Sermon: The Blessed Virgin Mary

Browsing through a catalogue of discount books I came across, “You never call! You never write! a history of the Jewish mother.” I wonder if Mary complained like that to Jesus when he went off with his disciples. After all, she was a Jewish mother.  And today the church celebrates her which is why we heard the words of her song of praise, the Magnificat, as the Gospel reading. So what do we know about this woman who is rightly honoured by the Orthodox Church as Theotokos, Bearer of God or Mother of God? And how can we separate what the bible tells us from the pious tradition that has grown up around her over the centuries?

According to the biblical accounts in the Gospels, Mary grew up in Nazareth, a small village off the beaten track in Galilee, where she was engaged to a carpenter called Joseph. After the angel appeared to her with the news that she would become pregnant by the Holy Spirit, she accepted this proposition although her question, ‘How can this be?’ reminds us that faithful action does not always have to depend on having clear answers to all our questions,   sometimes we have to say ‘yes’ to God when the way ahead is not clear. And she took a big risk – becoming pregnant out of marriage resulted in stoning, but still she said ‘yes’ to God. After the birth of Jesus, Mary became one of the countless millions of refugees down the centuries, when she and Joseph fled to Egypt to escape the brutality of King Herod and some years later returned to Galilee. They went on to have other children including James, Joses, Judas, Simon, and some unnamed daughters. Thus we get the picture of Mary as the Jewish mother of quite a brood.

The Church believes that Jesus was fully divine and fully human and he took his humanity from Mary. So maybe he looked like her, had her mannerisms, spoke with her Galilean accent. She taught him about God and he learned of his heavenly Father’s love through her human love. Rowan Williams has said that if we ignore Mary, if we shrug our shoulders and say it doesn’t really matter what kind of person she was, we deny the real humanity of our Lord.

The bible is silent on Jesus’ childhood except for one vignette when he was 12 and they went to Jerusalem for the Passover festival – another indication of their piety as a family since this was a long journey from Galilee which many families would not bother to make – and Jesus stayed behind in the temple. Mary and Joseph assumed he was with the other children in the extended family group that was travelling back home, and when they realised on the first night that he was missing they had to go back to Jerusalem where after three days searching they found him in the temple. We are told that it was Mary, the frantic Jewish mother, who ticked him off.

But there is another side to Mary, she pondered and treasured things in her heart; she kept going back to them, searching for new meaning to them. What do you ponder in your heart? She did this when the 12 year old Jesus rebuked them for not understanding that he had to be in his Father’s house, just as she had done it years earlier when the shepherds had shown up in the stable saying that angels had told them about the birth of a saviour. No doubt she also remembered Simeon’s enigmatic words when they presented their baby in the temple, that a sword would pierce her soul. Mary had an inner life with God that must have shaped the way she raised Jesus and her other children as faithful Jews – when her son James later became a church leader it was of the Jewish wing of the church in Jerusalem.

During his boyhood Jesus was obedient to his parents and increased in wisdom and in years and in divine and human favour. They raised their son well. Mary was a good Jewish mother, with the right to be very proud of her son and not afraid to show him off – when the wine ran out at the wedding of one of her relatives in Cana, Mary expected Jesus to solve the problem. She told the servants to do whatever he told them and the result was the miracle of water being turned into vintage wine. Is this a confident and pushy mother, or also a woman who had pondered extraordinary things in her heart for many years and knew there was more to her son than met the eye? We know that her other children didn’t believe in Jesus and were antagonistic to his ministry, so there were tensions in the family and probably family rows, especially if Mary pondered what she had stored in her heart and supported her eldest son. She also had to face the anger of her neighbours when Jesus caused a storm in the synagogue by claiming to be the fulfilment of prophecy. It was not easy being his mother.

Mary was widowed before Jesus began his public ministry. However, she had extended family and on one occasion early on in Jesus public ministry when he was surrounded by crowds and had just called disciples to follow him she and the rest of the family turned up in force to remove him, questioning his sanity. They couldn’t get in to the house because of the crowds so sent a message telling him to come out. The impact of his reply – that his mother and brothers are not just his blood relations but those who do the will of God – depends upon his tone of voice which we don’t know. But in it we can hear the call to become his disciples, a call Mary accepted although his brothers didn’t follow until after the resurrection.

Mary was present at the crucifixion of Jesus, along with her sister, his aunt. That is more than many mothers could have coped with: this mother loved her son very deeply and it must have tested every ounce of her trust in God’s word to her – had she been wrong all these years? It gives rise to the artistic portrayals of something that is not recorded in the gospels: Mary holding the dead body of her son in what is traditionally known as the pieta. John has the touching story of Jesus – her eldest son – dying on the cross entrusting his elderly widowed mother for whom he had a duty of care, not to one of his siblings (who at that stage still didn’t believe in him) but to the disciple he loved. This echoes the words from the beginning of his ministry about his family being those who do the will of God. That disciple took her into his own home and cared for her from that moment on.

The gospels don’t tell us if Mary was present at the resurrection appearances, but if she was at the crucifixion, then taken home by one of Jesus’ disciples, other women did see the risen Jesus, and her other children switched suddenly from disbelief to passionate belief that Jesus was the Son of God, then we can assume she was present on some of the occasions when her son revealed himself as risen from the dead. Maybe only then some of the things that she had pondered in her heart for over thirty years began to make full sense. We know that she was part of the group that, in the ten days between the ascension of Jesus and Pentecost, gathered constantly for prayer. And therefore she was part of the group who were filled with the Holy Spirit, when a tongue of flame rested on her and she spoke in other languages about God’s deeds of power just as she had once done in the Magnificat. And in the days to come, that group of believers held everything in common, worshipped in the temple and broke bread and praised God at home.

That is just about all we know about Mary although tradition, I believe unnecessarily and unhelpfully, has added more. For example, the doctrine of her Immaculate Conception, that she was born without the stain of original sin, dates from 1476 and – as late as 1950, formalising a much earlier tradition – the Roman Catholic Church added her bodily Assumption into heaven. In the context of this sermon, my only comment is that, in adding stories like these, the Church has rubbed some of the human edges off Mary so that she is not a robust Jewish peasant woman but a woman who was born and died in ways that other humans do not experience, and thus has made her an idealised figure. That is a simplified statement and I am not here to preach a sermon about what I do not believe, but in another context than a pulpit I would argue that sections of the church have created this inaccessible ideal of womanhood and have then used it to set women up for failure by holding out this version of Mary as the model of the perfect woman.  From this pulpit, preaching from scripture, I believe that the bible shows her as a woman like us, struggling to be faithful to God in life and someone both women and men can honour and emulate. And the reason she is so honoured and we can try to be like her is that she said “yes” to God, and took the risk of being faithful in the midst of daily life.

So my concern today when we celebrate Mary is to reclaim the remarkable, perhaps feisty and vivacious, woman who was confronted with quite extraordinary events and remained faithful to God through them all. And that takes me back to the Gospel reading, when she almost whoops with joy at what God is doing in the world. Notice her ready acceptance of what God is asking of her. I don’t hear her words to Gabriel, “Here I am, the servant of the Lord. Let it be to me according to your word”, as the passive submission of someone who has no mind or will of her own, but as the enthusiastic co-operation of a lover of God. In the Magnificat she sings about what this means, a vast and worldwide concept of God’s salvation – scattering the proud, bringing down the powerful from their thrones, filling the hungry with good things. This is Mary, the peasant woman in a country occupied by the Roman political machine, articulating the yearnings of the poor and oppressed, refusing in God’s name to accept injustice. The Mary who sings with such joy is the same Mary we encounter in the Gospels discovering the day to day cost of that vision for her and for the son of whom she is so proud.

This Cathedral is dedicated to Christ, Blessed Mary the Virgin, and St Cuthbert – in other words to our Saviour, to the woman from whom he took his human nature, and to one of his most faithful local disciples. Today is one of our patronal festivals at this Cathedral but, in closing, I want to take you to another Cathedral, to Salisbury, where in the grounds there an Elizabeth Frink statue of Mary. She has her back to the Cathedral and is striding out in the direction of the city; she is quite haggard, her rib cage shows and she is not the beautiful young woman of our own Annunciation in the Galilee Chapel, nor the grief stricken mother of the pietà in the Chapel of the Nine Altars, but a determined older woman with a mission to proclaim the gospel in the city. She is a Jewish mother who has come, through a demanding life, to know that her son Jesus is her Lord and thus she has a gospel to share. That statue captures for me the Mary we celebrate today – Mary our sister in faithful discipleship who was sent in her final years to proclaim as once she did in the Magnificat, that in Jesus Christ God offers the world transforming hope. May we, who worship in a church dedicated to her, be as faithful in our day as she was in hers. Amen.

Isaiah 61:10-end, Luke 1:46-55