According to Your Purpose
December 24, 2017
Luke 1:26-28
As Mary and Joseph made their
way to Bethlehem did their donkey have a bumper sticker reading #MeToo slapped
on its hind quarters? Was Mary just another in a seemingly endless line of
women sexually victimized by a more powerful male? Was the beginning of the
Incarnation story just another chapter in the endless history of patriarchy?
Or, perhaps, is something else
going on here at the beginning of the Jesus story? Is the beginning of Jesus
the beginning of something entirely new?
Let’s stipulate several things
up front:
First, it’s Christmas Eve
morning and most of us don’t want to spend overly much time in Biblical
exegesis just now!
Second, there’s 2,000 years of
such interpretive work out there already so, seriously, we could be here all
day … and, honestly, til next Christmas and read about nothing else, and still
not exhaust the supply theologies of Mary, or Mariology, as it’s known in
academic circles.
Third, most of that Mariology
has been shaped by the deep-seated patriarchy – if not outright misogyny – of
the Roman Catholic Church. That orthodox Catholic Mariology gives rise to traditional
understandings of Mary as eternally virgin, and the church as the sinless bride
of Christ. To be fair, there’s a lot more than that going on even in
traditional readings, but, as we’ve noted, it’s Christmas Eve morning and we’re
just not going to drag ourselves through all of that.
That history is there and it has
certainly had profound influence on Christian thought and expression straight
on through to our time. But, honestly, it doesn’t have a great deal to offer us
just now. We know that the church is far from the sinless bride of Christ, and
we also know a whole lot a basic biology that neither Luke nor centuries of
theologians understood.
So, let’s stipulate a couple of
things that orthodoxy would not necessarily easily agree to:
The story of the annunciation
and that of the incarnation are not concerned with Mary’s sex life; they are
about Mary’s faith life and about God’s purposes in the world.
I’m not interested in Mary’s sex
life, to be frank. I cannot learn anything about it that will, in any way,
change the way I try to live in the world. The witness of her faith, on the
other hand, challenges me and compels me to try to live my own faith more
deeply.
As Rosemary Radford Ruether put
it in her seminal work, Sexism and God-Talk, “Luke goes out of his way
to stress that Mary’s motherhood is a free choice. When the angel arrives, Mary
does not consult Joseph, but makes her own decision. Luke sees this free choice
as an expression of her faith. This is the key to the new redemptive community
of Jesus, as distinct from the old kind of family relationships.”[1]
The power of the gospel begins
right there in the reordering of domestic life. Jesus makes this break clear in
various places throughout the gospels. As Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza notes in
her classic, In Memory of Her, “Jesus brings to the patriarchal
household not peace but rather the ‘sword,’ the symbol for bitter enmity
between members of the same household.”[2]
Fiorenza goes on to insist, “Without question the discipleship of Jesus does
not respect patriarchal family bonds, and the Jesus movement in Palestine
severely intrudes into the peace of the patriarchal household.”[3]
The impulse to reorder every
other sphere of life ripples out from this foundational reordering of the
domestic sphere.
As Ruether goes on to say, “According
to Luke, God enters history in the person of Christ to effect a liberating
revolution in human relationships.”[4]
In particular, for the Jesus
movement in first-century Palestine, this revolution turned the world around
for women. As Fiorenza puts it, “Faithful discipleship, not biological
motherhood, is the eschatological calling of women.”[5]
Perhaps it goes without saying
that faithful discipleship is also the eschatological calling of men, but let’s
say it anyway. Because saying it anyway – insisting that faithful discipleship
is the singular purpose of human life – puts the focus in the story of the
Annunciation where it should be: not on Mary’s sex life, but on her faithful
response to the movement of the Holy Spirit in her whole life. It puts the
focus, in fact, on a single phrase that points out toward the whole of life: “let
it be with me according to your word.”
Mary speaks this line to the
angel Gabriel, the messenger who has told her that God is calling her to bear
God into the world. Basically, she responds, “OK, let what you’ve said be so.”
But beneath this response to the
messenger lies this further response to God, “let it be with me God according
to your purpose.” That is to say, in saying “yes” to the messenger and the
message, she is also saying “yes” to God’s intentions that rest behind it.
She is saying “yes” to the hard
work of working out God’s purposes for her life, and saying “yes” to following
them throughout her life. She is saying “yes” to the hard work of working out
God’s purposes for the whole world, and saying “yes” to participating in those
purposes as she is able.
Our reading this morning ends
there – with Mary’s “yes” – but we also know what Mary does next. She does what
women have done countless times before her and since: she talks with another
woman. She seeks comfort, consolation, solidarity in the company of another
woman. Mary goes to see her relative, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth is well into her own
pregnancy with the child who will grow up, according to Luke, to become John
the Baptist. Elizabeth proclaims Mary’s blessedness, and that of Mary’s unborn
child. And Mary responds lyrically:
“My soul magnifies the Lord, and
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”
Up to this point in Luke’s
gospel it’s all cards and carols. Hallmark could have written pretty much all
of the story – right up until it becomes a musical. For when Mary starts to
sing she reveals her own deep understanding of the purposes of God in this
mysterious pregnancy. Mary reveals her grasp of the dynamics at play. If her
pregnancy signals a reordering of patriarchal domestic life, it will
necessarily ripple out to the broader social sphere. The world is about to
turn.
Echoing the song of her
foresister, Hannah, Mary proclaims that through the life of the child she is
bearing into the world God will bring the powerful down from their thrones and
lift up the lowly; God will fill the hungry with good things to eat, and send
the rich away empty. God is turning the world around, and that turning, begun
with Mary’s faithfulness, has a momentum that belongs to God.
Hallmark gave up its rights to
the story right about there, for, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “For the
mighty ones, for the great ones of this world, there are only two places where
their courage deserts them, which they fear in the depths of their souls, which
they dodge and avoid: the manger and the cross of Jesus Christ.”
That is precisely where we are
invited again this Advent season: to follow the courage and faithfulness of a
young woman who said simply, “let it be with me, God, according to your
purpose.” Do we dare to come to the manger? Do we dare to approach? Do we dare
to say, “let it be with us, Holy One, according to your purpose”? Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
6:06 PM
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