Let It Be With Me
Luke 1:39-56
December 23, 2018
Who was Mary, really?
I suppose that is an interesting enough question, but, honestly,
there’s no way of knowing. Along with many of you, I’ve been reading Carol
Howard Merritt’s Advent devotional I Am Mary this season, and I love the
recognizably human Mary who emerges in Carol’s beautiful retelling of Luke’s
brief account of the annunciation and Mary’s pregnancy.
But even in the most careful telling of Mary’s story I can’t help
also hearing echoes of the oft-noted tendency to create God in our own image.
As Anne Lamott put it, “you can safely assume that you’ve created God in your
own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
There’s a similar pattern with Mary. We create her in particular
images to use her for our own purposes, and when an image of Mary can easily be
used to oppress the people we want to oppress then we can safely assume that
we’re creating Mary in our own image.
To be fair, this tendency goes way, way back. Indeed, it likely
goes all the way back to Luke’s gospel. The gospel writers likely had no more
direct access to Mary than we do. That is to say, they didn’t know much about
her actual life either.
After all, there was no Facebook for Mary to share her news and her
experience.
“Hi friends. Big news on the Mary front! Not to be all
vague-booking, but my soul magnifies the Lord! J”
Nor were there any reporters to stick microphones in her face.
“Brett Blowdry here for Action News, reporting live from Nazareth where sources
tells us that last night the angel Gabriel visited a local woman named Mary.
When asked about the visit, Mary said, ‘My soul magnifies the Lord.’ Back to
you now, Chet.”
No, Luke had only the fact of Jesus’ life to begin with, and
stories about his family, his life, and the movement that grew around him to
develop into this new literary form that came to be called gospel.
So when Luke begins he draws on literary traditions and sources
available to him. Ascribing a miraculous birth to a great man was a
longstanding literary tradition in the ancient world, and, like so much of
Luke’s narrative, the birth story served a pointed political purpose, as well.
Augustus was said to have been fathered by a god. Augustus was also called
“savior of the world.” That is the same Emperor Augustus who, “in those days
sent out a decree that all the world should be registered.”
Miraculous birth stories also appear in some texts of Judaism that
may have informed Luke’s gospel, which was almost certainly the case with the
passage in Isaiah that says, “Therefore the Lord will give you a sign. Look,
the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him
Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). As scholars have noted for hundreds of years, Matthew
famously quotes that passage from the Septuagint, the early Greek translation
of the Hebrew scriptures, which contains a mistranslation and renders the
passage, “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
There’s a whole train of Hebrew to Greek and then, eventually, to
English in that mess of meaning, but the bottom line is this: the pregnancy
narrative is not concerned with Mary’s sex life, but, rather, with her faith
life.
Ah, but of course, this is also one of those points at which it is
so easy to see how we create Mary in our image to use for our purposes. Much of
the church, for much of its history, has venerated the Virgin Mary – capital V,
capital M – and placed a rather disturbing emphasis on her sexual purity. The
venerated virgin then becomes the model for purity, and, it cannot be too
strongly stated, another way of controlling women’s bodies, women’s sexuality,
women’s lives.
I don’t think that was part of Luke’s agenda, however, and I base
my interpretation on Luke’s intention at least in part on his choice of
literary source for the key part of this morning’s reading: the song of Mary.
The Magnificat, or Mary’s Song, draws explicitly on the song of Hannah from the
book of Samuel. Indeed, Hannah’s song, which begins, “My heart exults in the
Lord; my strength is exalted in my God,” frames the whole of First and Second
Samuel much like Mary’s Song, which beings, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my
spirit rejoices in God my Savior,” frames the whole of Luke.
Hannah’s song, as Walter Brueggemann suggests, celebrates the
“power and willingness of Yahweh to intrude, intervene and invert.”[1]
Mary sings the same song. “God has brought down the powerful from their
thrones, and lifted up the lowly.”
The whole of Luke’s gospel tells the story of the one who has been
anointed to bring good news to the poor, recovery of sight to the blind, and
release to the captives. Through Jesus, God is intruding, intervening, and
inverting. All of that begins with Mary who is clearly one of the badass women
of scripture.
Of course, that also makes it just as easy for liberal interpreters
to create Mary in their image for their purposes, and thus we see Mary employed
to make the case for valuing young women on the margins, or as a stand-in for
refugees and the poor.
But if we are to take Mary on her own terms, as given in the text,
and take her seriously, we’ll have to accept that while Luke is not interested
in her sex life neither is he interested in her political life, at least in any
narrow or partisan understanding.
No, what matters in Mary is her faith. What matters is captured so
clearly and simply when the angel appears to her in the beginning. Gabriel
says, “fear not,” and Mary is confused but unafraid.
Contrast that with Zechariah. The same angel appears to him to tell
him of a miraculous birth to come, and Zechariah, Luke tells us, “was
terrified; and fear overwhelmed him.” In his fear he apparently does not
believe the angel’s pronouncement and he is struck mute, unable to speak until
his wife, Elizabeth, will give birth to John.”
When the angel tells Mary what is to come, she responds, “Here am
I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”
She is not mute. Instead, she sings!
In her faith she finds great strength, and she uses that strength
to speak out clearly, calling God to set things right in a world gone wrong.
I’m pretty sure that God is not calling me into anything as fraught
as the journey Mary was called to take. Will I have the faithfulness to say,
“let it be with me, according to your purpose”?
Let us pray: Holy One, give us the faithfulness of your servant,
Mary, that we might not try to mold you in our own images, but, instead, be
trusting enough to be formed in the image of fearless divine love. Open in us
again this Advent, space in our hearts for such love to dwell, that we might
have the courage and faith to bear that love into the world. Amen.”
posted by David Ensign at
5:42 AM
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