“When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born
of a woman”, says St
Paul to the Galatians. Today, August 15, is the feast of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, the woman of whom Christ was born. In the Roman Catholic Church it’s the feast of
her bodily Assumption into heaven, which some Catholics believe happened
without her actually suffering a physical death. The Church of England, like
the Eastern Orthodox Churches, has never held that belief, but nonetheless we celebrate
her life and ponder her influence on this day.
St Paul’s words are the earliest mention of Jesus’ mother in
the Bible – his letters were written a decade or so before the first of the
Gospels. But this is all Paul says about her, that Jesus was “born of a
woman”. He doesn’t name her or tell us anything about her. There are no
stories of angels, mangers, shepherds or wise men and certainly nothing about a
Virgin Birth. He doesn’t say anything about her other than that she existed,
that Jesus had a mother, just like everyone else. That’s Paul’s point. Jesus
was “born of a woman”. He wasn’t some unearthly superhero swooping in
with special powers to save the day. And the fact that he was born of a woman
proved it. He became part of our human family, so we could know that we were
part of the family of God, able to cry out ‘Abba, Father!’ with the same
confidence as he did.
The Gospel writers tell us a bit more about Mary, but only a
bit. Mark’s Gospel, the earliest of the four, only mentions Mary by name once,
when a sceptical crowd from Nazareth says dismissively “Is not this the
carpenter, the son of Mary?”, ramming home Jesus’ ordinariness and
suggesting some scandal around his birth, since he’s called the son of his
mother only, and not his father. Matthew’s Gospel tells some stories of Jesus’
birth, but it’s Joseph who’s the focus, not Mary – she doesn’t say a word
during the whole Gospel. It’s her vulnerability that Matthew wants us to
notice, and therefore the vulnerability of God’s plan, which seems to hang on a
very thin thread. When the Angel tells Joseph – not her - that she’s bearing
God’s child, will he believe the angel, or abandon her, or even have her stoned
for adultery?
John’s Gospel, written late in the first century, tells just
two stories in which Mary features – the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus turns
water into wine, and the story of her standing near the cross, with John, when
Jesus entrusts them to each other as a new family. But John never uses her
name. She’s only ever described as “the mother of Jesus”. To John, like St
Paul, she’s the proof that the Word has really been made flesh, “born of a woman”
as Paul put it.
It’s only Luke who really lets Mary speak, who gives us any
sense of her as a person with her own voice and ideas. He tells us of the Angel
Gabriel’s annunciation to her, of her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, soon to be
mother of John the Baptist, of Jesus’ birth and the visit of the shepherds, of Simeon
and Anna and their recognition of Jesus; events that leave her “pondering” what
it all means. Luke tells us about the time the twelve year old Jesus went
missing in Jerusalem, and of Mary giving him a piece of her mind when she and
Joseph find him – eventually – in the Temple. Luke, like Matthew and Mark,
later tells a story about how she comes with Jesus’ brothers to try to persuade
him to give up his mission and come home. Eventually she gets it though, and at
the beginning of the book of Acts, also written by Luke, we’re told she’s
present when the Holy Spirit comes on the disciples, at the birth of the
church. All that pondering has borne fruit. It’s still a rather slender
foundation for the significance she acquires later in Christian tradition,
though, but at least she has a voice, and a distinctive one at that.
The passage we heard in today’s Gospel reading, the words
traditionally called the Magnificat, are Mary’s song of praise when she hears
that she will bear God’s Son. She doesn’t celebrate the thought of having a dear
little baby to cuddle, or someone to carry on her name, or someone to care for
her in her old age, though. She isn’t rejoicing in what this child will do for
her, but what he’ll do for everyone, overturning the status quo, lifting up the
lowly, putting down the mighty, ushering in God’s kingdom. Her willingness to
say yes to God will change the world.
Whatever the Gospel writers did, or didn’t, say about her,
though, her importance soon started to grow. In AD 431, at a gathering of
Church leaders in Ephesus, Mary was given the title “Theotokos” –
literally the “God-bearer”. It was still really more about Jesus than about her.
If Jesus was truly human, as the Council of Ephesus wanted to insist, then he
had to have a truly human mother. Mary mattered in the same way all mothers matter.
Whether they are good or bad, present or absent, loved or resented, or a
complex mixture, without them none of us would be here. Without Mary, God would
not have been born into the world in the person of Jesus.
But from then on devotion to her grew and by the Middle Ages it
had reached fever pitch. Mary was everywhere. Devotions based around her, like
the Rosary, developed. Hymns were composed to her. Legends grew up around her,
like that of her bodily assumption into heaven. Visions abounded. It almost
seemed that she was more popular than Jesus himself – and perhaps she was for
some people.
She was seen as a powerful intercessor, more powerful than
other saints, but more accessible too. Maybe she was the mother everyone wished
they had, and surely, they thought, God would listen especially to her. You’ve
got to listen to your mother, after all…
All this horrified the Protestant Reformers. They saw practices
focussing on Mary as dangerous distractions from the direct relationship between
God and his people. In the violent struggles that swept the Church in the
sixteenth century, devotions to Mary were swept away, statues broken, rosary
beads outlawed. They tried hard to put Mary back into her rather small place in
the Bible but she had a place in people’s hearts that couldn’t be denied.
Perhaps it’s because she is such a shadowy figure in the Gospels
that she holds such fascination for us. We can project onto Mary whatever we
like. She can be the beautiful maiden, innocent and protected from the world, to
be adored from afar, even though we have no idea what she actually looked like
or what her early life was like. She might have been a plug ugly back-street
urchin abused or living rough for all we know. She can be that perfect mother,
the mother no actual mother ever manages to be, with endless patience and never
a cross word. She can be the revolutionary heroine, speaking up for the poor,
inspiring courage and hope. As I have said, there is really very little to go
on in the Gospels, so how we see her probably tells us more about ourselves
than about her.
But when you strip away all the projections, what we’re left
with for certain is back where we started - the woman of whom Jesus was born,
the “Theotokos”, the God-bearer. Whatever else we think of her, she tells us
that this is how God chooses to make himself known in the world, through an
ordinary human woman. She reminds us that this is how God continues to make
himself known, through human beings, women, men, children – people like us –
who’re also invited to be “God -bearers”. Mary reminds us that we’re all called
to join her in helping God’s Word become flesh, expressing
his love in ways that are real and tangible. That’s needed as much now as it
ever was, in a world where a young man can feel so unloved and hopeless that he
slaughters his own mother and random strangers before killing himself, in a
world where refugees find themselves homeless and despised at their moment of
greatest vulnerability, in a world which we are threatening to destroy through
relentless over-consumption. Mary’s “yes” to God’s call invites us to say “yes”
too, and become “Theotokoi”, God-bearers, with her.
Amen
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