Mansplaining Mary

Propers: The Fourth Sunday of Advent, AD 2024 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Luke’s Gospel is wild, especially in its opening chapters. When he sets out to tell us the tale of Jesus’ birth, with all the stories and supporting roles surrounding Christ’s Nativity, the Evangelist has his characters continually break into song. It’s Luke: The Musical. And this has been a treasure trove for the Church’s daily prayer. The Benedictus, or Song of Zechariah, we sing at every morning Matins. The Nunc Dimittis, or Song of Simeon, closes Compline before bed. And we chant the Magnificat, the Song of Mary, at every single Vespers service all across the world. Every night, Christians sing the Song of Mary.

This is remarkable for a number of reasons. Ancient literature rarely bothers naming women; and when it does, it is but in relation to some man: the mother of Alexander, the wife of Caesar. But Luke doesn’t write that way. He wants us to know the stories of the women; he wants us to know their names. And so we have today, in our Gospel, in the Magnificat, Elizabeth and Mary presented to us as active, faithful participants in God’s salvific work.

The women understand what’s going on. The men remain relatively clueless. Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah doubts the word of the Lord when spoken to him by a literal angel, and thus gets struck dumb for the whole of his wife’s pregnancy. I often wonder if that was more his lesson or her reward. Joseph too, a faithful Jew, nonetheless has no lines in Luke. All of the words are Mary’s. Mary bursts into song, singing of God’s ancient faithfulness, of how, through her, God will topple the high and raise up the low.

The Mary we meet in Luke does not simply acquiesce to the birth of Jesus. She is fully onboard, fully affirming, leaping in with both feet, regardless of the risk. The angel tells her that she, young and as yet only espoused, is about to become the mother of the Messiah; and the first thing that she does is start talking smack about the rich. That’s a feisty, faithful woman. That’s a daughter of Abraham worthy to raise up a God.

There are strong women throughout the Hebrew Bible. But we must try to realize how shocking  this would be to a first-century audience in the Greco-Roman world. It’s like George Lucas focusing on the droids. Here are the characters whom we have been trained to ignore. Here are the women through whom God will save us all.

Part of the singing—of Luke: The Musical—has to do with heaven coming down to earth. Angels, in the Hebrew Bible, sing in the presence of God. They do not typically sing down here. Yet now we have angels singing over shepherds, singing with Zechariah and Mary and Simeon, about the coming of Christ as a child. Luke is spelling it out for us. Heaven is wherever Jesus is, for Jesus is our God upon this earth.

Yet we must also remember Mary’s namesake, Moses’ sister Miriam, who sang her song of triumph in the Exodus. The Red Sea swept Pharaoh’s chariots away, and Miriam danced upon the far shore as they drowned. Mary’s song is not a lullaby; it’s her battle-hymn!

All generations shall call me blest. The Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is His Name … He has shown the strength of His arm. He has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.

Not exactly shy and retiring, is she? I’ll be honest: I wouldn’t want to get on Mary’s bad side.

I have an old and lifelong friend who was not raised religious yet underwent a powerful conversion during our college years. I’d like to think that our late-night conversations on things human and divine had something to do with that, but really it was the work of the Holy Spirit. She skipped over Lutheranism, however, and swam straight across the Tiber; married into a devoutly Roman Catholic family, and now works for her diocese professionally.

And she told me once that Mary is the female face of God. I was a seminarian at the time, so of course all of my confessional armor went up. Oh, no, no, no. Mary isn’t God, I said. Jesus is God; Mary is His mother; ergo, Mary is the Mother of God, but she herself is not divine. In retrospect, I feel like I was mansplaining Mary to a Catholic, which is not a good look.

My friend also opined that a person’s attitude toward Mary tended to reflect that person’s relationship with their mother. This I found to be firmer ground. The point of Christian faith isn’t just to know God in Christ Jesus, but for all of us to become one with God in Christ Jesus. That’s why we eat His Body, drink His Blood, breathe His Spirit. We pray the prayers that Jesus prayed and read the stories Jesus read and give the grace He first gave unto us. Everything that Christians do is intended to make us into Jesus together.

So then it would follow that His mother is our mother as well. Christ proclaims this from the Cross, when He says to Mary, “Behold your son!” and to St John, “Behold your mother!” Moreover, I was raised by a strong, independent, outspoken, highly intelligent, highly capable, extremely accomplished woman. So Freud would find it no surprise that I see this in Mary. She is faithful, fierce, and defiant; no wilting lily, no “Mary had a little lamb.” The Mother of God is strong, and powerful to save.

Indeed, I’ve always been drawn to feminine images of the divine: to Kali-Ma, the Vengeful Mother; to Athena, the Wisdom of God; to the Valkyries, harvesters of souls. I was raised by a strong woman; I married a strong woman; I have fathered strong women. Thus I do not shy away from the female faces of God.

Christ describes the Father as a woman who searches Her house. Christ presents Himself as a hen who gathers Her chicks. And Christ declares us all, who are the Church, to be His Bride. In medieval devotion, the wound in Jesus’ side is the womb from which we are born; the blood and water pouring forth the Sacraments of our rebirth. Sophia, the Wisdom of God, the Oneness of God, is spoken of as feminine.

And then of course we have the Holy Spirit: the Spirit of God who is God: His Life, His Breath, His Fire. The Holy Spirit, in Hebrew, is feminine. And the Syriac Church, which yet speaks Aramaic, the native tongue of Christ, refers to the Holy Spirit as God the Mother. Divinity has no gender; we speak here analogously. Yet one can be a perfectly orthodox Christian, invoking God as Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit, while also acknowledging and embracing the feminine icons of God found throughout the Scriptures and Church history.

Which brings us back to Mary. Mary, my dear Christians, is the archetype of the Church. She is individually what we are called to be communally. All the promises given to her are given to us as well. We too shall be called blest. We too shall bear forth Christ. We too shall be raised and crowned in Heaven. If you don’t believe me, just look to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb in the Book of Revelation. In Jesus Christ, Mary is both Mother of God and mother of us all; the Ark of the New Covenant; the worthy second Eve.

If Christ is God come down to earth, then Mary is humanity lifted up to heaven in Him. He is God incarnate, God made Man; while she is humanity deified, made one with God in Christ. It’s the same truth, the same salvation, seen from different directions.

You might not be familiar with Sergeius Bulgakov, but he is widely and credibly held by the twenty-first century’s greatest theologians to have been the greatest theologian of the twentieth. He insisted we remember that never are the Son and Spirit separate. The Word of God and the Breath of God eternally work together. And whereas the Son is revealed in Jesus as God incarnate, God made flesh, the Spirit reveals Herself differently: as fire and wind and a descending dove, yes, but also through Mary as the icon of the Spirit. God shines through her, Bulgakov wrote, as clearly as light through spotless glass.

It isn’t that Mary is God, as Jesus is, but that God reveals Himself through her; through her flesh, through her womb. Christ is born of Mary, as scandalous today as it was 2000 years ago. In that sense, then, perhaps she is the female face of God. And if you have a Mom like mine, then you know this is Gospel indeed.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come to us through Mary. Come through us to all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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