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The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
Almighty God, who hast given thy only Son to be unto us both a sacrifice for sin and also an example of godly life: Give us grace that we may always most thankfully receive that his inestimable benefit, and also daily endeavor ourselves to follow the blessed steps of his most holy life; through the same Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (Proper 15)
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The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 1:46-55
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 1:46-55
✛
Poor Mary
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Elizabeth was old and barren when the angel came to her husband, Zechariah, to announce that she would conceive and give birth to a child who would play an important, preparatory role in God’s plan of salvation. Six months later the angel came to Mary, a young cousin of Elizabeth’s, to announce that she would conceive—miraculously, without sexual intercourse—a child who would be the savior of the world. Almost as soon as the child was conceived in Mary’s womb, Mary “arose” and “went into the hill country with haste” to greet Elizabeth, the visitation of the young virgin great with child to the old barren woman great with child, the visitation also, in utero, of the savior of the world (in Mary’s womb) to his chosen forerunner (in Elizabeth’s womb). Elizabeth felt her child move within her, and interpreted that movement as him greeting his cousin; she said, “the babe leaped in my womb for joy.”
And at this point the two narratives of conception, the one out of time, coming to an old woman, and the other outside of nature, coming to a virgin: at this point, the narratives intertwine with every human narrative of desire and longing, every human narrative of being poor or small or passed over or unimportant. For we must not forget that in traditional cultures, for a woman not to have a child was a cause of shame. The book of Samuel opens with the situation of a man named Elkanah. Elkanah has two wives: one, Peninnah, had children; the other, Hannah, did not. We are told that he loved Hannah, and we are not told that he loved Peninnah, nevertheless Hannah found herself provoked and irritated by the other wife—and we can imagine despised and ill-spoken-of by many—and although Elkanah loved her, that was nothing over against the cruelty of the world.
And so it is, in modern societies as well as traditional, in so many other things besides having children: those who lack, those who fall short, those who cannot keep up are provoked by the better off, are irritated by them, are despised and ill-spoken-of. The world is cruel to the poor, the dense, the lame, the slow. Not every individual of course; Elkanah did love Hannah in herself and apart from her ability or inability to bring forth a child. But as Reinhold Niebuhr taught us, from his eminent post at a seminary in this city half a century ago, in this fallen world groups are always more sinful than individuals. When Mary goes to meet Elizabeth, the stories of all the poor and despised people of the whole human race from the fall of our first parents up to this very day, all those stories of oppression and suffering and sadness come together. They meet at that moment when Mary meets Elizabeth. And then Mary speaks.
My soul doth magnify the Lord. What Mary speaks is the hymn that we know as the Magnificat, a hymn so great that the church sings it every day even now, some two thousand and ten or twenty years later. One way you can tell that all those stories come together at that moment is by seeing that the Magnificat itself brings together many of the story-lines of the Old Testament. Every phrase that Mary speaks is a quotation or a close paraphrase of something already there in the Old Testament. It all comes together in her.
In the Psalms, for instance, we can find [35.9] “My soul shall be joyful in the Lord; it shall rejoice in his salvation.” And later [111:9] “He sent redemption unto his people . . . holy and reverend is his name.” And this [103:7] “the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him.” In 1 Samuel, Hannah asks God to look upon “the affliction of thine handmaid” [1:11] (remember that “handmaid” meant female slave, it was not a sweet word), and after God gives her a child Hannah says [2:1] “My heart rejoiceth in the Lord . . . in thy salvation.” Hannah also sang of the Lord making the rich poor and the poor rich, bringing low the mighty, raising up beggars to sit amongst princes.
There is much more. Mary alludes twice to things that Leah said after she gave birth to children—Leah who was not loved by Jacob, but who was loved by the Lord [Genesis 29:32, 30:13]. She quotes Moses in Deuteronomy [10:21] and the prophet Zephaniah [3:17] and Job [12:19] and Ezekiel [21:26] and more from the Psalms and Isaiah and Micah and from the end of 2 Samuel. All these story-lines and all the longing of the lowly world come together in the Magnificat.
+ + +
I have sometimes wondered why so many people have had for Mary such personal love—and “love” really is the only word for it. Why do so many people love her so? I was introduced to Mary by Susan Gavahan before she became Susan Austin. She introduced me to Mary by means of a variety of traditional devotions, carefully laid out in her small hand on pages of letters sent me during school vacations. She instructed me in the saying of the rosary, and gave me the lists of the traditional joyful mysteries, sorrowful mysteries, and glorious mysteries. She taught me the angelus and the regina coeli. All this was new and strange to me. I had been reared a Presbyterian and, although I knew Mary was important, I had no feeling for her. How had Susan come to love Mary, to have her so intimately tied to her life? This is a mystery. She was reared in a largely secular home, and her best friend in school had been the daughter of a Baptist minister.
Why is it that so many people have come to love Mary? Although it’s an impossible question, yet there are things we can say. Mary is a low person. She describes herself in words that, if you understand them, are not flattering words. It is not flattering to be a handmaid (a slave), to be lowly, to be poor. She says in the Magnificat—I change the words to make the point—He hath regarded the abased-ness of his female slave. Mary is a low person whom God has looked upon. And God having “regarded” her, lifts her up with a high task. Yet that task is just to be . . . a mother. God entrusts his son to her care: nothing else. She does not have to run for Congress. She does not have to go to university. She does not have to organize a religious order. Shall we say, she does not have to be much.
And look how it turns out. She does not become much. When Jesus was a boy at the cusp of his teen years, she did not understand him. When he was a man, teaching and healing thousands of people, she was peripheral to the action. And when he was not quite yet what we would call a middle-age man, she held his dead body in her arms.
She was lowly and God chose her, and it doesn’t seem to have changed much, not at least on the outside as the world might look at it. But women who ache to have children have looked to Mary, with love. Women and men who have teenagers they don’t understand have looked to Mary, with love. Parents whose grown children go off to do unexpected things that they don’t quite follow, they look to Mary. And those who have held the body of someone infinitely dear to them, the cooling, no-longer-breathing body, the body of someone too soon dead, they look to Mary, the lady of sorrows, and they love her.
She is not God, and isn’t that the point? Oh, I know the theology: that Jesus being fully God doesn’t change his full humanity, that being God doesn’t add anything to Jesus’ humanity, that Jesus (although God) is still one of us; but the feeling of solidarity, the movement of the heart, that seems easier, at least for many people, when we think of Mary. None of us, really, is very important. Even if you are a member of Congress, or have some fancy university initials after your name, or even if you have started a new religious order, you, I, we aren’t that important. We’re still just lowly people. What matters is for God to regard us, to look at us. He who raised Jesus from the dead will lift us up also. As he lifted up Mary. It won’t make us rich, indeed it might make us poorer. It won’t give us long life; it won’t make us smart; and my, it for sure won’t spare us a broken heart. But the hope is, he, who regards the lowly, will lift us up at the end, so that when all the millions upon millions of human stories come together, we can rise with Mary and say, My soul doth magnify the Lord.
[Note: For the Old Testament passages behind the Magnificat, see Raymond Brown, Birth of the Messiah, 2d ed., pp. 358ff.]
