Patron Festival (translated)
Genesis 50:15–21, Romans 14:1–12, Luke 1:39-56
“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.”
It would be easy from this start to the Magnificat to see it as boasting by Mary, if we are not careful, but Luke’s account soon moves onto the themes that Luke builds so much of the rest of his gospel around – “he hath brough down the mighty from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly.”
More than any of the other Gospels, Luke’s is an examination of inequalities in power and wealth, and the injustice that this causes in the world here and now. Luke’s Jesus is focussed on how this is not what God’s love and justice looks like, and Luke’s Mary is similarly focussed from our first introduction to her.
I guess this is what happens with a Gospel written by someone with an ancient Greek, rather than ancient Hebrew, background.
So many of Luke’s parables revolve around money. Not that he made them up – they are in the other Gospels too, but Luke seems to give them an extra focus.
It is clear that, like many of the later old testament prophets, he was focussed on how the Kingdom of God could make a difference here and now, in how we relate to each other, and in how we treat each other – whether it is as God created us, all equals before him, or as we often chose to be, always looking to gain power for ourselves at the expense of others.
And this theme is first introduced here, from the lips of a young, unmarried, pregnant teenager. A woman, not a man. A Jew, yes, but not a proper Jew from Judea, but rather a Galilean. Young. Unmarried and yet pregnant. Someone who doesn’t get a long and impressive list of ancestors like Joseph does (although there are some interesting names in that pedigree as well). God has certainly chosen to look with favour on the lowliness of Mary.
It is a powerful start for Mary in the Gospels, and yet despite this, she soon fades out of view. It really feels like there are only three places in the Gospels where she acts on her own behalf and makes an impact on the story.
The first is here – firstly at the Annunciation and now, in the Magnificat, where she is an archetype of obedience to the will of God, no matter how much it may turn your life upside down. In this willingness to be open to the will of God, and prepared to embrace a vocation thrust upon you, it feels like only Jesus in his passion in the Garden of Gethsemane is more compelling. And I think it is important to keep these two in your mind together, rather than projecting this willingness just onto Mary. It is important not to use Mary as a means to make subservience into a female virtue. Subservience to God’s will, and only to God’s will, is a appropriate to all of creation.
Secondly, we find her at the foot of the cross, where she and the other Marys gather to bear witness to the crucifixion – with John the only one of Jesus’ male followers to walk alongside him all the way to the cross. She may be silent in this scene, but her silence is not the silence of passivity – it is the silence and despair of all creation as it witnesses the death of the creator. She chooses to be there, to be a witness to her son’s death, as she was present at his conception and birth.
She is present at the start of Jesus’ incarnation and at the premature ending of it. She envelops and encompasses all of Jesus’ earthly presence.
The third instance, comes in between, and is a stranger event, recorded by John, in his account of the wedding at Cana. Here we see her interceding with Jesus on behalf of the groom, in order that the wedding should not be ruined, despite his initial unwillingness to intervene and reveal his power.
I will confess here that I have for a long time had a slightly ambivalent view of how the church approaches the Blessed Virgin Mary. I think my protestant sensibilities rebel somewhat at the excesses of Marian devotion of the Roman Catholic church, and worry that it comes very close to crossing the line from veneration to worship.
I have an instinct to need to cut Mary down to size – to make sure that there is no possibility of confusion – that she is in no way divine, but merely a saint like any other saint.
I think the tendency towards an enhanced or even excessive veneration of Mary probably starts in the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian era, when debates were raging about the relative humanity and divinity of Christ.
The Greek title for Mary of theotokos, literally the God-bearer, was used to emphasise that the man Jesus, born of Mary, was also at the same time, and indivisibly God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. It was a way of emphasising that Jesus wasn’t born human, and became divine at some later stage, like his baptism, but was from the very beginning indivisibly both human and divine at the same time.
This critical orthodox theological point needed to be emphasised to compete with alternative doctrines around Christ, but also had the side effect of elevating the status of Mary, as the God-bearer. Various beliefs later beliefs, like the Immaculate Conception of Mary, arose. It sometimes feels like these are based on ideas of having to be holy and pure in order to approach God’s presence – ideas with are directly refuted by Jesus’ teaching and behaviour in the Gospels, where He makes it clear that his divinity serves to purify and cleanse us as he moves among us, rather than our impurity and sin making us unacceptable to Him.
But, for me, deep reflection on John’s account of the wedding at Cana, opened up a new appreciation of Mary as intercessor with Christ, as our representative to the divine.
Here at the wedding at Cana, Mary does intercede with Jesus on behalf of the groom. She is acting here in as the great intercessor between humanity and God, in the person of Jesus. And she does this not on her own behalf, but on behalf of someone else.
I’m not going to try and unpack why Jesus is not minded to help the groom – that would take a lot longer than I want to be preaching for, and I don’t really have any good answers on that, only more questions; and I am certainly not going to renounce my very protestant belief that we are in no need of any intermediary between us and God – that the very essence of the Incarnation is that we have gained a face to face relationship with God through the person of the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, but I was left with a new-found appreciation of Mary’s strength of character and her righteousness – her obviously constant concern for the other – the weak, the troubled, the powerless.
I think though that when we place Mary on a pedestal, or proclaim her the queen of heaven, we must do so remembering the teenage girl who sang of how the powerful are brought down from their thrones.
I don’t think she wanted to sit on a throne over anyone else.
I think the beauty of Mary is that she is still down here among us.
It is the shame of our society that she still occupies a position of subservience and inferiority. Women are still abused and exploited. Single mothers are still shamed. Minorities are still marginalised. That literally patriarchal authority figures have chosen to exalt one women doesn’t make it OK to treat other women as second class citizens.
So let us remember Mary as that young woman who is so filled with the love and the joy of God that she can hope for a better world – a world of justice and equality before God. Let us hope alongside her, but more than that, let us go out strengthened in her resolve to build that better world; to build the kingdom of God where all are honoured and none are excluded.
Amen