Mary Christmas ~ Luke 1:46-48 (Where did your Christ come from? Advent series)

 

The story of Christmas is a powerful story. Believers and non-believers alike are fascinated by its claims. We sing its songs about baby Jesus, bewildered shepherds, fluffy mangers, and terrifying angels but many of us forget that one of the most striking features of the story is the woman at its center. The woman who said to the angel Gabriel, “May it be so” when told of God’s plan that she would bear the long awaited messiah, God’s own son. A bit later, after the encounter, Mary will sing:

"My soul glorifies the Lord and rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed . . ." 

Well, I hope Mary isn't too disappointed. Because, truth be told, I've been in many churches that neither called her "blessed" nor gave her any mind. No - we said - we focus on Jesus and then somehow ignored the woman who raised him, who fed him, and who taught him to follow God with courage and strength. Well, it's time to right the wrong and call her "blessed." In fact, when we place Mary back into her first-century world and take seriously what was being asked of her we would probably respond as Martin Luther suggests:
 
"How many came in contact with her, talked, and ate and drank with her, who perhaps despised her and counted her but a common, poor, and simple village maiden, and who, had they known, would have fled from her in terror?"

Last week we looked carefully and unflinchingly at the four women mentioned in Jesus’ own genealogy marveling at their courage and character and influence on Mary and Jesus. Today we are going to look at the woman at the very center – Mary – and the extraordinary agreement between the God of the universe and a young woman who had the guts to say “yes.” I wonder if Gabriel thought, “Really? You’re willing to say “yes?” Do you know what could happen? And here is where we must go back in time to Mary’s world. It’s important to recontextualize the world in which Mary said “yes” to God. We need to unfairytale the story and breathe historical life into it. What was life like for women who became pregnant in first-century Judea? Last week we talked about the women who preceded Mary and their own hutzpah. This week we look at the woman herself in her own context and discover a woman who changed the world. In Mary’s world, what does she look like?

Mary is contextualized courage.

In Mary’s world, Daughters were often considered shameful things. Don’t believe me? Just ask Jesus! Okay, not that Jesus, Jesus of Nazareth, but Jesus ben Sirach, who wrote a book of proverbs popular in first century Judaism and part of what is called the Apocrypha, existing in some Christian versions of the Bible. In a section on daughters, Jesus ben Sirach writes:

A daughter is a hidden source of sleeplessness for her father, and anxiety about her deprives him of sleep: in her youth, that she doesn't pass her prime, and when she's married, that she not be hated; 10 while she's a virgin, that she not be seduced and become pregnant while still living at home; when she's married, that she not go straying; or having married, that she not be infertile. 11 Keep a strict watch over an unruly daughter so that she doesn't make you an object of ridicule to your enemies, a topic of talk in the city and the assembly of the people, and she shame you before the crowd. 12 Don't consider the beauty of any person, and don't spend time among women. 13 Moths come out of clothes, and a woman's wickedness comes from a woman. 14 A man's wickedness is better than a woman who does good and a disgraced woman who brings shame. (Sirach 42:9-14)

The message is clear – watch out – your daughters are dangerous to your reputation, and a potential source of great shame. Daughters, Jesus ben Sirach says, are never considered as good as men, even wicked ones, and have wickedness come out of them like moths come out of clothes. In fact, in 22:3, Jesus Ben Sirach says, “It is a disgrace to be the father of an undisciplined son, and the birth of a daughter is a loss.” It is important to recognize that Mary could have said “no” and kept her reputation, even appeared to have been following God’s will but that would not have been the case. She would have looked good to Torah, looked right to her community, emerged as a good wife but would have missed out on an incredible blessing. Mary said “yes” despite being told she was less-than and despite becoming a potential object of shame. But it went farther than that.

She could be charged with adultery and sentenced to death. – Mary’s world was regulated by the Torah, the law given to Moses, which stated that anyone committing adultery was to be stoned. Deut. 22:23-24: “If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, ²⁴you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.”

Even further, if Mary was charged with adultery and disputed it with the truth about the angel and the promise, she could have been forced to experience the law of “bitter waters,” an elaborate trial-by-ordeal which came from the fifth chapter of Numbers. Accordingly, a suspected adultress was brought before the priest, required to let her hair hang down and under oath asked to drink a mixture of dust, holy water, and the ink of the priest’s written curse, which stated in part: “may the Lord cause you to become a curse among your people when he makes your womb to miscarry and your abdomen swell.” If the woman was guilty, she would supposedly become sick. If she didn’t become sick, she was acquitted. By the time of Mary, this ordeal became a public display of justice often at a gate to the city where women would be forced to drink the mixture and her clothes torn. Mary said “yes” despite the threat of that.

Mary is a contextualized beatitude (and the first!). It’s easy to imagine Mary as a faithful vessel for God’s divine plan but Scripture says something different. She was a contextualized beatitude – a faithful follower of God.

When we think of the beatitudes, we often think of the sermon on the mount in the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus’ manifesto recategorizing who was actually blessed, a reorientation of the world. So its interesting that the first beatitude in Luke’s Gospel comes not from Jesus but from Elizabeth blessing Mary’s faith (Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” 1:45). Blessed is one who believes in God’s promise despite all the obstacles.

 Later in Luke’s Gospel, however, someone tries to reassert a beatitude for women not in the way Elizabeth gave it but as merely a vessel. In Luke 11:27 a woman shouts to Jesus, “Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that nursed you!” This sounds nice, but it seeks to fit women back into the old paradigm of saying that only as a “wife and mother” are women blessed, as if all Mary gave was her body. It’s a reassertion of Jesus ben Sirach, that women are blessed only by their connections to male husbands and their biological roles as mothers. But Jesus knowing the story and knowing his mother corrects the person in a shocking way, given the thoughts about women at the time. In response, he says, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it!” How did Jesus come to this conclusion? Is it not because he heard stories about Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheeba, and his mother – their power, their courage, their faith. Could it be because he knew that a womb wasn’t what made Mary special but her faithfulness and obedience to God? This beatitude is the seed that flowers into the belief that women can be full participants in God’s story, in the sharing of the gospel, and the declaration found in the Christmas song that the world will be made right “far as the curse is found.” The rupture of sin in human relationships between men and woman is now being overturned and women are equal partners in all things. Like men, they can hear the Word of God and do it!

That’s Mary – she wasn’t blessed because she had female parts or even because she was some supposed vessel for the divine. No, God’s plan was birthed because this young, powerless woman – courageously, thoughtfully, prayerfully heard the Word of God and said “yes.” This was the point of Elizabeth’s beatitude that Mary is blessed because she believed. She was a blessings because she had faith. And faith is gender neutral, unisex!

Mary’s courage and diehard faithfulness offer a different picture from the syrupy Hallmark, Disneyfied image we’ve been given. Perhaps that’s why the Apostle John who knew her best, the one whom Jesus asked to take care of her, described her and the story of the Nativity in this apocalyptic way (remember "apocalyptic" literally means "unveiling" and aims to describe things as they truly are in poetic and imaginative language):

A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. ² She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. ³ Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. ⁴ Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. ⁵ She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. ⁶ The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God . . . (Revelation 12:1-6a)

This teenage girl said, “No!” to shame and worthlessness, “No!” to fears of death or male injustice, “No!” to evil and no to anyone who might suggest that, “A man’s wickedness is better than a woman who does good.” This woman said “yes” and shown forth like the sun with stars in her hair. This woman said “yes” and faced off against a dragon. This woman said “yes” and fulfilled the first prophecy spoken about the messiah at the very beginning in Genesis 3 when God told the serpent: And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head . . .” This woman said “yes” and the world, Mary’s and our own, was forever changed and she will be forever “blessed.”

These women: the Radical, Kingdom Genealogy of Jesus ~ Matthew 1:3a, 5-6 (Where did your Christ come from? Advent series)

 

Matthew begins his Gospel with “An account of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham” (Matt. 1:1). His aim is to support the claim that Jesus is a descendant of King David. Ancient Jews regarded the ancestral line as passing through men, not women, so it’s interesting that Matthew intentionally names four women from the Hebrew Bible that many church-goers know little about.

Forty generations are recorded from Abraham to Joseph, but Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “Uriah’s wife” (Bathsheba) are the only Old Testament women mentioned. Why these women? Why not Sarah, Rebekah, who are often highlighted in Jewish writings and who were also Jesus’ ancestors? Do these four women have anything in common? How do they connect with Mary, Jesus’ mother? Where did Jesus come from?

1. These women were all outsiders.

Perhaps the most prominent feature connecting these women was that none of them were Jewish.

~ Tamar’s unusual story is told in Genesis chapter 38. She was not related by blood to Jacob’s family. She was a local Canaanite.

~ Rahab was a Canaanite living in the city of Jericho. Her story is told in Joshua 2 and 6:17-25.

~ Ruth was from Moab and Moabites were expressly prohibited from joining the Israelite community (Deut. 23:3).  So her acceptance by the Israelites in Bethlehem and her inclusion in Jesus’ genealogy was especially noteworthy.

~ Bathsheba was the daughter of Eliam, a Gilonite (2 Sam. 23:34; cf. 1 Chron. 3:5). Giloh was a town in the Judean hills. This doesn’t exactly tell us about her ethnicity, but perhaps information about her husband does. Before she was assaulted by King David, she had been married to Uriah who was a Hittite.

Now, Mary was Jewish. But many significant and faithful women that preceded her were not. Whatever we might make of chosenness, always remember that that is determined by the gracious God who chooses and includes. Is it any wonder that Jesus had a habit of including those that made others bristle? Is it any wonder that he would highlight the faithfulness of a Roman soldier or a Canaanite woman? Or tell a story where the hero is a non-Jew? No – Jesus learned from his parents – that outsiders, even ones that some Scriptures condemn, are faithful family. Belonging and inclusion were family traditions.

2. These women were all daring and courageous.

Another feature of these four women is that they all took courageous risks in a patriarchal and dangerous world. They didn’t sit idly by waiting to be rescued.

~ Tamar went to extraordinary lengths to disguise herself as a prostitute, putting herself in danger of death, to have a child with her father-in-law Judah. The story is complicated, totally Rated-R, and I don’t have time to give it justice. In effect, she was calling in a legitimate debt that Judah owed her and her legal right under Levirate law. Having a son was Tamar’s best chance for a secure future and she risked everything for it.

~ Rahab was a prostitute who committed treason against her own people in Jericho when she helped their enemy Israel. At great peril to herself, she hid two Jewish scouts from the King of Jericho, helped them escape, and cut a deal with them in order to save herself and her entire family. She was a principle architect of Israelite military success in the Promised Land and became a member of the community of God’s people.

~ Ruth voluntarily left her homeland of Moab to help her mother-in-law Naomi―and they settled in Bethlehem, among a people whose own religious text denied her inclusion. Then, in another daring move, she effectively proposed marriage to Boaz in a clandestine meeting. Her aim was to save herself and Naomi from destitution. Israelites were forbidden from marrying Moabites, but Boaz recognized Ruth’s virtue and married her anyway (cf. Ezra 9:10-12).

~ Bathsheba was essentially sexually assaulted by King David (1 Chron. 3:1-5). When David was old and nearing death, she was encouraged by the prophet Nathan to make the bold move to ask for her son to become king. She did this knowing that palace politics could be dangerous, even deadly. She secured the throne for her son Solomon instead of David’s oldest son, Adonijah.

All of these women were outsiders, politically and ethnically. They had little personal power and made seemingly deadly choices in order to secure a better future for others as well as themselves. When Jesus stood silent and powerless before Pilate – did he think of these women? When Jesus included women as a critical part of his discipleship cohort did he do so intentionally, remembering his own ancestral line of female faithfulness (BTW Do you remember that it was only women who pretty much watched him on the cross?)

Did these women’s stories steel Mary’s own courage? Did she agree to Gabriel’s risky plan which placed her in real jeopardy because Joseph had recounted a matrilineal line of which she was becoming a part? Her willingness to take the risk made it possible for all humans to be rescued: to have a better, more abundant, life in her son Jesus, as well as a wonderful hope and future. Her life-altering “yes” in the face of danger was a family tradition.

3. These were righteous women in a broken world.

Some say these four women in Matthew’s genealogy were immoral in some way, or that they each suffered disgrace because of the role of sex, which says more about us than them. Because “immoral” is not how the Bible describes them. In fact, you will not find one negative thing said about any of these women.

~ Tamar was forced to deceive and through trickery have a child because Judah was wrongfully harming her. When Judah discovered the truth of Tamar’s actions which led to her pregnancy, he declared her more righteous than himself (Genesis 38:26). She is spoken of positively in a blessing to Ruth ( Ruth 4:12).

~ Rahab, despite continuing to be identified as a prostitute, is commended in both Old and New Testaments. The Bible only says good things about her. A quick aside – prostitution was hardly an element of choice for women in the Bronze age but one foisted upon them by men. Her plight, in other words, was a male choice not a female one. James writes that Rahab is an example of someone who practiced faith and deeds (Jas. 2:24-25), and she is included in the list of faith heroes in Hebrews 11:31.

~ Ruth will take the upper hand by meeting with Boaz in a clandestine way, at night, alone, and offering all of herself to him. And he has this to say about her: “All the people of my town know that you are a woman of noble character.” (Ruth 3:11, 13-14).

~ Bathsheeba may be the one caveat in all of this for her connection is clearly because of sexual wrongdoing but not her own but by David. In 2 Samuel chapters 11 and 12, David is held fully responsible for the actions surrounding Bathsheba’s wretched entrance into palace life (cf. 1 Kings 15:5). And friends, that wretchedness is sexual assault. Interestingly, she is nameless in the Greek text of Matthew 1 and is identified only as “Uriah’s wife.” Some interpreters have argued that this was to distance Bathsheba from David’s crimes. Well, our culture is different – say her name.

These four women and Mary were righteous even if they don’t appear that way to the casual or narrow-minded observer. All four, as well as Mary, could have been accused of sexual immorality. Judah initially ordered Tamar to be burnt to death because he first thought she had acted immorally (Gen. 38:24). Mary could have been stoned to death for being pregnant by someone other than Joseph. Some of these women, especially Bathsheba, continue to be maligned yet each of them were shrewd responders to a patriarchal culture which sought to deny their dignity and harm them.

The women in Matthew’s genealogy all have difficult stories about how they came to be mothers of children (Tamar, Mary) and wise women in the community of Israel (Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba). The stories all have the potential to scandalize, but each woman was considered righteous.

The title for our Advent series comes from the famous 19^th century Women’s Rights advocate and evangelical Christian Sojourner Truth. In a famous speech titled, “Ain’t I a Woman” in 1851, she said: “Then that little man in black there, he says ‘Women can't have as much rights as men, 'cause Christ wasn't a woman!' Where did your Christ come from?,” she asked. “Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”

And today we we’ve seen in a broader sense how Jesus’ own origins and the foundations for his ministry echo way back to brave and courageous women who followed God amidst incredibly trying circumstances. Where did Jesus come from? From women who refused to be marginalized. And men we’re going to need to confess all of the ways that we have been that “little man in black.” So in order to best live into the Kingdom genealogy of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, I invite the women to stand for a blessing and the men to join me in this blessing and confession:

Receive this blessing: Women of faith – of Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheeba and Mary. Go forth into the world as gospel agents of redemption, blessing and good news. Bring in the outsiders. Be courageous, and forgive us for the ways that we have through effort and neglect hampered your faith, harmed your pursuits, and sinned against you. We will seek to repair the damage and be faithful and equal partners you with for the sake of Jesus, his mother, and God’s Kingdom. Amen.