21 December
Dear Friends,
I am, in many ways, the product of three Marys. This is our family name, and so my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all bear the name Mary. My brother and I used to joke that we only knew women in our family—women who were divorced or widowed. They were by far the greatest influence in my life.
The advantage of growing up with these three Marys was that, despite Protestant apprehensions, God’s grace was mediated to me through Mary. Today, I am grateful that I never got to know the meek, mild, and silenced Mary often portrayed throughout history. The Marys I knew spoke up (as in Luke 1:46-55), pondered often (as in Luke 1:29, 2:29, and 2:51), and consented to be channels of God’s grace (as in Luke 1:38). They embodied, in many ways, the triptych often attributed to their namesake: disciple, prophet, and mother.
For a long time, Protestants have largely ignored Mary, the Mother of God. As biblical scholar Beverly Gaventa points out, “[I]f there is one thing Protestants agree on—across the theological spectrum—it is that we do not talk about Mary.” It’s not that they lacked respect for her. In fact, the Reformers’ view on Mary can be summarized as sola fide. Although she could no longer be viewed as an intercessor, she was regarded as a “model of faith.”
Nevertheless, much like in the famous nativity scenes, she was often relegated to the background in our confessions and theology. Feminist theologians have pointed out that this diminishment of Mary coincided with the embellishment, idealization, and domestic confinement of everyday mothers.
Not only did we not speak about Mary, but Mary also did not speak to us. We effectively silenced her. In fact, this is a common translation of Mary’s “ponderings” in the Gospel—Luke 1:29, 2:29, and 2:51—where she is often translated as having become “silent.”
However, Mary did not become silent; she “pondered.” Theologian Bonnie Miller-McLemore, who inspired this piece of writing, argues that this pondering was far from being sentimental, trivialized silence. Rather, it represented “maternal thinking”—the embodiment of intense feelings of attention, anguish, and awe. Moreover, we certainly hear Mary speaking, especially in our Gospel reading for this Sunday, the Magnificat. Luke makes it clear that these are indeed Mary’s words.
What difference would it make if we took a moment longer in Advent—not rushing to the birth of Jesus, but instead sitting a while longer to listen to Mary speak?
Jan Richardson captures Mary’s active role in her beautiful poem “Gabriel’s Annunciation”:
For a moment
I hesitated
on the threshold.
For the space
of a breath
I paused,
unwilling to disturb
her last ordinary moment,
knowing that the next step
would cleave her life:
that this day
would slice her story
in two,
dividing all the days before
from all the ones
to come.
The artists would later
depict the scene:
Mary dazzled
by the archangel,
her head bowed
in humble assent,
awed by the messenger
who condescended
to leave paradise
to bestow such an honor
upon a woman, and mortal.
Yet I tell you
it was I who was dazzled,
I who found myself agape
when I came upon her—
reading, at the loom, in the kitchen,
I cannot now recall;
only that the woman before me—
blessed and full of grace
long before I called her so—
shimmered with how completely
she inhabited herself,
inhabited the space around her,
inhabited the moment
that hung between us.
I wanted to save her
from what I had been sent
to say.
Yet when the time came,
when I had stammered
the invitation
(history would not record
the sweat on my brow,
the pounding of my heart;
would not note
that I said
Do not be afraid
to myself as much as
to her)
it was she
who saved me—
her first deliverance—
her Let it be
not just declaration
to the Divine
but a word of solace,
of soothing,
of benediction
for the angel
in the doorway
who would hesitate
one last time—
just for the space
of a breath
torn from his chest—
before wrenching himself away
from her radiant consent,
her beautiful and
awful yes.
Rev Marius Louw