December 18, 2011

Today is the fourth Sunday of Advent and our attention turns to the story of the birth of Jesus. Our attention turns to Mary. As you know Christians have speculated for nearly two thousand years about Mary. Why Mary? In answer to that question, elaborate theologies and doctrine have developed to explain what set Mary apart, why God chose her as the woman who would give birth to Jesus Christ. The irony is that as important as the question why Mary has been for two thousand years of the Christian tradition, it’s not a question Luke, the gospel writer who tells us the most about her, is interested in.

For all their familiarity, the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke present us with a number of puzzles. The details we are given in each raise questions because of the very different stories that are told. While one could focus on any number of these differences, one of the interesting ones is the way each gospel writer works with biblical tradition. Matthew uses a series of biblical quotations introduced with the formula, “This was done to fulfill the prophecy….” Luke is much more subtle in his appropriation of Hebrew Scripture. Instead of direct quotation, his story is filled with language and imagery that reminds the reader of Hebrew Scripture. In a way, the whole of Luke’s nativity story is an adaptation, a retelling of the Hebrew Bible.

This is most apparent here, in the story of the angel coming to Mary. Hebrew Scripture is replete with stories of miraculous births, beginning with the birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah. That story begins with a divine appearance, in fact a series of divine appearances to the aged couple. The first time, God tells Abraham that he will have a son; the second time, God tells both of them that Sarah will have a son. Each time, the response from Abraham and Sarah are disbelief and laughter. When Sarah laughs, God asks Abraham, “Is anything too wonderful for the Lord?”

Another story of an elderly, barren mother who receives a miraculous child is that of Hannah, who gave birth to Samuel. The resonance of that story in Luke is even deeper than the story of Sarah, for Luke adapts part of Hannah’s song of praise and puts it in Mary’s mouth. It is canticle, the magnificat that we chanted today: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Even as Luke draws on Hannah’s song he transforms it. It is no longer the song of praise sung by an elderly woman who has heard her prayers answered. Now it is the song of a young woman, a girl really, who is responding not to the words of an angel promising her a child, but to another elderly woman, to Elizabeth.

Luke is weaving a rich tapestry for us that reshapes the narrative of the Hebrew Bible to tell us about the coming of Jesus Christ. In his use of that traditional imagery, he is making connections with what has gone before, but he is also transforming it into a new episode, the culmination of God’s salvation history. By careful attention to this detail, we learn not only about Mary and Jesus Christ, we also learn something about what it means to be someone who proclaims Jesus Christ as Lord.

The magnificat is one part of the picture of Mary painted by Luke; and it has shaped how Christians have thought of her over the centuries. But there is another part of Luke’s story. Mary is usually depicted in visual images of the annunciation, for that matter, in most of popular devotion as a young woman who passively accepts this fate that is thrust upon her. She is shown with her head bowed, sitting serenely as the angel Gabriel speaks to her. That depiction has become fixed in our religious and cultural consciousness, for better or for worse. Mary has often been shown to us as a model of the Christian life, passive, receptive, docile. While that model has worked powerfully over the centuries for all Christians, it has been even more important in the way our tradition has thought about women. Mary was, and is for many the ideal woman, passive, submissive, quiet.

That is only part of the story. It begins with a rather different response. When the Angel Gabriel first announces to Mary that she is to bear a son, she replies to him, “How can this be?” Not exactly resistance, but disbelief, uncertainty. Luke says she was perplexed.

One of the dominant strands of the traditional interpretation of Mary is to interpret Gabriel’s words to her, “Hail, favored one” or in the traditional rendering, “Hail Mary, full of grace” and Elizabeth’s response to her after the magnificat, “Blessed are you and blessed is the fruit of your womb” to suggest that in some sense she was deserving of the honor of bearing the Christ Child. That wasn’t Luke’s point. He wasn’t interested in the question “Why Mary?” Indeed the biblical tradition on which he builds was rarely interested in making a connection between God’s choice, of Abraham and Sarah, of Israel for that matter, as a deserved reward for faith.

Luke allows us to focus on Mary’s response in two ways. First, of course, in the familiar words of the Magnificat, Luke puts in Mary’s mouth a profound hymn praising God’s saving acts. We are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus Christ saving us from our sins, that we rarely consider the political ramifications of anyone in the New Testament referring to Jesus Christ as Savior. I’ve said before that Savior was one of the titles iven the Roman emperor; so to give it to Jesus is say something about empire.

When Mary sings of God her savior; when she sings that “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.” These phrases are not primarily describing spiritual states, but rather political and economic conditions. The empire introduced by Jesus Christ is a profound challenge to the Roman empire, a challenge that would end with Jesus crucified as “king of the Jews” a political revolutionary.

Political, revolutionary, a world turned upside down, that’s part of Mary’s response to her God. But there is another part of that response. I remind you again of Sarah’s response when Yahweh told her that she would bear a child. Sarah, and her husband Abraham before her, laughed. Mary, in contrast, was perplexed and wondered “How can this be?” Yahweh chided Sarah with the words, “Is anything to wonderful for the Lord?” In response to Mary’s query, Gabriel responded, “For nothing will be impossible with God.”

We don’t know, we can’t know how Mary responded to these words. We do know that Luke presents her as something like the first Christian. She is a model of faith, not in her docility and passivity, but in her acceptance, her choice to receive the words from Gabriel. Among all of the other Christian reflection about Mary, there is a strand that emphasizes that what set her apart from others was not her unique nature but that she chose to accept the responsibility given her by God, that it was her choice, her will, her desire that set her apart.

The collect today connects Mary with us. It reminds us that like Mary, we desire Christ’s coming into us. Advent has brought us to this point. After weeks of thinking about the Coming of Christ in majesty and to a crude stable in Bethlehem, we are also now, finally, contemplating Christ’s coming to each of us. That too ought to be part of our Advent preparation.

Mary has long been seen as an example for us. She said to the angel, “Let it be with me according to your word.” She is a model for us not in her humility, or passivity, but in her open-ness to God’s grace. The fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart said that Mary would not have given birth to Christ physically, if she had not first given birth to God spiritually in her soul. For Eckhart, the miracle of Christmas was also the miracle of faith—the coming of Christ to each of us in our hearts. As we make our final preparations for Christmas, our last-minute shopping and cooking, I pray that we all take time to prepare ourselves as well, so that we might truly mean the words of Philips Brooks familiar O little town of Bethlehem, “O holy child of Bethlehem … be born in us today.”