+ ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed’, sings Mary.
But why, Mary’s just a simple girl from Galilee? One reason is that men have it easy, at least when it comes to having babies. The male part of making a baby is quite short but the female part takes about nine months. One hopes the father is around but it is the mother who does all the work with her own body. Mary did that for Jesus.
In a minute we’ll say the Creed, what Christians of all churches believe. We will say of Jesus Christ that “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and was made human”. What grates there for some of us here is the new phrase ‘was made human’, we are used tosaying Jesus ‘was made man’. What the Greek and Latin words, however, say is that Jesus was made human, not that he was made a male human – which is what ‘man’ means for many people today. He obviously was male but that is not the point, the Creed says he was ‘enfleshed’, the literal meaning of incarnate, as a human being like us. He didn’t have a human father, hence Mary is called in the Creed ‘the Virgin Mary’. This is also controversial, we all have human fathers even if we don’t know them, but the most important thing is not the biology but what it means. Jesus takes his humanity from Mary and has his divinity because he is the Son of the Father.
There is only one Jesus so Mary the mother of Jesus is also mother of God. If she is not, then either Jesus is not God or there are two Jesuses. The whole Christian world in 431 AD at the Council of Ephesus decided that to be a Christian is to believe that Mary is the Mother of God, and the decision of that Council as accepted today by all Churches, Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Protestant. It’s not an optional extra. But it does help us understand why Mary said ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed’. We call her blessed because she is the Mother of God. How can a finite and mortal human become the Mother of God? Only if the infinite and immortal God becomes a finite and mortal human being, God becomes one of us – this is what Christianity is all about.
But what difference does it make to us? Well, the answer is in the Creed. Just before the bit about Mary we say, “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven”. In Jesus, through Mary, God became human to save us, he did it for us. Why? Because we humans are all mixed up in sin, death and evil. If you doubt this or think it is a bit negative, let me tell you a story from Ukraine. Our curate Ross and I drove through the area called Ivano-Frankiv on our trip with Jeeps for Peace, we passed by a small village which the Russians struck yesterday with a hypersonic ballistic missile, they are very accurate and the target was a family house where an 8 year old boy called Volodymyr and his family were killed. Russia is a terrorist state which bombs homes, schools, hospitals and pizza restaurants but it is not the only agent of evil in this world. If you think our world is not one of sin, death and evil, you simply need to open your eyes to realise you are wrong. In Jesus, through Mary, God became human and got mixed up in all this sin, death and evil, to show us the way through it out into the realm of goodness, truth and love which he called the Kingdom of Heaven. This path goes through the darkness of the cross but without Mary the path doesn’t exist. No Mary, no Jesus; no Jesus and we’re still stuck in the mess with nothing but death to look forward to. No wonder she said, ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed’.
So, we have something to celebrate today, but let’s go back to the Creed. We’ll say, “by the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus became incarnate of the Virgin Mary”. But actually that is not a good translation of the original Greek. That says Jesus “was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary”. I make no apology for looking closely at the words, we have lots of teachers here after all. Jesus was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary makes it look like the Spirit was doing all the work and Mary was just like a lump of human plasticene. The real translation makes Jesus becoming human, and thus our salvation, a joint work and that’s the idea I want to explore in my last few minutes.
In making a baby, the man does his stuff and the woman’s body works away for nine months making the child. There are two types of Christianity, in one God does everything and we just submit. This type has no special place for Mary. She just has a baby. In the other type, I would say real Christianity, God waits patiently, with real courtesy, until Israel produces the right woman. Then he asks her through the angel and waits to see if she consents to allow his to become human. Mary shows us that we are called to work with God, to cooperate in salvation, to help God by helping each other. We ask each other to pray for us, as part of this, and this mutual help doesn’t stop when we die so we can ask Mary and the saints to pray for us.
Today we remember Mary’s death when she was reunited with Jesus in heaven. We see what that means in the first reading where the simple girl from the Galilee has become the Ark of the Covenant and the throne of God, a woman clothed with the sun, crowned as Queen with the stars of heaven and with the moon beneath her feet. We don’t make Mary a goddess, she is greater than any goddess because she is the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven. This, and some of the hymns we are singing today, feels strange to those of us brought up in a Protestant tradition but don’t be afraid of it, it is rooted in the Bible, it takes the experience of women seriously, and is realistic about the dignity of our God-given freedom. Our God wants us to work together for salvation and to join the generation who call Mary blessed.
Mary, Queen of heaven and simple girl from Galilee, pray for us now and at the our of our death, because you are the Mother of God, you are close to your Son in heaven and he wants us to love you.
