Sermon
Lessons
Sunday 20 December 2015
Micah 5: 2 – 5a
Hebrews 10: 5 -10 St Luke 1: 39 – 45
Prayer of Illumination
Let us pray.
Holy God, Holy and Strong One, bless us at this time and through this sacred
season. May we be receptive to Your Presence and alive to the touch of Your
guiding providence. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. Amen.
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and [she said to Mary],
‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.’
St Luke 1: 41f
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is sometimes referred to as the Mother of
God; at other times, she is the Theotokos (the God-Bearer). Scholars
suggest that, given the culture of her society at the time, she would
have been 14 or 15 years old when her first child was born. It is a
matter of regret and sadness that the mother of Jesus is a source of
division for the Church rather than an inspirational figure that unites
us. The cause of that division almost certainly stems from a period
in the Church’s history when theology tended to emphasise the
divinity of Jesus and, at the same time, obscure His humanity.
Enthroned in heaven, Christ had become remote, a distant deity. The
pastoral gap was filled by the humanity, compassion and sensitivity
of Mary. Tragically, her continued elevation in the mind of the
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Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, has been her
downfall in the eyes of the Reformed churches. So, can the churches
put aside their squabbles of the past and be open to the spiritual
insights which Mary has to offer in pages of Holy Scripture?
In 1854, Pope Pius IX declared Mary to be the Immaculate
Conception. In common with other churches, the Roman Catholic
Church believed that Jesus was without sin. In order to preserve His
sinless state, the Pope said that, conceived in the womb of her
mother, St Anne, Mary was without sin. Coming as it did in the
middle of the nineteenth century, the doctrine of the Immaculate
Conception was intended to protect the sinless state of Jesus from the
advancement of scientific knowledge: the Pope feared the possible
implications of evolutionary theory and genetics. What would they
mean for the humanity of Jesus?
In the thirteenth century, there had been theological discussion
about the conception of Mary but, the greatest theologian of the day,
Thomas Aquinas, had resisted a doctrine of immaculate conception
on the grounds that, if Mary was without sin, she would not need to
be redeemed by Christ. In the sixteenth century, the greatest of the
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reformers, Martin Luther, said that Mary was born in sin of sinful
parents but that, conceived in her womb, Jesus was protected from
her sinfulness. On one level, these theological developments are
matters of the most profound faith: they articulate a community
wrestling with the identity and importance of Jesus. Yet, on another
level, the details, both Catholic and Protestant, seem bizarre and
otherworldly in contrast to where we are today. Are we open to the
spiritual insights which are offered by Mary in the pages of Holy
Scripture?
Mary is the Greek rendering of the Hebrew name Miriam. Miriam
means to be born, to stand upright and, in life, to live to all its
fullness. Hidden within her name, there is something of a clue to the
role she would play in history and also play for us today. The Gospel
writers were not crafting an historical narrative but writing salvation
history. Weaving together fragments of history, mythology,
spirituality and the liturgy of the Church, the evangelists were
inviting us to go on a pilgrimage, to explore our own spiritual
journey, to examine the inner life for ourselves.
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In the Gospel of St Luke, the drama of events moves at a considerable
pace. At the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel visits Mary promising
her a child. Soon, Mary hurries to visit her relative, Elizabeth, in the
hill country of Judea. Elizabeth is pregnant with John, who will one
day become the Baptist at the Jordan. In almost no time, after
enduring the journey to Bethlehem, Mary gives birth. An army of
angels appears to shepherds in their fields and they make their way
to the stable, to the manger, to see for themselves the face of the
Saviour. If we are to discern anything about Mary and learn a lesson
for our own spiritual life, perhaps the first detail to notice is that,
despite all that had happened, it is said that ‘Mary treasured all these
things and pondered them in her heart.’
For me, in matters of faith, the stories in Scripture and the
imaginative wanderings of the mystics, the spiritual giants of our
tradition, are to be treasured and pondered. Of course, we cannot
fail to apply our critical faculty but, I believe, in one sense, at least, we
are to be childlike in our faith. Faith is a love affair more than a
philosophical argument. We are to fall in love with the Sacred, the
Divine Mystery: to treasure all the riches that we have inherited and
ponder these things in our heart. If there are doctrines which
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bedevil us, the best response is to smile, to hold them for what they
are and do not be too Protestant, too literal.
In the New Testament, in the Gospels and the Book of Acts, there is
precious little said about Mary. She is mentioned only once in the
earliest of the Gospels, the Gospel of Mark and only twice in the latest
of the Gospels, the Gospel of John. Whenever she is mentioned,
however, it is almost always at a significant moment in the life or
ministry of Jesus, or in the life of the Early Church. In the Gospel of
Luke and the Book of Acts, Mary is present not only at the birth of
Jesus, quite obviously, but also at Pentecost, at the birth of the
Church. In the Gospel of John, she is present at the wedding feast in
Cana, the very start of Jesus’ public ministry and she is there at
Golgotha, at the foot of the cross, at the death of her son, her firstborn
child. In the Gospel of Luke, at the Presentation of Jesus in the
Temple, the priest, Simeon, tells Mary that ‘a sword will pierce her
own soul too’.
As we treasure and ponder the character of Mary, we see that, in
Cana, at the wedding feast, Mary believed in her son. With her whole
being, before any sign or revelation had taken place, Mary believed in
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Him. Whatever the meaning of the miracle of water into wine, it was
preceded by Mary’s faith, her belief in Jesus. In His ministry, Jesus
said, ‘Blessed are those who hear the Word of God and keep it.’ This
is true of Mary. The mystic, Eckhart, wrote of three births: the birth
of the Son from the Father, the birth of Jesus from Mary in Bethlehem
and, finally, the birth of the Son in the soul of every Christian. Jesus
is to be born in us: spiritually, Mary is our model.
She is also our model because she accompanies Jesus. Through our
own reflection and meditation, we too can journey alongside her Son.
Though she is often hidden, she stands at the cross with Jesus,
experiences her own God-forsakenness as she hears His cry of
desolation. At the cross, we do not see Peter, James, Andrew or any
of the rest, but Mary is there. She heard the scoffers mock her Son,
‘Come down from there if you can?’ From the cross, Jesus tells her to
take the Beloved Disciple as her son; in other words, her firstborn
Son is taking leave of her. Biblical scholars suggest that the binding
together of Mary and the Beloved Disciple is the embryonic inception
of the Church, the conception that will be born at Pentecost. Again,
at this new birth, Mary is present and integral. In Christian art, in
The Pietà, Mary holds the body of the One she embraced so often as a
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child. She lived through Holy Saturday and experienced for herself
the seemingly total absence of God.
There is no record of Mary encountering the Risen Christ and, if we
go with the original ending of the Fourth Gospel, there is no record of
the Beloved Disciple, the one whom Jesus loved especially, seeing the
Risen Christ either. In other words, the two people who were closest
to Jesus, those who loved Him the most, whose relationship was the
most intense and intuitive, do not ‘see’ the Risen Christ. It seems
that they are able to believe without ‘seeing’. For both Mary and the
Beloved Disciple, Christ was already born in them.
Christ is to be born in us, in the womb of the soul. In life, we are
always moving from one appointment to the next, another visit and
another piece of work. Often what lies behind our continual
busyness is a secret fear of failure; activity helps us feel important.
The religious philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard said, ‘If I were a doctor
and some one asked me what I thought might best be done, I would
answer: First of all be silent! Help others to be silent!’ ‘The sound
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of God is stillness. God appears to Elijah, not in the fire storm, but in
the sound of a gentle breeze.’1 Are we the inn or the stable?
As St Paul progressed on his spiritual pilgrimage, he was eventually
able to say, ‘Christ lives in me’. In the Gospel of John, Jesus spoke of
spiritual union with the Father and with His disciples. He said, ‘I am
in my Father, and you in Me, and I in you.’ Again, He said, ‘Those
who love Me will keep My word, and My Father will love them, and
we will come to them and make our home with them’.
Mary journeyed with Jesus, often hidden in the background, but there
nonetheless, present to all He experienced. If we can leave aside the
disputes of the past, we can at least agree that in the Gospel
narratives she is a model for us to emulate: we are to be as present
to Jesus today as she was to Him then; to care for Him as much as she
did; and, like her, to be sensitive to all that He taught and endured.
We are to see Him in all faces, embrace Him when He suffers in our
world, speak for the oppressed as she did and nurture a faith that lets
Him grow inside us to life in all its fullness. In a sense, we are Mary,
Miriam, born to stand upright, born for life in all its fullness. Amen.
1
Fritz Arnold Like Mary 39
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