Mary of Nazareth
Women in Scripture Group
King’s House Retreat Center in Belleville, IL
December, 2005
I think one of our biggest challenges whenever we talk about the mother of Jesus is that our church has put Mary on a pedestal for hundreds of years – made her untouchable, remote, and saccharine. We need to reappropriate the real Mary for who we are today – the Mary of old doesn’t speak to us anymore. I personally feel some grief at the way Mary has been placed on a pedestal – we women desperately need models to help us navigate our lives in these very difficult times. I cannot relate to a Mary whose main defining characteristic is her purity. As long as she is kept elevated and out of reach on her pedestal, she cannot speak to the real-life struggles that I deal with every day – how to be a good mother to my children even though many days I am exhausted, how to maintain a loving relationship with my husband even though the demands of our daily lives leave us with very little time for one another.
We know that patriarchal forces, down through the ages, have way over-emphasized the notion of Mary’s virginity, have used it as a twisted reason to denigrate sex and the goodness of married life. Mary’s virginal state, unsullied by man, is a big reason she remains on a pedestal, out of reach, for far too many of us. Loretta Dornisch in her book A Woman Reads the Gospel of Luke, proposes another interpretation of Mary as virgin than the traditional one we are used to. She says that in ancient Israel, the traditional roles of woman were to be wives and child-bearers, and though sometimes these roles were freely chosen, they often became oppressive. Also, I have learned that women in ancient Israel were seen as having value only in relation to the men they served. So for us to look at Mary as virgin is to see her inherent value in and of herself. She does not need a man to give her worth. In fact, Dornisch says that Mary “appears in the simplicity and strength of an autonomous woman from whom the Lord requests a role radically different from the dominant roles of her society.” Mary’s virginity is, perhaps, not so much a sign of her purity, though it may be that as well, but more of a sign of her independence and her singularity.
So how can this woman, who has been so unfairly placed upon her pedestal and thus removed from the struggles of real life, help me now in this day and age? What I want from Mary is that she witness for me two things: how to hold loosely those whom I love, especially my children, knowing that they are not really mine – they never were nor will they ever be. How do I love them completely and unreservedly, knowing that someday they will leave me?
The second thing I need from Mary is that she model for me her tremendous faith – a faith that came from her close and intimate relationship with God, and not on any tangible assurances that her life would be OK. When the angel Gabriel announced to Mary God’s plans for her, he did it with no guarantees about her or her son’s future, nor did Mary say, “I’ll do as you ask as long as you meet these certain criteria!” So often in my own life, I’m tempted to say to God, “I’ll follow you as long as you make sure it’s not too painful or taxing.” Honestly, I think if I could, I would offer God a contract saying, “I’ll fulfill my end of the bargain if you fulfill yours” and refuse to cooperate unless God signed on the dotted line.
But unfortunately, God doesn’t offer to us contracts that clearly spell out the terms of our commitments! It seems to me that the limited amount of information the angel Gabriel gave to Mary regarding God’s plans for her is very much how in line with how God usually calls me to a certain path or line of action. In my own life when I have felt called by God to go in a certain direction, I am only given snippets of information, never the big picture. Like when I felt called to go to graduate school – I didn’t really know why, all I knew was that God was asking me to go in a different direction than the ministry with which I had been involved. Or when I felt called to get married – I had no idea (as none of us do!) what God had in store for me down the road – I only knew that I felt impelled to take this certain direction, which meant marrying my husband, at this certain time in my life.
So Mary did not know all the details of how her life would unfold; she was only given the briefest of information. Her ability to say “yes” to God models for us her willingness to embark on a journey that is mostly shrouded in darkness, and that is how most of us move forward too – not knowing what the future holds, only hoping that God will be with us no matter what. In her book Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints, Elizabeth A. Johnson cites Therese of Lisieux’ reasons for loving Mary as “not because the mother of God received exceptional privileges that would remove her from the ordinary condition, ‘ravishings, miracles, ecstasies’ and the like, but because she lived and suffered simply, like us, in the dark night of faith.”
Mary’s beautiful song of praise in Luke 1: 46-55, the Magnificat, is an affirmation that because she was called by God to a new undertaking, her very identity changed – she became a different person. Her yes to God’s request made her an active participant in God’s plans for humanity, and opened up for her a whole world of grace she had not experienced before. And she exemplified this huge change in her personhood by traveling to go see her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country – her physical change of locale is symbolic of the interior change that had taken place within her.
Think about the times in your own lives when you have felt called by God to a new venture, a new undertaking. Think about the challenges you faced and the blessings you received at each different turning point of your life. What are some of the milestones in our lives as women? As you reflect back upon the various milestones of your lives, I bet the one factor that is true of each new situation that you found yourself in, with each new adventure, is that you changed. As you rose to try to meet the challenges of the various turning points of your lives, who you were as a person evolved, adapted, grew. As Renita J. Weems explains in her book, Showing Mary: How Women Can Share Prayers, Wisdom, and the Blessings of God, “…You are never too young or too old to give birth to yourself. New parts of yourself. New dimensions to yourself. Untapped sides of you. You are like Mary of Nazareth in the New Testament gospel stories. You are pregnant with possibility.”
Just as Mary was called forth to new life in her yes to God’s request to be the mother of Jesus, so are we called to new life with ways God asks us to stretch and grow, and we open ourselves to new opportunities for grace. Like when we took our first jobs, or when we got married or had children. Do we think of ourselves, in the various ways we respond to God’s initiative in our lives, as cooperating with the Spirit as Mary did? “Mary is me, and Mary is you. I am Mary, and you are Mary. Whenever you feel like you’re being summoned from some deep and holy place within to journey to some deep and holy place within, know that it’s God inviting you to an altar where you might encounter God anew and yourself anew. That’s spiritual pregnancy,” Renita J. Weems explains in Showing Mary.
Mary’s prayer of thanksgiving to God, the Magnificat, is also her way of affirming God’s plans to use her as part of God’s great mission. And what is the reason Mary gives for why God chose her to do God’s work? Why does Mary say that her soul magnifies the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God? Is it because of her great power, or her intelligence, or her extraordinary abilities? No. It is because “God has looked with favor on the lowliness of [God’s] servant”. God’s choice to ask Mary to be the mother of Jesus is another example that the people God calls to do God’s work are not the powerful among us, are not those whom the world calls great. God calls the meek, the lowly, the ones who are humble of heart to fulfill God’s mission here on earth. Over and over again, we see this reflected in the Scriptures – God always chooses the least likely human being to fulfill God’s plans! So the next time you’re asked to do something that maybe you think you’re not qualified to do, think about this tendency God has! And can we think of ourselves, in the times we are able to say “yes” to God, as participating in God’s plans for humanity like Mary did, no matter how small and insignificant our actions seem to be?
Much is made of Mary’s outward cooperation with the God who asked her to be the mother of Jesus; very little thought is given to the inner strength and stalwartness it took for her to be able to cooperate with God’s plan. This little 15 year-old Hebrew girl was made of strong stuff – how else could she have traveled, newly pregnant, to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country? I looked at a map of ancient Israel, and calculated that the distance between the town of Nazareth where Mary was from to the locale where Elizabeth was reputed to have lived is roughly 80 miles! There were no cars in those days! Now I can’t imagine walking on foot or even riding a donkey for 80 miles in the first trimester of any of my pregnancies – I was sick as a dog and tired all the time! All I wanted to do was eat crackers and go to sleep. Yet we are told that Mary “went with haste” to visit her cousin Elizabeth in the hill country. Inner strength and stalwartness, that’s what that girl had.
What do you think Mary’s experience of letting go of her son was like? As he grew into adulthood, she must have had all the angst that any mother who has to let her child become independent and face the world has. And as Jesus progressed in his ministry of teaching, preaching and healing, Mary must have become more and more anxious about the obvious dangers her son was placing himself in. In Mark 3:33 we are told that while Jesus was preaching about the dangers of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, his mother and his brothers called to him, probably wanting to save him from further embarrassment or even danger. And how do you think Mary felt when Jesus refused to acknowledge their attempts at intervention? Rejected? Alone? Uncared for? When you think that Mary must have known how Jesus was annoying the religious authorities during his three years of ministry, we get some sense of Mary’s internal sense of equilibrium – it probably wasn’t even there. She must have lived with a constant state of anxiety, knowing her son was angering the people in power and that no good could possibly come of that. How do you think she dealt with her anxiety? It had to have been there.
But yet another of the ways our tradition has done a disservice to Mary has been by freeing her from any human emotions she might have had, once again done by placing her on her remote and out-of-reach pedestal. Most statues and pictures I have seen of Mary depict her as serene, even smiling, as she holds her baby in her arms. Mary’s ever present serenity as portrayed in artistic renderings of her is off-putting to me; it makes me think she cannot understand or relate to any grief or sadness I might feel. Yet Simeon the prophet, when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to him in the presentation at the Temple, predicted that “a sword would pierce” Mary’s soul, alluding to her son’s death on the cross. How could it not have? Mary’s humanity meant that she felt just as keenly as any woman would the loss of her child. All of us who have experienced loss of any kind, especially the loss of a child, can take heart in the knowledge that Mary truly understands the grief that we feel. We can look to her for support and comfort when our own souls are pierced with a sword, when our own hearts are broken.
Yet some of the theology surrounding Mary that has developed through the ages depicts her as willingly sacrificing her son for the sake of humanity. This sort of theology, I must say, I find absolutely abhorrent. First of all, to paint her as one who knew her own destiny and that of her son’s makes her more than a human being – it makes her divine. Secondly, the idea that Mary is asked at one and the same time to not only be the mother of Jesus, but to be willing to allow her son to die for the good of the world is to depict her not as a loving mother, but as something much less than that. What mother gives birth to a child and then passively and willingly submits to the untimely death of that child? Not any mother I know! Just as I believe that Jesus grew into his knowledge of who he truly was and what his mission here on earth was, so do I believe that Mary grew in her understanding of just exactly who this son of hers really was. Luke tells us that at Jesus’s birth when the shepherds reported to Mary and Joseph what the angels had told them, and again when Jesus was lost and then found in the temple, Mary “pondered all these things in her heart,” – she mulled them over and processed them in her mind.
For Mary to lose her son by crucifixion was probably even more excruciating because only criminals died such a shameful death. Did she question how God could allow such a thing to happen? She, too, must have felt abandoned and betrayed by God, this God who had called her “favored”, yet we do not know for sure, because scripture does not mention her reaction to her son’s execution.
The Book of Acts includes Mary in the group of disciples gathered in the Upper Room after Jesus’ death, the room where John says the disciples “had met for fear of the Jews.” It was then and only then that Mary, who must have experienced unspeakable grief at the public execution of her son, finally knew completely and wholly that her son was indeed the Son of God as she and the other disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit. It took 33 years from the time the angel Gabriel announced to her, a young girl, that she would bear “the Son of the Most High”, to when she finally understood the fullness of God’s plan for her as she and the other disciples experienced Pentecost together in that upper room, experienced the gift of Jesus’ resurrected Spirit. 33 years spent in loving and caring for her son, anxious years spent worrying about her son after he left home, time filled with unrelenting grief after her son was killed. That’s a long time to wait before she really understood what her yes to God’s invitation to bear God’s son would mean, before she really knew most fully and profoundly that God’s love conquers all, even death. Mary experienced many years of suffering, anxiety, and sadness, and all this for a woman who proclaimed as a young girl that, “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”
Sometimes we, too, have to wait a long time until we understand completely and wholly the fullness of God’s plans for us. Some of us may never fully understand, in the midst of our all too human lives, exactly what God has in store for us. We stand with Mary our sister, one who has known like us, darkness and doubt, alienation and aloneness, to face the unknown portion of our lives, hoping that God will be with us in the journey. We believe that we, like Mary, proclaim the greatness of the Lord, every time we are able to respond to God’s call to bring to birth new parts of ourselves, every time we say yes to God’s call to be life-givers and peacemakers for our world. Along with Mary, we embrace God’s invitation to be most fully the women that we are called to be, so that we can stand before God with outstretched arms and say, “Here I am; let it be done to me according to your word.”
The Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55)
And Mary said, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”