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.”
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