22nd December 2024

Mary - 22/12/24 – Martin Mowat

Readings:  Matthew 1:18-24 and Luke 1:46-55

You’ve probably heard the statement that the New Testament is in the Old concealed, and the OId Testament in the New revealed, so in fact, even though it’s Christmas, there are plenty of Old Testament heroes that we could legitimately talk about this morning.

But we won’t. During my own Advent meditations there has been one New Testament person who has come to my attention in a particular way, and that’s Jesus’ mother. If you’ve been listening to Lectio 365, they have been talking about her quite a lot recently too.

Mary is, of course, particularly revered by the Catholic church, and those of you with a Catholic church background possibly know far more about her than I do. In Protestant traditions, though, she is mentioned very little.  

This morning, let’s give some thought to who she was, and the role that she played, not just in the nativity, but in history as a whole.

As for her ancestry, this has been provided for us by Luke. She was of the tribe of Judah, he tells us, and a descendant of people such as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and also, rather charmingly, of our friends Boaz and Ruth.

God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, he tells us, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. (Luke 1:26–27) 

In the culture of her time, as in rural Middle East today apparently, a woman had to belong to someone, and her sexual purity was enormously important. So at a relatively young age – anything from 12 to 14 – a marriage would be arranged, by the parents, with someone suitable. There would then follow a legally binding engagement (that’s the the ‘pledged to be married’ part) in which the girl stayed with her parents, under their supervision. Only after this did the formal wedding occur, when she would move to her husband’s house. 

So Mary was in that ‘in-between stage’ of the marriage process: still with her parents but legally bound to Joseph. 

The Bible tells us nothing about Mary’s parents or about her home-life.  Some traditions think that she was herself “immaculately conceived” but were that really true, you would think the Bible would mention it, which curiously it doesn’t.

We don’t know very much about Joseph, either.  It seems likely that he was at least in his 20s or perhaps even older, though I have read that he could have been still in his teens.  I have to say, though, that I find this figure of him, positively middle aged and with almost as little hair as I have, rather alarming.

It seems that both families were of modest means because, after Jesus was born, and his parents went to give the mandatory offerings, they give the sacrifices expected of poorer people. 

So Mary was, to all intents and purposes an ordinary girl, in a town that was considered to be something of a spiritual backwater, at a time when, at least 400 since the last book of the Old Testament had been written, God seemed to have fallen silent. 

The very last thing in the world that she would have expected was an angelic visitation, and not just any old angel, it was the big boss of the angels, Gabriel himself, not that she probably knew much about angelic hierarchy. 

Those of us who have never met an angel perceive them as harmless, but actually, in most Biblical accounts, the people who met them face to face found it to be a terrifying experience. 

His announcement was probably one of the most extraordinary statements ever made to anybody. It was not just that she was to have a son from a miraculous conception but that in him all the prophecies of the Old Testament were to be fulfilled. 

Mary, even in her early teens, seems already to have a good grasp of what these were, as we heard in the Magnificat that xxx read for us earlier.

The news must have taken a few moments to sink in. Then, when it did, she must have been utterly overwhelmed. She was going to be pregnant, more than that, she would be an unmarried mother in a society that had very firm ways of handling teenage girls who had been up to no good. 

Not only afraid, Mary must have been puzzled. Why me? Surely this angel had got the wrong village, the wrong house, the wrong Mary.

Could this be really happening to her? And if so, the angel didn’t seem to know the basic facts of biology. ‘How will this be,’ she asked, ‘since I am a virgin?’  A very reasonable question.

But what would her parents say?  Would they believe her story about the angel? Worse! What would her fiancé say?  To all intents and purposes she was going to be in deep trouble !

Yet Mary’s final response tells us so much about her as a person. Mary, a mere teenager, simply says, ‘I am the Lord’s servant; may it be to me according to your word.’ 

What Mary did next is extraordinary.  Presumably with her parent’s permission, she walked some 80 miles to visit and consult an aged and saintly relative called Elizabeth, who was married to an old priest called Zechariah, because she too, the angel had told her, was to have a son miraculously. 

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Elizabeth immediately declared that the girl before her was to be ‘the mother of my Lord’, thereby instantly confirming everything that Gabriel had said. She also told Mary how blessed she was for having believed what God had said. Notice God’s grace to Mary at that moment. 

Now she knew it was true, she was indeed pregnant, and the son she was to have was the promised Son of God, David’s heir, the Messiah, the ‘Lord’. Her heart was full to bursting point.  

“My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour, …” she sang. “From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me – holy is his name.”

After 3 months, when the bulge in her stomach would have been beginning to show, she walked those 80 miles home again, to face the music. But now what people were going to think or say didn’t matter to her. She was a girl on a mission.

Meanwhile, Joseph was struggling with the news too. We don’t know when he found out that Mary was pregnant but when he did he was faced with an appalling dilemma.  Would he defend his own honour in a public divorce, which would publicly and permanently humiliate Mary,  in the uncertain hope of saving his own reputation? 

No, bless him, he planned a private divorce in order to avoid any public ‘naming and shaming’. 

But God graciously intervened and sent another angel to Joseph in a dream, demanding he go one step further, and take Mary home as his wife. The child was of God and he was to name him Jesus because ‘he will save his people from their sins’ (Matthew 1:21).

Amazingly Joseph obeyed. Ignoring the inevitable gossip, he took Mary in as his wife, putting her and the child under his protection, and thereby adopting the child into the family of David.  He was a hero too.

And the rest, as they say, is history.  Mary married her carpenter, had her baby, and subsequently had 3 more. I would like to say that they all lived happily ever after, but at some point, the poor young woman seems to have lost her husband. I so wish we knew more about what sort of person he was, what sort of father he was, and what happened to him. 

So, when she was in her mid to late 40’s, it was alone that she had to face an ordeal that no parent should ever have to face. I’m talking about the crucifiction.

Charlotte and I recently watched a TV programme about the renaissance recently, perhaps you saw it too.  It showed a simply amazing carving by Michelangelo called the Pieta. Almost 5'9" tall and 6'5" wide, it took him two solid years’ work to carve it from a single piece of Carrara marble, and it depicts Mary, sitting with her dead son on her lap.  The expression on her face is haunting.  It’s certainly not an image that you would expect to see on a Christmas card, but, as I say every year, it’s the events of Good Friday that give Christmas it’s context.  

Mary wasn’t just a hero, she was a super-hero. Why, because she sacrificed her whole life to mother a Saviour.