Regarding Mary
The Fourth Sunday in Advent
The Revd Dr William Beaver
20 December 2015
The Readings (year C) are:
Micah 5.2-5a
Canticle: Magnificat
Hebrews 10.5-10
Luke 1.39-45
This, the last Sunday in Advent, is when we turn our attention to Mary
to whom this church is dedicated.
For Saxon and Norman churches it was a very popular ascription. After
all, life on this planet was not easy and you needed all the extra
terrestrial help you could muster to get through it as your children died,
your husband beat you, your crops failed. To whom do you turn for
solace? There, in majesty, up on his throne was Christ the King, the
Lord. His job, as the people who stood where you now sit were very
aware, was to judge both the quick and the dead.
For it was Christ who decided whether you went to heaven or hell. And
equating Him with their temporal masters here on earth, if they were
not interested in your petty problems, why should the King of Kings?
Indeed every action or reaction to Jesus was subservient. You knelt
when addressing him. You clasped your hands in feudal loyalty and
your language was of a villein to a lord.
So no wonder mediaeval men and women looked to Mary with such
devotion. She was their go-between. After all, you would not dare to
approach your baron, much less Christ, without an intermediary, a
friend in the court, an intercessor. And that was the task they gave to the
Mother of God. She was a mother and mothers understand. Mothers are
compassionate and, most importantly, mothers will have a word in their
son’s ear.
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She was everywhere. For centuries she was the most popular figure in
western art in any medium and here in Iffley, from the late 1200s
(without doubt) she knelt in carved wood, high above the heads of the
people along with St John, polychromed, beautiful, adoring her crucified
son on a screen separating the chancel from the nave.
She was in the moon, she was in the stars. She was the stella maris. She
was invoked in the telling of beads, in simple mantras, in books for
church, in books for the expanding literate and, above all, in earnest
prayer, ‘Bright virgin, steadfast in eternity, trusted guide, turn your
thoughts to me. In the terrifying squalls in which I find myself, alone
and rudderless, take pity on me.’
And whilst she was crowned in majesty, she was underfoot as well.
From spring to late autumn every week would bring fresh evidence of
her beauty to refresh the beholder: Lady's Lace and Mary's Fan. Lady
Cushion, Lady Smock and Lady's Mantle. St. Mary's Seed and Lady
Never-fade. Lady Comb, Madonna Lily, Lady's Ear-drops. Lady Pins
and Lady's Looking-glass. Through the year, the people of Iffley would
have been able to pray the litany of Loretto, simply by naming the
flowers at their feet!
As time went on the line between devotion and worship blurred and she
was as dominant a force in the minds of people as God. After all, she
was His mother.
But come the Reformation and the intellectuals who were angry at the
excesses of the Church began asking difficult questions about who did
and did not hold the keys to heaven. The spotlight fell full on Mary.
Show us, they said to the faithful people of this land, where in the Bible
does it say Mary can wipe away sin? Show us where in the Bible that she
can intercede for us? Prove that she is a verba mediatio, a mediatrix.
Well, what we can show you, O you simpeltons, that she is a
superstition swathed folk religion and gobbling up all your money. And
above all, they argued to the Church’s horror, nothing nor anyone
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should stand between mankind and God save our only mediator and
advocate, Jesus Christ our Lord who is indeed judge of all.
And as this powerful thinking coincided with Henry VIII’s desire to pull
away from Rome’s authority, so it was that within the space of three
decades, no more, generations of devotion to Our Lady were swept
away.
Our Lady’s Fingers became foxgloves; Our Lady’s Mantle became
morning glories, Our Lady’s Tears to spiderwort. Almost all the flowers
of the field named after Mary, some 500 in English, were encouraged to
disown the Mother of God. Her statues were pulled down, paintings
ruined or privally put away, vestments cut up.
It was a very thorough expunging. So over the years in England and the
protestant lands of Europe, Mary has slipped from our awareness as we
are more than slightly embarrassed by the blue and white, chipped
plaster image of her. She seems to us locked in with Bing Crosby and
Ingmar Bergman in The Bells of St Mary’s. We don’t understand the hold
she has on Roman or Orthodox Catholics, especially in poor countries,
and she makes us uneasy.
But her relegation from almost being a fourth member of the Trinityto a
walk-on part by the reformers and then the hard-line Puritans had an
unintended consequence. No longer were the ameliorating, healing
maternal attributes of the Godhead so easily understandable, accessible
and capable of emulation. And it can be argued that this robbery was
especially hard on women. No longer did a woman have someone who
would understand when her husband beat her. When she lost another
child. When the rope on her bucket broke.
No longer was there a mutual regard between an understanding Mary
in heaven and a devoted follower below. For many, the gossamer strand
between heaven and earth broke. And until Jesus the Judge began to be
reinvented in the 19th Century as being gentle, meek and mild
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there was little in protestant England to fill that vital gap and many
would also argue that it is still not completely bridged.
So on this pleasant Sunday in Advent, when the Biblical Mary is much
on our minds shall we conclude by thinking of her as she was, not as she
became?
In a word she was remarkable and more than remarkable.
First of all, she early on recognised her role in the world. She got it and
her understanding of what she was to do is encapsulated in the
Magnificat we rehearsed this morning as we have in this very church
every Sunday evening since 1170,first in vespers and now in Evensong.
And it is in that prayer that we recall to mind how God helped her to
understand that she alone of all women had much to do for the good of
the world. And she accepted the challenge. Without God the design to
bring us his son could not have been set in motion, but without Mary, it
could not have been carried into effect. She was doing what God had
willed for her, voluntarily, with her free consent.
There she was, this 17 year old unmarried mother in the making, the
expecting and expectant girl-woman who had to confront her fiancé
with a thoroughly improbable tale. Then she had to endure a difficult
journey to Bethlehem riding on an ass in the last days of her final
trimester. She gave birth in a stable, and finally had to escape and evade
her way to Egypt to prevent her newborn son from being killed.
And then, despite what Mrs CF Alexander, the lyricist of Once in
David’s Royal City would have us believe, he did not always honour
and obey. That very son got lost in the temple and embarrassed her in
public at least twice.
Then when Jesus was in his early 30s, she found herselfbecoming a
celebrity mum during that three yearlong circus of his ministry. She
watched with apprehension as he was off and on, up front and close
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with some shady characters including a number of women she would
not want for a daughter-in-law. She then saw him killed before her very
eyes, held him as rigor mortis set in and witnessed his Resurrection only
for him to disappear.
But all the while, she held it together. She did not do victim. She faced
the challenges one by one and transformed them. And we might
legitimately posit that she took some quiet pride in knowing that what
she had done was worth it, was it was meant to be, as every traveller
coming back to her home with John told with wonder and awe of the
hundreds and hundreds of conversions of the poor and rich, free and
slave all around the Mediterranean, her son’s words, his message
spreading like a forest fire. How her son’s name, his teaching, his actions
was on the lips and in the hearts of more and more people every day,
bringing them hope, inculcating love into their behaviour. In her own
way and in her own time she was a Marianne. That is quite a lot for
anyone to get through, not least the mother of God.
So Mary, in short, ascertained what God’s will was and through
challenge after challenge kept the faith.in a way no other principal actor
in the drama of Jesus’s incarnation could. So let us take heart from the
reality of Mary’s life, this heavenly sent emissary not a dusty plaster
statuette dispensing notional favours, but a symbol of all that God
would have us be, all that God gives us in womanhood.
It is this new way to look at Mary. She becomes real again, symbol of
perseverance, of good, a wellspring of strength and generosity, and you
recognise it as it is, in fact, the default setting for most women.
So this Advent let us re-discover this agent of God and give thanks for a
church which, at long last, is recognising that we are only strong when
we are a community in which everyone is valued and everyone can give
and in giving receive. And that community includes the woman unto
which this church is dedicated:
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Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee! Blessed art thou amongst
women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother
of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et
benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro
nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae.
Amen.
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