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Sermon: Mary, the Mother of our Lord – Series C - 15th August 2010
St Aidan’s Anglican Church West Epping 8:30 am
Readings: Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 113, Galatians 4:4-7, Luke 2:1-7
Today is set aside in our church calendar to honour Mary, the mother of Jesus. Yet Mary is a person of controversy between Catholics and Protestants and we often get the balance wrong, either making too much of her or too little.
In 2006 Newline Cinemas released the Movie called “the Nativity Story.” I don’t think there has ever been a film before which so accurately portrays the political turmoil into which Jesus was born. No film so well presents the problems created for Mary with her pregnancy. Here was Mary, already engaged to marry Joseph, yet she finds she is pregnant. What can she tell her parents? What can she tell Joseph? What shame and suspicion will fall on her from her village? As the movie points out, many women had been stoned for far less. Yet the story being told in essential to our faith. This in the story of the incarnation, the story of God entering into all that it means to be human. We must remember that he becomes thoroughly human and that can only happen through the co-operation of Mary.
The incarnation is a more profound event: God becomes one of us, one with us, joins us in our human condition, comes to know us from the inside, as it were, and not just from outside. God is born, and nothing can ever be the same again.
Pivotal to the incarnation of God among us is this young woman named Mary, and today we remember her role in the story of our salvation. I’ve not often had the opportunity publicly to reflect on Mary and her role; truth be told, I’ve probably avoided it. In the very Protestant and conservative evangelical traditions in which I grew up, Mary was almost a peripheral figure. Incarnation, in these traditions, was all ‘Act of God’ in which Mary was but the willing means by which God’s will is done. To think otherwise was to think that a human being played some part in our salvation, when salvation was understood to be a pure act of God’s grace: God does something for us that we couldn’t do, and does it without our help or aid or even agreement. Mary’s role is simply to acquiesce to the announcement of the Angel that she is to give birth, whether she likes it or not, to a child who will be Son of God and the salvation of Israel.
This was in sharp contrast to what we were told Roman Catholics and others believed. Mary in these traditions was seen as an active participant in our salvation, even seen as a sort of co-redeemer with Christ, and who now sits as Queen of Heaven making intercession for us with her Son and the Father. Mary was worshipped, we were told, as a sort of second God, when God alone in Christ should be worshipped; she was prayed to when only God in Christ should receive our prayers. Mary was a sort of fourth person of the Trinity, if that isn’t too absurd a thing to say.
Neither of these views, of course, is helpful. The Protestant view is too hard and blinkered: of course our salvation is an act of God’s grace, but at the most fundamental level it requires at the very least our co-operation, and Mary shows this in her somewhat bemused ‘yes’ to God. The Catholic view, if I can say it like that, makes too much of Mary by removing her too far from her humanity. They make us forget she was flesh and blood like us. As well, these teachings of Mary are not that old. The Doctrine of the Immaculate conception comes from the fifteenth century and the Doctrine of Mary’s Assumption into heaven was not recognized officially until 1950. She is, of course crucial to our salvation, but she is not its author; she may be Mother of God, but she is no more divine than you or me. There were many before Mary who co-operated with God for our salvation; there are others since and even today, who, in their very humanity, can also bring God to birth for us.
Because we know almost nothing about Mary, it is easy to see how logic could make more of Mary than is necessary. Mark and John tell us nothing about the birth of Jesus, and Mary only really features in John towards the end. She is there, in the Book of Acts, at Pentecost with the rest of the disciples, but nothing is made of her; and Paul tells us nothing more. Matthew tells the story of the birth of Jesus more from Joseph’s point of view, and so it is only in Luke that we get very much about Mary. Later traditions give us names for her parents, but once Pentecost has come and gone, we don’t even know where she lived or how she died. We know nothing of what she did or the circumstances of her life before the angel makes his announcement to her. She’s engaged to Joseph, who is a carpenter; she has an older cousin Elizabeth who is just ahead of her in a pregnancy; her husband Joseph was not originally from Nazareth, and the baby Jesus was born in Bethlehem. That’s about it.
But of course, that is much more than we know about the vast majority of people who have ever lived. And what emerges from even the scant information we have about Mary in the Bible is a picture of a young woman who is pretty secure in herself, who is able, even when surprised by an angel, to accept the possibility of God working through her, and whose life is defined by her faith and, ultimately, by her love for her child. Her extended family seems to have been connected to the priests who served in the Temple, and her husband was a tradesman; all in all not quite the picture sometimes painted by those who would like to see Mary as the equivalent of a modern-day, homeless, single mother from the wrong side of town. Joseph, after all, had the means to flee to Egypt when the family was threatened. I think it is unhelpful to create myths around Mary, no matter how well intentioned they may be.
Against the pull of my Protestant upbringing, I have come to find in Mary some really important things for our faith and for our understanding of how God acts in our world. If I am prepared to take the writings of Luke seriously, then I have no difficulty in placing Mary right at the heart of the story of our salvation.
We mustn’t forget the simple truth that Mary was, first and foremost, a genuine human being, and it is in her absolutely ordinary humanity that the strength of her place in our understanding of salvation and the activity of God is rooted. The more unlike you and me she becomes, the less helpful she is, for without her full and normal humanity there is no Christ. The point of the incarnation is that God takes on the fullness of our humanity, warts and all. Jesus need not be born of an immaculate mother, with a string of immaculate conceptions all the way back down the evolutionary tree, for it is our ordinary humanity which God assumes, and through which our salvation comes. Mary need not be assumed into heaven as if it was undignified for the mother of our Saviour to die, for it is our ordinary human life and death which our God suffers and through which our salvation comes. Mary places humanity right at the heart of our salvation, for without her the Christ of God is merely another supernatural being as unconnected to the human condition as any other alien. The humanity of Mary is the humanity of God and the vehicle of our salvation.
Each Christmas celebration can be a great time of celebration with family and friends. But Mary was not in that fortunate position. For her, that first Christmas came as a bolt out of the blue; there was no run up, no sense of needing to get things ready, no list from last year from which this year could be prepared. On the other hand, Mary did have the words and traditions of the prophets of Israel and their longing for God’s kingdom of justice, mercy and peace; she did have the family tradition of worship at home, in the synagogue and in the Temple in Jerusalem, and the shared sense of God’s presence and purpose in her life; she did have that deep sense of the world being God’s world, and the hope that God’s world should be a place where everyone lived in peace with themselves and with their neighbours, and where justice flows like a river and the stranger is loved and respected, and where no one needs to live in fear. All of this - all of this longing and hope and expectation – is what prepared Mary for Christmas.
Mary was an ordinary human being trying to live a godly life, and that was all the preparation she needed to say ‘yes’ to God. We are offered that same opportunity, to live godly lives in the midst of our normal humanity. The only real question is: are we prepared, like Mary, to say ‘yes’ to God?