Normally on this Sunday of the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, one hears a homily extolling Mary’s humility and obedience. When we consider what this solemnity proclaims – Mother of God - that hardly seems appropriate, and those who know their Church History will recall how hard fought the battle was to get her true status acclaimed and fixed in Church doctrine. In actual fact, all our Readings speak of a great overturning in the long established Jewish faith and the order of things as understood right from the earliest moments of Jewish religious practice. We need to consider just how momentous this act of God in Mary was and try to appreciate its power in our lives.
Our Reading from Numbers (6:22-27) takes us right back to the memories of the Exodus and into the early Iron Age, so well over a thousand years BCE. Graves of this age discovered in Jerusalem contain silver inscriptions with this early Priestly blessing of the people, the earliest discovered written text of the Hebrew Bible to give any established ‘prayer’. It gives us a vivid picture of a people close to God, and as Numbers is all about journeying from Egypt and the laying down of rules with strict punishment for their infringement we can appreciate that the early entrants into the Promised Land were made aware of their responsibilities. Certainly, as by this time they were engaging in warfare to take the land from the inhabitants. Being different from the pagan groups into whose midst they were entering had serious consequences. The last word of the blessing is the hope for ‘peace’. Rather than being about being safe and special, this blessing is pregnant with struggle and uncertainty.
Something utterly new was on the horizon, as we see in Luke’s Gospel. (2:16-21) Previously, in the work of Matthew, we have met ‘dreamers’, Joseph and the Magi, inspired by their meeting with God in their dreams to take dramatic risks all centred around the birth of the child from God destined to shake the Jewish establishment to its core. It’s very similar with our picture of Mary, for far from being the milk-sop of Victorian representation, she’s a feisty young woman and everything about her in the story in which she is enfolded speaks similarly of a great overturning of what made Judaism tick. First of all, we have those shepherds, another lot of dreamers or visionaries. Now in the society of the time, ‘knowing your place’ and sticking to it was fundamental to the way things worked, not to mention the good of the empire. Shepherds, because they lived wandering lives caring for their flocks, were outcasts with huge fierce dogs guarding against robbers and the wild bears, lions and other dangers of the countryside. They were smelly and unkempt and certainly never went to the Temple to pay their dues or worship. Yet as we see, God speaks to them! They are the first outsider witnesses to the Christ and in Luke’s Gospel – shock, horror on all sides. It is these men, outside the law, who meet the angelic messenger and respond to God’s invitation to go and ‘see’ the Child given by God. We must not overlook the power of Luke’s description of the angelic appearance, for it was very dramatic, life-affirming and altering to this group of ‘non-people’, suddenly become ‘martyrs’- in Greek, witnesses to the Christ – a shift in status much more dramatic than any leg-up in Greco-Roman society, they represent a cosmic shift in the order of the universe and of course suggest so much about Jesus and his future ministry among outcasts and away from respectable Jerusalem. Then there is Luke’s Mary, far from being the ‘simple maiden’ who just did as she was told, everything about Luke’s picture of her paints the portrait of a feisty girl. She answers the angel positively at the Annunciation, and then, far from a respectful withdrawal, hikes off into the hills of Judaea to visit her cousin Elizabeth, one similarly blessed; and remains with her until the birth of John the Baptist whose own parents show remarkable verve, even going so far as to change the tradition of naming in accord with the angelic message. Finally, Mary, we are told ‘Treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart’, as her child was circumcised according to Jewish law and named Jesus or Joshua, the one to lead his people into the new and eternal promised land. In no possible sense then is Mary quiescent, for that ‘pondering’ surely suggests a life-times exploring what her Son was called to be, and the cross where that would take them both. Eventually she, and a different John, would end up in pagan Ephesus, city of libraries and philosophers, and ripe for the spreading of the Gospel to the nations.
Sometime in the 50’s CE, Paul wrote his Letter to the Galatians (4:4-7). This we recall was to his convert Church which (only a few verses previously) turned its back on Jesus, returning to Judaism and the law. It provoked his outraged letter ‘Who has bewitched you?’, and his vehement defence of a law free Christianity, as salvation lay in Christ crucified alone; and he denigrated any possible role for the following of the rules of the law in salvation. What we have as our Reading is part of that renewed teaching to this wobbly Christian group, speaking both of the effect of the redemption Christ brought to those of Jewish faith and his brilliant exposition of what this meant. And what the cross brought was their and our ‘Adoption as sons of God’. Now formal adoption in the Greco-Roman Empire was the way in which the childless wealthy could pass on their often vast inheritances to a person brought into the family, thereby continuing the family name, and it was responsible for the continuance of some of the gems of that time, the Scipio's, the Paulii and so many other lines which would have died out. So for Paul to use this metaphor of great transformation, whereby the Christian believer was transformed from ordinary mortality, doomed to die to that of a son of God eternally, was to press home the enormity of the change that salvation in Christ wrought in each and every life. He presses it home, ‘God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts….. you are not a slave any more’. That slavery – being stuck in mortal life is what dooms every human being, and now they enter into this staggering new life, rich beyond dreaming as ‘heirs of God himself. This almost unthinkable transformation of the human being who believes in Jesus is the outcome of the cooperation of God with humanity in the flesh and choice of Mary. For most of Judaism, which kept a careful division between the human and the divine this would be a step far too far, but for those pagans who would ultimately be drawn to Christianity this staggering outburst of divine grace is affirmed as we recognise Mary’s graced response in her Title Theotokos, Mother of God, and we so tarnished creatures are enabled to meet God face to face in the human body of Jesus.
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