Dec. 24, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 1: 39-56

No persona in the literary and artistic traditions of Christianity has captured the imagination as has Mary – or Mariam (MUD-ee-ahm) – said to have been the mother of Jesus. Unlike others in the cast of the drama known as the New Testament – say, John the Baptist, Herod the Tetrarch and Pontius Pilate – Mary seems largely to be character created, perhaps originally by St. Mark as he took account of the reaction of a crowd marveling at the power of Jesus’ teaching: Is this not the son of the carpenter and of Mary and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us? [Mark 6:3]

Miriam was as common a given name for female children among First Century Palestinian Jews as Jesus (Yeshuah) was for males. It is not clear if the name “Mary/Miriam” is meant as a particularity or to denote a kind of Everywoman. You can take it either way. The recent rave movie depicts the character as a particularity – as a real person in real time having a very real thing happen to her.

The idea of the character being a virgin – that is to say, sexually inexperienced – grows out of the gospel writer Matthew’s misreading (perhaps deliberate) of a Hebrew word (almah) actually meaning “young woman of marriageable age.” The idea was helped along by the more ancient myths of supernatural births of such luminaries as Augustus Caesar. There are also the late medieval and Victorian ideals of love without sex (and its opposite) and of Platonic relationships unsullied by the desires of the flesh.

Truth to tell, we know next to nothing about Jesus himself and even less about the woman who would have given birth to him. What we do know is how the various historical traditions of Christianity have created characters for her to inhabit. The Marian story is not about esoteric obstetrics and gynecology. What it’s about is spelled out in the reprise of an ancient Hebrew hymn that St. Luke placed on the lips of his version of Mary. Here it is in part in its formal English translation:

He hath showed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud
in the conceits of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he hath sent empty away.

There she was in Luke’s fertile imagination – a young woman pregnant in betrothal just short of wedlock, far from home trying to cope with what she had been told about the future person stirring in her womb. Luke wanted her to feel what her kinswoman of note, Hannah, was said to have felt on the verge of giving birth to Samuel, one of the heroes of ancient Israel, namely that something momentous was afoot.

All Israel and her children stand out in history as survivors of pogrom and persecution, of deprivation and degradation, always at the hands of malign powers. The Marian vision is that the imminent momentous thing will put down the mighty from their seats, and exalt the humbled and meek, will fill the hungry with good things, and dismiss the rich with what they have and not a soupçon more.

That is the Marian vision. It is why her first post-partum callers were said to have been shepherds: poster children for those at the bottom of the economic heap. The Marian vision is one of economic and social justice – wrenched, if necessary, from the grasp of those who would withhold it. Next time your eyes fall on a nativity scene, think about that.

© Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.