Three Marys by The Rev. Frank Kirkpatrick
Posted on
December 21, 2014
Fourth Sunday of Advent
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Romans 16: 25-27, Luke 1: 26-38
This is the season of the year when things get a bit nauseatingly romantic and overly sentimental. In their extreme form they get channeled through overbearing drive-you-mad seasonal music blaring from TV screens and mall shopping outlets. To be sure, most of the music that bombards us has little if anything to do with Christmas as the celebration of the birth of Jesus our Savior. Most of the music that drowns us is focused on the generic ‘season’ celebrating good cheer and fellowship in the midst of the dark and cold (reminding us that most of this music originated in and is oriented to the peoples of a northern European climate). Now I don’t agree with those who would claim that some anonymous but malicious “they” somewhere out there in the cultural environment are trying to take Christmas away from the increasingly smaller number of us who really do want to think of Christmas as having to do with Christ. In fact Christians might be grateful for the growing awareness that celebrating the birth of Christ is not the same as celebrating good fellowship and cheer, as important as these are, by going on buying sprees and succumbing to a frenzied desire to shop until we drop. Don’t worry: I’m not about to go into a rant (as tempting as that might be) on the perverseness of associating the birth of Jesus with spending wads of money (which some of us really can’t afford to do) for gifts which really don’t enhance the meaning of someone else’s life but presumably make us feel better by showing that we ‘care’. But what I do want to do is reflect briefly on how even some of our uniquely Christian moments have gotten caught up in the false romanticism of much of the seasonal celebrations that take place before Christmas. In particular I want to touch on the way in which our religious tradition has treated the young woman, Mary, who bore Jesus as her son. Mary has often become herself a romantic non-human fantasy figure whom the church over time seemed to want to strip out of her humanity by creating a non-historical, ethereal, non-human mythology about her. She has also, fortunately and rightly, been seen as a loving, nurturing mother. And, third, and often this is underplayed, she is part of a divine drama which is profoundly destabilizing and revolutionary for the privileged powerful who run the world on their own terms as if there is no God other than their own egos and greed.
Part of the story of Mary is that of a young woman or, as the text this morning says, a virgin, who is told by the angel that she will bear a son in accordance with the will of God. It should be noted that mention of her virginity is relatively insignificant to her role in the divine drama. Only two of the gospels even have a birth narrative and both rely on an ambiguous passage from the prophet Isaiah in which the word “virgin” can also be translated simply as a young or unmarried woman. The decision on the part of some of the gospel writers and later Christians to call her a virgin has more to do with their felt need to single out the birth of Jesus as being of special significance for the life of the world. One way (but not the only way available to them) to underline that significance was to insist that God overrode the normal means of conception by being, in effect, the direct father of the child Jesus without the sexual intermediation of Joseph.
And with that decision began a series of attempts to remove Mary from her humanity and to clothe her instead in the sentimental, romantic, and mythical garb of a woman uncontaminated by sex and biology, as if human sex is somehow less worthy of God’s good creation than supernatural sex. This is quite ironic given that Jesus became fully human in order to redeem humanity but somehow the full biological and sexual humanity of his mother was not good enough for him. By suggesting her virginity the Church made Mary in many ways an exception to all things earthly, beginning with the claim that she never lost her virginity and that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were not her biological children. The culmination of extracting Mary from the human condition is found in the last infallible doctrine of the Catholic Church which proclaimed the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven, by-passing the process of biological death that the rest of us, including Jesus, go through.
But fortunately in addition to this mythical, almost non-human Mary, there is the warm, nurturing, welcoming and grieving mother who gives herself unstintingly both to God and later to her child, Jesus. She remains bound to him even to the moment of his death upon a cross. This compassionate and nurturing Mary is one to whom we are all drawn, one who is fully human in her vulnerability and tender faithful love. And we surround her with art and music and legends that call us to invite her into our spiritual lives as she embraces us, too, with her motherly love. In fact, over time, Mary sometimes seems closer to us than Jesus, the resurrected one who became for many theologians, perhaps inadvertently, more a subject of doctrinal theological definition than a living person accessible to us in our broken humanity. In some parts of the Christian tradition Mary is more often prayed to than is Jesus. She intercedes for us with her son almost as if he was not intercessor enough. This second more human Mary is a good corrective to the increasingly remote and mythological Mary.
But I would like to suggest that there is still a third Mary somewhat hidden under the mythology and the blue robes and the motherly warmth we so often associate with her at this time of year. And this third Mary is the one who appears just a few verses after the ones we heard in this morning’s gospel. This is the Mary of the Magnificat [[which we’ve heard so magnificently sung this morning]]. This is the Mary who willingly gives herself up to God’s will and offers thanks to God for looking with favor on her, a lowly servant. This is the Mary who knows that wealth and power are not the foundation on or the entrance through which God builds his kingdom in the world. This is the Mary who reminds others that the God to whom she has given herself is the same God who has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. This is the God who does not hide behind the gauzy plush curtains of sloppy seasonal sentimentality or who blesses conspicuous consumption and fevered buying in order to show love, but a God who, instead, brings down the powerful from their thrones and lifts up the lowly, who fills the hungry with good things while he sends the rich away empty.
It must seem quite jarring and disturbing to have the glow and warmth of season’s greetings interrupted by mention of the cruelty often inflicted by unjust exercise of political and economic power. But there it is in the text, in the very center of one of the most romantic parts of scripture, the Magnificat. If there is ever a time in the year in which the power of the rich and of riches is seen most clearly it is in these days between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We are lured from every side to show our love for others by buying, buying, buying. We rush to the malls on Thanksgiving Day and stay online until Christmas buying, buying, buying. And how are we able to fulfill our economic duty to buy? By becoming as rich as possible. Meanwhile people are literally going hungry around the world and in our own nation. Recently the UN World Food program for refugees from Syria was in danger of closing down because donor nations, other than the US, were not fulfilling their promises to provide the money to keep it going. There was no concerted effort to pool the wealth of nations to feed the hungry and to lift up the lowly. We can’t do this only by putting money in Salvation Army kettles or giving money to Food Share, as important and vital as this giving is. The effort to feed the hungry of the world often half-way around the globe takes large amounts of our collective as well as individual financial wealth distributed efficiently through workable international programs and policies. And that financial wealth is there, especially among the 1% of our society whose increase in wealth far outstrips the meager gains and mostly losses of the lesser 99%. And so, perhaps we might hear underneath the racket of seasonal music and in the midst of the poverty of our imaginations the voice of the third Mary, the Mary who reminds us all that the frenzy of making and spending means nothing at all unless it first feeds the hungry, lifts the lowly, and brings justice to the oppressed even if doing so rattles and disturbs the thrones of the privileged and their and our incessant greed for more and more.