Mary (A sermon on Luke 1:39-55)

 ³⁹In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, ⁴⁰where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. ⁴¹When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit ⁴²and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. ⁴³And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? ⁴⁴For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. ⁴⁵And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

I must confess that the first thought that struck me when I looked up today’s reading was ‘why did I get Mary and Elizabeth this year while Margaret (last week’s preacher) got John the Baptist?’

In as much as I do feel I’ve dealt with John adequately (and some would say more than adequately) over the years, I must admit that I do feel a certain kinship with John. He’s feisty, erratic, unpredictable, very male, and capable of doing crazy and offensive things. Truly he is a man after my own heart!  Mary, on the other hand, is gentle, feminine, and, in this scene from Luke chapter one in particular, she is concerned with matters that seem to fall very squarely under the banner of ‘women’s business’!

According to Luke chapter one, Mary is somewhere in the hill country of Judea, visiting her cousin, Elizabeth, who is also pregnant.

This is something that women are apt to do during their pregnancies – get together with other women who are also pregnant, most particularly with other pregnant members of the family. These sorts of get-togethers tend to be women-only affairs in my experience, and for understandable reasons.

The two women (who are both first-time mothers-to-be) wish to talk about their experiences of pregnancy with someone who speaks their language. They want to support each other, and they are uniquely positioned to do so.  They understand each other. They share a common experience, and it is one that I do not have, have never had and will never have! What am I doing here?!

I’m sure many of you who are husbands have had that awkward experience of accompanying your wife into a shop that sells women’s underwear. You’re not sure where to look! I feel similarly awkward being privy to this scene!

The two women are going to talk about their pregnancies and Elizabeth indeed begins the conversation by giving details of the intra-uterine contractions that she experiences at the moment of Mary’s arrival! ‘Too much information’ is my immediate reaction!

Could not Margaret have dealt more sensitively with this passage?

But in truth, while I do feel that John is ‘one of the boys’, I think my sense of connection with him is really somewhat illusory. What would I know about being a Nazarite and living on bush tucker!  And if the connection with John is somewhat remote, I suspect that the common ground that we share with Mary – that any of us shares with Mary – is similarly miniscule indeed!

What would we know about being a woman in first century Palestine?

I appreciate that there have been worse periods for women in history than in 1st century Palestine, and I appreciate that things are far from perfect for women in our world today, but the gulf between the experience of the 21^st Century Australian woman and her 1st century Palestinian counterpart is vast!

Mary lived at a time when you were expected to start having children shortly after reaching puberty!

Mary lived at a time when unmarried mothers like her weren’t simply frowned upon but faced the very real prospect of being stoned!

Mary lived at a time when women had few property rights and even fewer rights over their children, who were really considered to be the creative work of their fathers.

As crazy as it might seem to us now, the human ovum wasn’t actually discovered until 1827. That’s less than 200 years ago! Prior to that the woman was generally considered to be no more than an incubator for the child.

Holy Mary, mother of God, would have been considered by most of the Church Fathers (and mothers) to have contributed nothing to the genetic makeup of Jesus! She was simply the oven (so to speak) in which the man’s seed (or in Mary’s case God’s) was baked.

What would we know about being a woman in first century Palestine? And what would we know about being a Jewish woman in first century Palestine, living under the Roman Occupation?

I have never lived under the occupation of a foreign occupying power.  I don’t think any of us have ever lived under the occupation of a foreign occupying power.  I know that some of the Sierra Leonean members of our congregation have experienced living in a context where military violence is part of the fabric of daily life, so perhaps they can understand this dimension of Mary’s life better than the rest of us. Even so, I doubt if any of us can fully appreciate the experience of daily humiliation that comes with being answerable to foreign soldiers and foreign officials at every point in your life.

John the Baptist’s exhortation to the Roman soldiers who came to him, “not to extort money from anyone by threats for false accusation” (Luke 3:14) was a good indication of the regular practice of soldiers then, who, like soldiers in every age, used their position of authority to abuse those who were in their power. They stole money from some and no doubt they raped and physically abused others because they could!

And in as much as many of us might have romantic associations with the ‘little town of Bethlehem’ we can imagine that for Mary (and for Joseph) it must have been a town of many nightmares!

It was the town that had no room for Mary when she was in labour! It was the town where Herod massacred the little children. And it was a place where Mary and Joseph had never wanted to go.

So why did Mary and Joseph have to go to Bethlehem? Because Caesar Augustus said so! That’s why!

That’s the reality of living under occupation, and it does seem like a bizarre and tragic coincidence, of course, that the people of Bethlehem are still living under occupation today. The uniforms change and the weapons change but the interrogations, the check-points, the humiliation, the violence and the bloodshed are horribly familiar.

That is the experience of the residents of Bethlehem today and it was certainly the experience of both Mary and Elizabeth – the two women who take centre stage in our Gospel story today. They were members of an oppressed and relatively powerless community, and, as women, they were the most powerless members of that oppressed and powerless community.

What do we have in common with Mary and Elizabeth? Whether we share their gender or not, can we really pretend to share their experience in any way, shape or form?

Well … I think it depends upon whether we look at them or listen to them!

I find that when I look at who Mary and Elizabeth were – their context and their historical experience – I feel the enormous gulf of history and culture that separates us, but when I listen to their prophetic words I realise we are one!

For these two women are prophets – make no mistake about that! They are indeed the first prophets of the New Testament!

John would appear in the desert and ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ and prophesy about the coming of Jesus, but in truth he was only continuing what his mother had started thirty years earlier!

It is Elizabeth who first ‘prepares the way’ – who first speaks of the ‘Lordship’ of Jesus and who pronounces her matriarchal blessing on both mother and son!

Elizabeth is indeed the first of the New Testament prophets and the second is Mary, who is young in age but speaks with a wisdom well beyond her years!

“My soul magnifies the Lord, ⁴⁷and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, ⁴⁸for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; ⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; ⁵³he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. ⁵⁴He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, ⁵⁵according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

We are familiar with this wonderful piece of prophecy. We have heard it often enough. We have repeated these lines often enough. Most of us have sung these lines multiple times, and this is an indication of the fact that Mary’s song is not just Mary’s song!  It is not just a song about Mary.  The song is a word of prophecy that involves us all!

The song of course echoes very strongly the prophetic words of one of Mary’s own fore-mothers in the faith – Hannah, mother of Samuel (Israel’s first official prophet) – who prophesies in a very similar way in 1 Samuel chapter 2.

But in as much as both Hannah’s song and Mary’s song are prophetic words that both start with their own experiences they likewise both express a vision of the work of God throughout history that involves us all!

• ^·          He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
• He’s 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.

This is not just about Hannah and Mary and Elizabeth. This is about us all!

God is at work in history, lifting up the people at the bottom of the heap and moving them to the top and turning the whole power structure upside-down! The stories of these individual women are a reflection of this wonderful and unstoppable historical process, but the process is something much larger and much more wonderful than any of the individuals themselves!

Both Mary and Hannah and Elizabeth recognise this. They recognise that they are a part of something that God is doing in history that is bigger than all of them! God is bringing justice! God is freeing the oppressed! He is reconciling the human family to Himself and to each other, and these women have each been caught up in the wondrous turmoil of this divine storm!

The miraculous births of both John and Jesus are incredible events that the women each give thanks for, and yet they realise that their miracles are only glorious instances of a work of a greater God that spans the entirety of space and time! The Kingdom of God is coming and they have each been caught up in it!  And this wonderful awareness all starts to dawn at their family gathering somewhere in the hill country of Judea!

We too will travel off to our family gatherings soon enough, I suspect, and we too will share our experiences with each other and talk about babies that are going to be born and do those things that families do when they get together.

And while we should not assume that our family gatherings have a lot in common with those of these first century Jewish women, living in Palestine under the Roman occupation, when we listen to the prophetic words they utter we realise that the God who was at work in them, reconciling the human family to Himself, is the same God who is at work in us, carrying on the same work of reconciliation and peace!

⁴⁹for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. ⁵⁰His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. ⁵¹He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. ⁵²He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly

We are all in this together – you, me, Mary, Elizabeth, Hannah and all of us! We are different in so many ways – in time, in culture, in gender, and in a thousand ways – and yet we are one, for we are all a part of the one great work of God in history. We share the one hope, as sisters and brothers of the one God! Holy is His name!
First preached by Father Dave at Holy Trinity Dulwich Hill on December 23, 2012.

To hear the audio version of the sermon.