver” and thought (as I sometimes have) “Really: those were the good old days?” For whom exactly? Ward Cleaver? Gender roles were pretty rigid, to say the least, and from this vantage point that can lead both women and men to a whole range of reactions. In the greater scheme of things, it really wasn’t that long ago. It turns out the “good old days” had some really bad shadow sides, especially if you happened to be female, or black, or gay. 

So what about Mary? In that American cultural context, Mary became the “ideal woman” – or at least the ideal woman in a male-dominated Church. In that context, Mary was perceived as very quiet and very passive and very obedient and very submissive. Let it be with me…whatever you say boss.  I don’t mean to trivialize this. I mean to challenge myself and anyone reading this: because at some level this part of the "tradition" isn't really past. 

Even so, there’s something about Mary. There is something in Mary’s willingness to say "yes" to God and something about her song, the Magnificat, that invites a closer look, something that challenges us to dive deeper into the tradition. 

It turns out that Mary isn’t a Roman Catholic girl (of course!) but a first-century Jew. Her parents and friends and husband would never have dreamed of calling her “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Just Miriam. This glimpse of her in Luke’s Gospel is of someone maybe fifteen years old—a sophomore at Nazareth High. Her Song—the Magnificat—is about what is possible for all human beings, female and male, young and old, with God’s help. Her soul magnifies the Lord. Think about what that means. I think it means something like, with God we can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. I think it means that when we do a little thing in the name of Christ, it ripples out to change the world, magnified by the grace of God! It turns out that there is a way older tradition that Miriam draws on for strength as she sings this new song to the Lord, which is really a riff on an old song first recorded by Hannah. (That song can be found in I Samuel 2:1-10, sung at the birth of her son, Samuel.)

Mary pre-figures Pentecost: the day when the Holy Spirit breaks down all walls that divide us into "us" and “them.” In truth there is only us, beloved children of God. Mary models for us what it might mean to let the Holy Spirit blow through our lives and make us new in spite of the dominant culture’s expectations. She knew, as Hannah knew, that God cares about justice and cares especially for the poor. She knew that the deck is stacked and that in this world kids attending inner-city schools or growing up in the third world do not have the same opportunities that as kids living in the suburbs. 

This is why I shared the icon (above) of Our Lady Mother of Ferguson. God loves us all, but God wants the playing field to be more even, and so somebody has to take the side of the underdog. That is what the liberation theologians mean when they speak of God’s preferential option for the poor and I think Mary is doing liberation theology in the Magnificat. Like the other great figure of Advent, she is about the work of making a more level highway through the wilderness. I wonder how the woman who sings this song would feel about a tax plan that rewards those who have more than enough and further penalizes those who are at the economic bottom? 

When she riffs on Hannah’s Song, she stands in a long line of Biblical prophets, female and male,  who know that God has no problem knocking the proud and arrogant and powerful down a few pegs, a God who rejoices in bringing up the lowly to fill the hungry with good things. This is not because God plays class warfare; it's because we do, every day. It's not because God hates the rich. It's because we keep building systems that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. And God really does love the poor, the ones who in the Bible are called God’s anawim—God’s little ones. In this dog-eat-dog world the anawim need God on their side because the rich do quite well taking care of themselves. 

Mary will teach her child, Jesus, to love the poor as God loves them; and as she loves them. She will teach him how to read the prophets, so that when his public ministry begins his first words will sound a lot like the song we heard his mother singing today.  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Mary is called by God through the very same pattern that we find throughout the Old Testament whenever God needs to have a job done: from Abraham to Moses to Samuel to Isaiah with his “unclean lips.” The angel says, “I’ve got a job for you.” Like those who have gone before her, she is initially fearful and confused. “How can all this be?” she asks. The angel insists that it can be because with God all things are possible. That’s when Mary sings: I am fully open to the will of God for my life. That is not "submissive" but empowering, for everyone who responds to God's call, female or male. Mary has a choice. I love the lines in Denise Levertov’s poem, The Annunciation, which go like this:  

…we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent. God waited.
She was free
to accept or refuse, choice

integral to humanness.

Mary is free to say, “get lost angel!” Instead, she chooses freely, to say: Here I am! Send me! In so doing, she is the first and model disciple. She is bold and courageous and strong in this moment, and not this one only. She will have to be bold and courageous and strong to raise a son like the one she raises. And she will have be bold and courageous and strong when her son walks the Via Delarosa some thirty years later, as her heart is pierced and her son dies on a tree. Mary has to bury her child, something no parent should ever have to do.

There is nothing passive or submissive about Mary. And while she may not have a starring role in the Bible—her role is crucial in the deeper, wider, tradition. Roman Catholics may well say too much about her, but Protestants have not yet said nearly enough. Mary says “yes” to God and the world is changed. She is Christ-bearer, which is precisely the ministry that you and I are called to: to make room in ourselves for Christ to be born; to take on our flesh.

The life of faith is not without its questions, struggles, uncertainties and fears. But with God, all things are possible. God comes to us, as to Mary, not because we are perfect, but because we are willing to open our lives to the radical transformation that the Spirit brings. As we prepare our hearts for Christmas we look to Mary as one who shows us what is possible, even now. May Christ be made manifest, and even magnified through us, for the sake of this world.