Library
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Mary
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Luke 1:26-45 ~ Good News Bible
In the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee named Nazareth. 26 He had a message for a young woman promised in marriage to a man named Joseph, who was a descendant of King David. Her name was Mary.27 The angel came to her and said, "Peace be with you! The Lord is with you and has greatly blessed you!" 28 Mary was deeply troubled by the angel's message, and she wondered what his words meant. 29 The angel said to her, "Don't be afraid, Mary; God has been gracious to you.30 You will become pregnant and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus.31 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High God. The Lord God will make him a king, as his ancestor David was, 32 and he will be the king of the descendants of Jacob forever; his kingdom will never end!" 33 Mary said to the angel, "I am a virgin. How, then, can this be?" 34 The angel answered, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and God's power will rest upon you. For this reason the holy child will be called the Son of God.35 Remember your relative Elizabeth. It is said that she cannot have children, but she herself is now six months pregnant, even though she is very old. 36 For there is nothing that God cannot do." 37 "I am the Lord's servant," said Mary; "may it happen to me as you have said." And the angel left her.38 Soon afterward Mary got ready and hurried off to a town in the hill country of Judea. 39 She went into Zechariah's house and greeted Elizabeth.40 When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby moved within her. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 41 and said in a loud voice, "You are the most blessed of all women, and blessed is the child you will bear! 42 Why should this great thing happen to me, that my Lord's mother comes to visit me?43 For as soon as I heard your greeting, the baby within me jumped with gladness.44 How happy you are to believe that the Lord's message to you will come true!" 45
You might be as surprised as I was to see how little there is in the Bible about Mary the mother of Jesus.
The passage we heard from Luke is one of the longest passages, and in it we meet Mary when she was a girl of fourteen or so. We follow Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem where she gives birth in primitive conditions. We hear more about her when she and Joseph take the new born baby to the temple and they are met by the old man Simeon who predicts that the baby will be the reason for the rise and fall of many in Jerusalem and that sorrow will pierce Mary’s heart like a sword.
We read about her and Joseph traveling with twelve year old Jesus to Jerusalem for the Passover and he gets lost on them—Jesus still gets lost on us as well—until they find him in the temple asking insightful questions of the priests. She ponders all these things in her heart. I like that statement about her. She thinks and reflects and ponders.
Then we read about her next when Jesus the adult teacher and prophet is going about Galilee teaching, preaching and healing and Mary and her other sons and daughters are looking for Jesus to bring him back home because some people are saying Jesus is out of his mind (Mark 3). Some of you are already surprised because you have been taught that Jesus could not have had brothers and sisters because Mary had no other children, but the Bible says otherwise.
The Bible also seems to downplay the elevation and veneration of Mary which appears in several Christian traditions. In the eleventh chapter of Luke, Jesus is walking to Jerusalem and a woman in the crowd blesses his mother: blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you. Jesus, surprisingly, does not join in this veneration! What does he say? “Blessed instead are those who hear the word of God and obey it!”
It is the same kind of response he makes early in Mark’s gospel when he is in Capernaum and in a house teaching. Someone tells him his mother and brothers are outside. What does he do? What does he say? He makes a surprising response: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? Whoever does what God wants us to do is my brother and sister and mother.”
I am sure that Jesus had a good relationship with his parents because we cannot teach others about love and grace and compassion unless we have learned that, and the first place we have a chance to learn that is in our families. But the point is that the elevation or even, for some, the deification of Mary, is not much present in the Bible. It begins to show up at the end of the second century in Christian history and by the end of the fifth century, the church leaders had ascribed miraculous deeds to Mary and referred to her, amidst much controversy over this term, as the “mother of God”. It is not a phrase from the Bible but from later Christian tradition.
There are different perspectives on Mary in Christian tradition, but I believe the primary reason she has been respected and honored is that for millions of people, she represents the feminine face of God. If some people have seen God as the remote and angry judge, Mary has represented the approachable and comforting mother figure who can intercede and pray for us sinners. Mary has that role in some Christian traditions and not in others.
Let me offer another difference: in some traditions Mary never gave birth to any other children, again, even though the Bible tells in Mark 3 and Mark 6, that Jesus had brothers and sisters. I encourage you to look that up for yourself. The Greek word for “brother” is fairly plain, but when 20 of us were in Greece two years ago, our Greek Orthodox guide disputed those verses in the Bible about Jesus having siblings by saying that they were only Jesus’ cousins or that they were old man Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. I think that is a point of view that forgets these folks were human like us!
What I want us to see as we look at this morning’s verses on the Christmas story is the humanity of the people in the story.
I have encouraged folks to see the new Nativity film for several reasons. One reason is that it portrays Joseph and Mary as real, fallible people. It does not lose their humanity. One woman who saw the film after it came out and was quoted in an article thought that Mary was a little too headstrong, that Mary thought too much. A different way to say this is that she was too human. Well, she was.
If we lose her humanity and the humanity of Joseph, we will lose a huge portion of our faith. And if we lose the humanity of Jesus we will lose the chance to identify with Jesus who, the Bible says, was first of all a man. There is one portion of the nativity film I object to when Joseph and Mary are on the way to Bethlehem and they wonder with each other if they will be able to teach this child anything. It is a very unfortunate line—not Biblical—because it denies the humanity of Jesus, it denies what the Bible tells us in the gospel of Luke, that Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and others. Jesus was a real, teachable person who needed a mother and father as he grew up to nurture and teach him just as any child does.
These are flesh and blood people in these stories and that is why of the hundred paintings of the annunciation we saw three months ago in Italy, the one I like best is the one by Botticelli where Mary is sticking our her arm to the angel and telling him to hold on just a minute! The story we heard says, when the angel approached her, she was deeply troubled or even afraid and perplexed. We would be too.
Her life was being turned around and she was going to be at risk being pregnant while she was engaged. Joseph had the right to have her stoned to death. Matthew’s gospel says that because Joseph was an upright man unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, he planned to “dismiss her quietly”. But something happened to Joseph. He had a dream where the angel appeared in the dream and told him to go ahead and marry Mary so he did but had no relations with her until after the birth of their first child. They named the child Jesus which means, God will save us.
Jesus was a descendant of the greatest king in all of Jewish history. The Messiah was to be a descendant of King David, and Jesus was—through his father Joseph. Does anybody see the conundrum here? There are two claims about Jesus—that he was descended from the house of David through Joseph and that his mother was a virgin.
You can make of that conundrum what you choose. What helps me is to know that Jesus of Nazareth was not the only first century person who people claimed was born of a virgin. It was a way of attributing divinity to, mainly, the Roman rulers. And two of the Gospels as well as the book of Acts, say nothing about an unusual birth for Jesus. Neither does the writer who is the earliest writer in the Bible, the one closest to Jesus time, that is, the apostle Paul.
In fact, in the Bible, the proof that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, is the resurrection. “We know he is the Messiah because God has raised him from death.”
All of that so far is prologue for what we can learn from this story. There are several learnings:
Mary is a prime example of faith and trust in God. After her initial feelings of being deeply troubled and afraid, she makes the statement that even became the basis for one of the most popular songs ever. “Let it be with me just as you have said.” Mary is a role model for faith, and her faith is a faith that developed and grew just as even her understanding of her son and his mission developed and grew. Right after the resurrection, she is meeting with the twelve disciples in the Upper Room as they are all waiting to be empowered by the spirit of God.
Her faith caused her to ponder things in her heart—to think and to grow and to keep learning even about her own son.
Mary is a prime example of faith and Martin Luther saw that when he said, what impressed him about this whole Christmas story is not the virgin birth but the Virgin’s faith!
Secondly, Mary like some of us, is confronted with a radically different plan for her life and she sees that as a call from God and is willing to go with the interruption and hear God’s call to her in that change of her plans. God will be and has been offering us a vocation, a call (vocare) also, and it is more likely to come in the form of some nudges and some hunches than in the dramatic appearance of an angel—but God still does offer us new paths of service that may be very different from what we had planned but offer us the chance to really fulfill our lives and our dreams. I have talked this week with two people who are sending a nudge to change careers, change directions in life, and they sense these nudges as something from God.
Third, this story tells us that God is often active and alive in the people we least expect. Mary and Joseph are working class folks. We know this because when they bring Jesus to the temple for his dedication a few weeks after his birth, they bring the offering of poor people. God is at work, the story says, in people we think are the least and the last, and we usually miss seeing God at work in our world because we do not look low enough. God has a heart for the vulnerable and the lowly and God expects us to do that as well and when we do, we will see God and we will see some miraculous happenings even today.
That point is made not only in the story of Mary but in a new movie that just arrived in theaters yesterday based on the true story of a man in San Francisco who knows what it is to be poor and outcast and needy and because of the ministry of a United Methodist Church in San Francisco, Glide United Methodist Church, and because of his faith and his own hard work, was able to break the cycle of poverty for himself and his young son and is now a very successful stock broker in his own brokerage firm.
The film, The Pursuit of Happyness, is the true story of Chris Gardner, played in the film by Will Smith, who was homeless and desperate for a while, but whose life was turned around partly because of the ministry of Glide Church and Cecil Williams. Glide has an incredible ministry with homeless persons in the tenderloin district of San Francisco and Chris and his infant son were helped by that ministry. The film features the Glide congregation and Rev Williams and credits Glide with being part of the turnaround.
Cecil Williams hopes that the film will give the rest of us more empathy for the poor. He says, “that learning Chris Gardner’s story helps us get a sense of some of the horrifying experiences a poor person can encounter.”
The first Christmas is about a poor couple who was without a home for a while and even had to flee for their lives as refugees to a foreign land until Herod was dead and they could return to Nazareth without fearing they and their baby would be killed. When we remember that, we may have more empathy for the vulnerable and the needy in our time.
Finally, this story is about one of the most basic realities in our world. It is a story about a mother and a baby, a mother whose love is so basic to life. The love of a mother is unconditional, it is fiercely protectively, it is tender, it is, at its best, always present. The story of Mary says to us: Do you want to see God? Do you want to see what God is like? Do you want to know what is at the heart of the universe? Look here. Look at a mother holding a child, rocking the child, singing a lullaby. This is what God is like.
This is how we can start to talk about God with us in our world. This is what love is like. It is this: a mother holding a baby.