AVE MARIA

“AVE, MARIA”

            The famous song about Mary resonates in the Christmas season.  It was written in 1825 by Austrian composer Franz Schubert, and my first encounter with it was to hear my Catholic friends in high school say that they had to say so many “Hail, Mary” prayers to get her intervention with God on their behalf.  The song, like Mary herself, has a complicated history.  It was based on Sir Walter Scott’s poem “Lady of the Lake,” written in 1810. 

            Mary’s story in Luke’s Gospel does not begin in splendor but rather in terror and complexity.  She is a young woman engaged to be married to a Galilean carpenter named Joseph, and it is no doubt an arranged marriage.  The angel Gabriel appears to tell her that she has been chosen as a possible candidate to birth the Messiah.  Gabriel gets around in the Bible – he appears also to Daniel to help him interpret his visions, and he has just encountered Zechariah earlier in Luke’s Gospel to tell him that he will have a son who will become John the Baptizer.  Gabriel also appears in the Qur’an, consoling Adam after the Fall and giving Mohammed messages and guidance from Al’lah. 

            In Luke’s gospel, he greets Mary with strange words:  “Hail, O favored One!”  They are strange words because the words that he shares with her don’t seem favorable at all.  He asks her to allow herself to become pregnant with the Messiah, to become pregnant by someone other than Joseph her fiancé.   These are troubling words because they require that Mary allow herself to be moved further to the margins.  She is already marginalized as a woman, and now she is asked to put herself at risk of the death penalty because she will be pregnant by someone other than her betrothed.  She is the property of her father, being passed on to be property of her husband.  She has no agency in most of her life, but now Gabriel is asking her to have agency and to say “yes” to this dangerous request.

            Obviously Mary is afraid, and Gabriel responds with the words that resonate throughout these Christmas stories in the Bible:  “Don’t be afraid.”  Don’t be dominated by fear.  Gabriel tells her that God’s power will come upon her, and she will be filled with the fertile power of God.  She will become pregnant in the famous but incorrectly named “Virgin Birth” – it is rather the “Virgin Conception.”  The silly Alabama official who sought to justify Roy Moore’s abuse of young girls by citing this story obviously had completely misunderstood (or perverted it, more likely) it.  The point of the story is that males had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus – Joseph did not get Mary pregnant by abusing her.  Or, as Sojourner Truth put it so well at the Women’s Convention in Ohio in 1851:  “Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from?  Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!  Man had nothing to do with him!”

            We don’t know what motivated Mary to say “yes,” but she does say “yes.”  As she puts it:  “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.”  She puts herself at great risk to be the loving source of the power of God.  This decision to say “yes” has been used by all sides over the centuries – in the early part of the 20^th century, belief in the “Virgin Birth” became a requirement to be ordained as a minister.  Margaret Atwood understood how this radical decision could be misused and entitled her famous novel “The Handmaid's Tale” based on Mary’s words.

            If we seek to put this “yes” back into its original context, it is a reminder that God often asks us to take radical steps of love, steps that take us towards the margins.  When she says “yes” to Gabriel, Mary yields any small vestige of power that she might have – she has truly allowed herself to be moved to the outer margins of society.  Her political fate now rests in the hands of her fiancé Joseph, and next week, we will look at his response.  While God is working in her and for her, it is Joseph and the patriarchy who will decide if she will live. 

            Even in this precarious position, and perhaps because of if, Mary’s eyes and heart are opened wider.  After she receives the support of her cousin Elizabeth (now 6 months pregnant with the fetus who will become John the Baptizer), Mary’s vision deepens and sharpens.  She sings what has come to be known as “The Magnificat” in Luke 1:46-55, in which she sees the Christian vision of God’s turning the order of the world upside down:  “God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich God has sent away empty.”

            As we have seen in the election of Donald Trump, the rich are exceedingly threatened by such a vision.  As we think about these things in this Christmas season, and as we are tempted to think of sweet baby Jesus, let us remember what a dangerous and political and surprising story this is.  And, may we hear Gabriel’s words to us: “Ave, Nibs….” Ave, {put your name in here}.”  May we hear how we are being asked to have God’s Spirit born in us.  May we have Mary’s spirit of courage and love to say “Yes.”