Listening to Mary, Prophet

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.

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.  

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