Christmas. Adam C. English
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her heart” (Luke 2:19). Even if we credit Mary with unflinching faith, her resolute response to the annunciation is still surprising given her marital status.
As a young girl promised to a man but not yet married, she must know her fate teeters on a socially precarious needle. She has pledged herself to Joseph. As the husband-to-be, Joseph can exercise his rights and divorce her without recompense or explanation. Joseph, not Mary, holds the power in the relationship. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gospel of Matthew focuses on his encounter with the angel as opposed to hers. In Matthew, he is the active agent: Joseph receives the nighttime visit from the angel, Joseph marries Mary, Joseph names the child Jesus (Matt 1:18–25). But, and here is what is really surprising, it must be remembered that even in Matthew’s account, God usurps Joseph’s rights over the girl.55 Before Joseph has any say in the matter, “she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:18, RSV). The angel of the Lord only consults Joseph after the fact. And what is more, for having such a seemingly central role in the drama, he is not granted any speaking lines. We have not a single recorded word from the husband of Mary.56 Gently then, God’s Holy Spirit lays a hand on the primordial privilege of patriarchy. The unquestionable rights and prerogatives of the head of the house have been side-stepped and overshadowed. The privilege is not broken, only loosened, and only for a brief festal moment. But the moment is divine, after all. The crack in male privilege is almost imperceptible, but it is there. By God’s grace it will grow.
But for now, we need to return to Mary. Can we get closer to her thoughts?
In March of 2004 a very unlikely meeting took place between the Nobel prize-winning peace advocate Desmond Tutu and a convicted criminal seven months from his date of execution in Texas. Dominique Green had been tried and convicted for a murder that occurred during the course of a robbery in Houston. While on death row, Dominique began a correspondence and friendship with the writer Thomas Cahill and, through a serendipitous series of events, Thomas Cahill was able to arrange a meeting between Dominique Green and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Archbishop Tutu sat down in a tiny cubicle facing a window of thick double glass and waited for the inmate to arrive. On either side of the glass there was a telephone receiver. Through the handsets, visitor and prisoner can converse with each other. Dominique was led in shackled at his wrists and ankles. After his hands were unbound, he sat down, facing the glass and Desmond Tutu. Dominique placed his right hand against the cold, thick pane of glass, a hand that his mother had permanently scarred when she held it over a gas burner, and Archbishop Tutu followed his lead and put his own polio-weakened hand against the glass. It was the closest the two would be allowed to come. Thomas Cahill left them to their own private meeting. As he waited in the adjoining room, he heard peals of laughter and the sounds of genuine friendship and knew that these two strangers would get along just fine.
After Archbishop Tutu finished his hour-and-a-half visit with death-row inmate Dominique Green, he thanked the warden and the prison officials, and then headed across the street to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Livingston, Texas. The church had been asked to host him for the press conference. Swarms of media and news agencies had gathered to cover the story. The church, having graciously agreed to let him hold his press conference there, in turn asked him to celebrate Eucharist. Without hesitation he agreed. The Bible passage assigned by the lectionary for the day of his visit narrated Gabriel’s announcement to Mary of Nazareth that she was to become the mother of Jesus Christ. Speaking to the gathered congregants, reporters, and onlookers, Archbishop Tutu imagined Mary’s response:
“What? Me!! In this village you can’t even scratch yourself without everybody knowing about it! You want me to be an unmarried mother? I’m a decent girl, you know. Sorry, try next door.” If she had said that, we would have been up a creek. Mercifully, marvelously, Mary said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word,” and the universe breathed a cosmic sigh of relief, because she made it possible for our Savior to be born.57
Desmond Tutu’s imaginative musing reminds us that Mary could have told the messenger of the Lord “No.” Indeed, she had every reason to say “No.” And yet, at the risk of her respectability, her standing in Nazareth and before Joseph, she mercifully and marvelously said “Yes.” Mary’s yes is the model for our own responses to God’s will. Her yes had moved Archbishop Tutu to say yes to the invitation to meet with a convicted criminal awaiting execution in Texas. In the face of the cold efficiency of the criminal justice system that cannot help but perpetuate the cycle of victims and offenders, the good Archbishop would have us risk as Mary risked, and be the bridge of salvation that only God’s mercy can build.
Handmaiden of the Lord
A common subject of fifteenth-century Renaissance painters was the annunciation, and sometimes these artistic masters would show a ray of light shafting through a high window onto the young Mary. We look at it and see it as a spotlight drawing the viewer’s eye to center stage, the submissive Mary. And it is that, but there’s more. Theologically, these paintings show exactly what happens in the incarnation: just as the light passes through the window pane without shattering, warping, or destroying the glass, so the Spirit of God implants the holy Son in the womb of Mary without shattering her person or wrecking her body. The light comes through the other side of the window pane unaltered, so the Light of the world comes through Mary unaltered—abundantly radiant and radiating. Or, to use another comparison from the tradition of the church, on the mountain of God and in the presence of Moses the bush blazed and crackled with fire, yet was not consumed. So the Lord of heaven and earth tucked and curled into the womb of the virgin, yet the womb did not crack or explode. The Holy Spirit overshadowed this young girl upon whom the weight of God rested, and yet she lived. We step back to wonder how. Even more intriguing, why Mary? Why was she alone chosen from all the women in the world who ever have existed or will exist to be the mother of our Lord? Why did she receive this honor? Did she distinguish herself by her own personal holiness or was she especially designed and groomed by God for this task?
The fourteenth-century mystic, Nicolas Cabasilas, tributes Mary’s own virtue and character. “The incarnation was not only the work of the Father, by His power and by His spirit, but it was also the work of the will and faith of the Virgin.”58 Bernard of Clairvaux goes one step further by saying that without virtue and humility, Mary’s virginity would not have been sufficient for her to be the mother of our Lord. Eve was a virgin when she ate of the fruit and sinned, which proves that virginity is no guarantee of virtue. Mary had both virginity and humility.59 Indeed, she was more than simply a not-yet-married girl, she was a woman after God’s own heart, a model of virtue and character. For this reason it is said Mary conceived in her heart before in her womb. She had faith before she had a baby inside her. She was found by the angel to be pure and unblemished.60 Mary proved herself to be a faithful servant of the Lord and allowed herself to be made the “mother of God.”61
Mary did not initiate these astounding events, of course, God did. Alongside Mary’s personal holiness we should pay attention to God’s grace. Prior to Mary’s virtue is God’s decision. Is it not the case that God selected, prepared, and sanctified the vessel of the Lord for this honor? Her unique privilege as the mother of God came about by a special act of divine will for the sake of salvation history. The Holy Spirit radiated, illumined, and sanctified the soul of Mary as it did Moses’s when he met the Lord God atop Mt. Sinai. Just as the blinding luminescence that glowed upon Moses’s face even after he descended from the mountain was not his own, so her light was not her own. It was a reflection of the true Light. To extend this “light” imagery, we might say that if God incarnate can be called the sun of the world, then Mary is the moon. She does not generate light herself, but as a reflector of the sun she is the brightest object in the night sky.
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