There’s something about Mary.
If you were to
remove all of the art depicting Mary--the Annunciation, the Madonna with Child,
Mary kneeling by the manger, enroute to Egypt, weeping at the foot of the
cross, or holding her dead son upon her lap—there would be empty museums: too little art to fill them. Mary, the handmaid of the Lord, the matriarch of the faith, the
ideal disciple, the mother of God; intercessor, mediatrix, the second Eve, the
eternal feminine, the Queen of Heaven, and always, the timid, teenage,
submissive virgin.
Some of us still pray our Hail Mary's. Some see Mary as a victim of divine coercion.
For some, she is an irritating model of pious femininity—never sinning, eternally a virgin, yet ever a mother. How can anyone measure up to that? To some she has been
over-exalted, almost the fourth person of the Trinity. Mary Mary Mary!!
In the face of all this attention, it’s been said that Mary, like any
good Jewish mother, would probably rather have people pay attention to her son.
Still, there’s
something about Mary.
I have never
liked the images of Mary as young teenager, as a lesson only in submissive
faith. Although I have never really been behind the cult of Mary—maybe I’m too
Protestant for that—I have always had a great affection for her. I wrote a
paper on the Magnificat. I collected images of her and studied them to consider
what they said about her. I thought I had seen and heard just about every way
that Mary could possibly be imagined. And then, when I was at seminary in
Virginia, while we were consecrating our new chapel (the old one having burned)
we consecrated a sculpture designed for the new space. It was Mary, with
Elizabeth, the scene just after this Gospel reading that we call the Visitation.
And the sculpture was called Mary, as
Prophet. (The consecration of the sculpture is below: watch to the end of the video for a really good view of the work.)
Mary--as
prophet!! I realized I had never seen or heard of Mary represented that way. And
quite frankly, it blew my mind.
This image could only be drawn from Luke. Mary is named only once in Mark’s Gospel, and five times
in Matthew’s—in the infancy narrative, which gives more attention to Joseph--and
not at all in John, nor in Paul’s letters. But Luke saw in Mary a specific actor in God’s plan, and a powerful
messenger of this coming Lord. He recognized that God had called Mary forward
just as God had the prophets and heroes of the Hebrew Bible, male and female
both. And so he featured her words of prophecy and the prophetic task she had
been given: not just to deliver a message about what he stood for, but to bring the Word into the world, as the Word made flesh. Mary gave voice
to the promises made, the promises kept, and the promises of the upside-down kingdom
to come.
Although he doesn't call her prophet, Luke establishes here as prophet in at least three ways. First, he described Mary’s
call so that it was recognizable to an audience familiar with the prophets and
heroes of the Hebrew Bible. The
theologian Raymond
Brown identified the criteria of such Biblical calls, and mapped every prophet against
them. The criteria include: the appearance
of God or an angel; a reaction of fear or prostration by the
called; a divine message delivered with the specifics of the call; an objection
by the recipient, often on the basis of qualification—I’m too old, my wife is
barren, I don’t speak well, I’m only a boy--and the giving of a sign. In this
call, Gabriel calls out Mary as “favored one.” He commands her not to fear; he
announces her conception and predicts the birth, the name of the child and its
meaning; and describes the child’s future deeds. This same pattern is seen in the birth
annunciations of Ishmael, Isaac, and Samson, and in the New Testament, of John
the Baptist in both Luke’s and Matthew’s Gospels. In fact, Brown found that the
Mary annunciation is the most complete example of the literary form of a call
to prophecy in the Bible.
The second way
Luke establishes Mary as a prophet is that out of her mouth comes a
prophecy: The Magnificat. The Magnificat has been
compared to the song of Hannah, Samuel’s mother, and the songs of Moses and
Miriam. The content of the words is strongly prophetic. Peggy Parker, who sculpted Mary as Prophet, said in her sermon
about the sculpture: “Mary’s words
foretell an upending of power as radical as any proclaimed by the prophets who
preceded her; her call to repentance is as radical as any preached by John the
Baptist; her announcement a way of life as radical as that embodied by her own
son. This Mary, bearer of the eternal Word, reminds us with her words of the
revolutionary nature of the Incarnation; she calls us to consider how the entry
of God into this world, in our very flesh, should shape our lives.” And you
see--that is what prophets do! Prophets move hearts and point to a path. As the
song says, “my heart would say yes, and my feet would say go!”
The last way in
which Mary acts as a prophet is in embodying her message in her pregnancy.
Ezekiel ate a scroll, literally internalizing God’s word. Jeremiah put on a
yoke to show the Israelites that God was using the Babylonians, and wanted them
to submit to them. Mary’s pregnancy announced, with every passing week, the impending
coming of the very savior that her prophetic words had foretold. This is not
just the metaphor of a light in the darkness:
a living, breathing Messiah was under construction in her womb.
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| Magnificat, James Tissot |
I love the image
of Mary as prophet. But why was it so important to Luke to highlight Mary this
way? Luke’s Gospel was written at a time when the world was fractured, and
hurting. The Temple had been destroyed and a Jewish rebellion brutally put down
by the Roman Empire. To this day, the Arch of Titus in Rome commemorates the
sacking of the Temple and the carrying off of its sacred menorah.
And it was beginning
to look like the Romans had no intention of allowing a temple to be rebuilt.
Meanwhile, a band of Jesus followers was spreading throughout the Jewish diaspora, and they held fast to their conviction that
the Messiah had already come, had died for them, was resurrected, and lived
among them in Spirit. They had been worshipping in the synagogues with other
Jews—those who did not follow Jesus. But relations were increasingly strained.
Families were dividing. The Jewish community was tearing apart.
And the Pharisees
had taken charge. Concerned with rescuing Judaism, they wanted to center
it around the family and the home, instead of the Temple. They saw the Jesus
followers as a distraction, as sowers of conflict—planters of false hopes. So they began to make them unwelcome in the
synagogues, even inserting a prayer at the end of the Shabbat services against
those who claimed the Messiah had come. The Jesus followers remained faithful,
but were feeling the pressure from every side.
In the face of
this strain and stress, emerges Luke’s Gospel and its second volume, Acts.
These books speak to a community who is finding their way, maturing in their
faith, but must at times have needed encouragement, and their direction affirmed. And so Luke wants to remind them of the
sacred path they walk. It is a path charted by God hundreds of years before,
and a path that would continue for eternity.
Luke reminds them that Jesus, their Messiah, was a promise kept.
The House of David had been promised in Samuel, and had come to them in the
form of the Incarnate Word. As we heard in our first reading, it was never
to be a house literally built by David. No, it was God’s house to build, the
promised home of God in the midst of David’s descendants and with the coming of Jesus, a house made available to everyone. For a brief time, Mary’s
very womb was where God came to dwell; her womb growing in expectation of the
coming one who fulfills all the hopes and dreams of the Messiah of old--the one who will make all things new.
There’s someone
else in our story, and that is Gabriel, the angel.
Nowhere else is an angel called out by
name in the Gospels--only in Luke. Gabriel
means “God is my strength” in Hebrew. In Christian imagery, Gabriel, stands
with three other angels: Rafael, behind
us, represents healing. Ariel, standing
in front of us, represents illumination; Michael, at our right hand, represents
mercy; and Gabriel, at our left, power and judgment. It is Gabriel who brings
the message to Mary—the power of the God
of Israel has not abandoned you, he says.
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| Modern icon of Gabriel by Kiko Arguello |
And Mary listened. She recognized Gabriel
to be God’s messenger, and accepted her chosenness by God. She was perplexed. She
questioned. For a time, she pondered it
all in her heart. And she committed.
When her heart said yes, her prayer--her
prophecy—came forth in the words of the Magnificat. And so Mary shows us Advent
as a way of life—a template by which we meet the moments of our own lives.
Mary’s prayer is one that Luke must have hoped we would make our own prayer, our
own hope, our own expectation, and the prophecy that would propel our own path
forward, to be God’s servants on behalf of the lowly and the hungry, the poor
ones. It started before the Son was
born. But it is a commitment for Christmas and beyond—indeed for eternity, for
those who trust in the promise.
Greetings,
favored ones. Listen to your prophet Mary. And may your hearts say yes, and
your feet say go!!
Advent 4B (or 7th Extended Advent, which we observed this Advent season at St Gabriel.) Sermon delivered December 24, 2017. Propers: 2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Canticle 15 (Magnifcat); Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38
