M
Murmurs
Guest
Today the church celebrates the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. And while I have by chance a day off work (hooray!), and a desire to do something more fulfilling and spiritually nourishing than play on the Sims all day until 6pm Mass (!), I have a few thoughts which have struck me this morning.
Many people, especially protestants of whatever denomination, tend to associate Our Lady with the birth of Jesus – her radical, trusting, (fool-hardy?) fiat to the angel when she was invited to be the mother of the Son of God, and then her leading role in the Nativity story, and maybe little more. The Bible shows her as a woman much like us, struggling to be faithful to God in life and someone both women and men can honour and emulate. And the reason she is so honoured and we can try to be like her is that she said “yes” to God, and took the risk of being faithful in the midst of daily life. So in celebrating Mary, can we reclaim the remarkable, perhaps feisty and vivacious, woman who was confronted with quite extraordinary events and remained faithful to God through them all?
Before turning to Mary, I want to think about her son who is, after all, the reason we remember her at all. She knew him as her baby; we can imagine she taught him to walk; he no doubt spoke with her accent; maybe he looked very much like her. She fed him, was woken at night by him, taught him to pray, told him off when he was naughty (Son of God or not, all toddlers are troublesome) and generally saw the human side of him. There were those times when she was aware of something different about him. In contrast, 2,000 years on, sometimes I wonder if we are in danger of thinking of him as more divine than human. Perhaps the Constantinian emphasis of the kingly qualities of Jesus, as divine-emperor (which obviously suited Constantine and his successors politically!), has made him unapproachable for many and I suggest this affects how we understand Mary, whose role changed to fill the gap left by the loss of understanding of Jesus’ humanity. She is the mediatrix between humans and her son – we approach his Mother, beseeching her to bend her son’s ear on our behalf. If we reclaim a fuller understanding of Jesus’s humanity as well as his divinity, we gain a better perspective on Mary, his Mother.
At the Annunciation, and then in delivering the Magnificat, Mary gave her un-coerced “yes” to the monumental enterprise proposed to her by God. Her active consent was responsibly given, the outcome of dialogue with God’s angelic messenger. I think this shows her a more self-determined woman than the Church has allowed. It is radically different from the view of Mary which sees her expressing passive, humble obedience and then enjoins that attitude on all women. I have come to understand her words “let it be unto me according to your word” as excited anticipation of what wonders God is going to do through and with her, despite natural hesitation at the personal cost. It is not simply meek acceptance.
The gospels give us tantalising vignettes of this remarkable woman. She was wife to Joseph and mother to Jesus. But Mary appears to glimpse that the child she knew so well was also God incarnate. She kept the events of his birth and childhood in her heart and pondered them, as she no doubt did other things during his life, becoming for us a model of reflective prayer. Thus she was able to trust Jesus to respond to the wine shortage at the wedding in Cana; she might not have expected a miracle but she clearly expected him to do something.
Mary sought the company of others, in her network of friends and relatives. We read in St Luke that she stayed with Elizabeth for three months; her extended family was at the Passover in Jerusalem when they lost Jesus and found him in the Temple; we hear of her with (her?!) other children, the other women around Jesus, and disciples. Her example reminds us that we need one another and need to seek out one another for strength and support, fun and recreation, praise and prayer.
Then Mary, who stuck by her son throughout his life even when he appeared to rebuff her, watched him die an agonising death. In today’s terms, she’d understand the plight of women whose children are tortured and killed for political reasons, of women sold into prostitution or trafficked by criminals. She was probably in late 40s or early 50s by the time of the crucial events in the life of her Son – something, incidentally, that art tends not to portray: even pictures of her Assumption tend to show a figure akin to the young virgin with her child, a lifetime earlier. Rediscovering Mary as the older woman who was respected by the early church, having been there at its birth praying with the men (remarkable in itself) might be a perspective to balance the not-always-helpful focus on her virginity and motherhood as the sole definition of her example to women.
So, how can we honour Mary today and what can we learn from her? One suggestion might be to understand more of her in her context of first-century Palestine. To understand Mary as a remarkable, faithful woman in her own culture, with its particular religious, political and economic contexts, is to open the door to understanding our potential to be faithful and prophetic in our own contexts.
It also frees her from the saccharine docility that makes her too-good-to-be-true, which sometimes turns non-Catholics away from the faith (speaking from personal experience, once upon a time), and restores her as a woman of flesh and blood, and allows us to read intelligently into the New Testament’s silences, for example the indications in Acts 1 that she was active in the early church life. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that presenting Mary just as a mild, self-effacing woman, may say more about the ideal first-century Jewish woman than the woman we glimpse in the New Testament…
Many people, especially protestants of whatever denomination, tend to associate Our Lady with the birth of Jesus – her radical, trusting, (fool-hardy?) fiat to the angel when she was invited to be the mother of the Son of God, and then her leading role in the Nativity story, and maybe little more. The Bible shows her as a woman much like us, struggling to be faithful to God in life and someone both women and men can honour and emulate. And the reason she is so honoured and we can try to be like her is that she said “yes” to God, and took the risk of being faithful in the midst of daily life. So in celebrating Mary, can we reclaim the remarkable, perhaps feisty and vivacious, woman who was confronted with quite extraordinary events and remained faithful to God through them all?
Before turning to Mary, I want to think about her son who is, after all, the reason we remember her at all. She knew him as her baby; we can imagine she taught him to walk; he no doubt spoke with her accent; maybe he looked very much like her. She fed him, was woken at night by him, taught him to pray, told him off when he was naughty (Son of God or not, all toddlers are troublesome) and generally saw the human side of him. There were those times when she was aware of something different about him. In contrast, 2,000 years on, sometimes I wonder if we are in danger of thinking of him as more divine than human. Perhaps the Constantinian emphasis of the kingly qualities of Jesus, as divine-emperor (which obviously suited Constantine and his successors politically!), has made him unapproachable for many and I suggest this affects how we understand Mary, whose role changed to fill the gap left by the loss of understanding of Jesus’ humanity. She is the mediatrix between humans and her son – we approach his Mother, beseeching her to bend her son’s ear on our behalf. If we reclaim a fuller understanding of Jesus’s humanity as well as his divinity, we gain a better perspective on Mary, his Mother.
At the Annunciation, and then in delivering the Magnificat, Mary gave her un-coerced “yes” to the monumental enterprise proposed to her by God. Her active consent was responsibly given, the outcome of dialogue with God’s angelic messenger. I think this shows her a more self-determined woman than the Church has allowed. It is radically different from the view of Mary which sees her expressing passive, humble obedience and then enjoins that attitude on all women. I have come to understand her words “let it be unto me according to your word” as excited anticipation of what wonders God is going to do through and with her, despite natural hesitation at the personal cost. It is not simply meek acceptance.
The gospels give us tantalising vignettes of this remarkable woman. She was wife to Joseph and mother to Jesus. But Mary appears to glimpse that the child she knew so well was also God incarnate. She kept the events of his birth and childhood in her heart and pondered them, as she no doubt did other things during his life, becoming for us a model of reflective prayer. Thus she was able to trust Jesus to respond to the wine shortage at the wedding in Cana; she might not have expected a miracle but she clearly expected him to do something.
Mary sought the company of others, in her network of friends and relatives. We read in St Luke that she stayed with Elizabeth for three months; her extended family was at the Passover in Jerusalem when they lost Jesus and found him in the Temple; we hear of her with (her?!) other children, the other women around Jesus, and disciples. Her example reminds us that we need one another and need to seek out one another for strength and support, fun and recreation, praise and prayer.
Then Mary, who stuck by her son throughout his life even when he appeared to rebuff her, watched him die an agonising death. In today’s terms, she’d understand the plight of women whose children are tortured and killed for political reasons, of women sold into prostitution or trafficked by criminals. She was probably in late 40s or early 50s by the time of the crucial events in the life of her Son – something, incidentally, that art tends not to portray: even pictures of her Assumption tend to show a figure akin to the young virgin with her child, a lifetime earlier. Rediscovering Mary as the older woman who was respected by the early church, having been there at its birth praying with the men (remarkable in itself) might be a perspective to balance the not-always-helpful focus on her virginity and motherhood as the sole definition of her example to women.
So, how can we honour Mary today and what can we learn from her? One suggestion might be to understand more of her in her context of first-century Palestine. To understand Mary as a remarkable, faithful woman in her own culture, with its particular religious, political and economic contexts, is to open the door to understanding our potential to be faithful and prophetic in our own contexts.
It also frees her from the saccharine docility that makes her too-good-to-be-true, which sometimes turns non-Catholics away from the faith (speaking from personal experience, once upon a time), and restores her as a woman of flesh and blood, and allows us to read intelligently into the New Testament’s silences, for example the indications in Acts 1 that she was active in the early church life. It’s not unreasonable to suggest that presenting Mary just as a mild, self-effacing woman, may say more about the ideal first-century Jewish woman than the woman we glimpse in the New Testament…