I know Mary!

It is early morning on New Year’s Day. I am back from the party, and just hours away from getting on a plane and leaving the United States today after my whirlwind, excitement-laden 18-day break. It is quiet at the moment, unusually quiet, but not unusually quiet for that morning when the world tried to make it to the new day and celebrate beginnings and new possibilities. It is quiet and I am quiet. And I am thinking about Mary. Mary, you know the one who doesn’t have a last name?

Christmas was last week but I am still thinking of Mary. Maybe I am thinking of Mary because my niece, Emma, played Mary in the Christmas pageant last week on Christmas Eve. Emma is 14. Mary was probably right about at that age when thrust onto the stage of history. Emma has attended Holy Family Catholic School her whole life and the school ends in the 8th grade. Playing Mary is thought to be the pinnacle for an 8th grade girl at Holy Family.

We all know the role that Mary actually played in the story of the birth of Jesus. However, even though I had been to this Christmas pageant before, I paid more attention to Mary this time. I don’t want to dwell on it very long, but whoever scripted this pageant has a little explaining to do. You see, Mary had no lines! You have the angels, who have lines, and shepherds who have lines, the wise men who have lines, and Joseph who has the most lines, and then Mary, with no lines.

I am not complaining like an uncle who wants his niece to have the most lines—I just found it strange to watch the Christmas pageant, watch this tall, composed Mary, and she had no lines.

But there was a moment in the pageant that made me chuckle—a warm, funny, unexpected moment. As Joseph and Mary walked down the main aisle of this venerable Catholic church and Joseph spoke about the impending trip to Bethlehem, a little voice rang out in the church. A little voice wailed, “I know Mary!” I know immediately who this must be. I had heard about the kindergartener named Michael who loved to greet people with big and bold salutations. He sees my sister and cries, “Hi Emma Mom!!” So I knew who this little guy was who recognized Emma.

No sour grapes over Emma’s lack of lines—although perhaps there is a soupcon of sour grapes; I asked my sister and she said that one year the director’s daughter played Mary and so she had a solo that year. ‘Nuff said.

But as I watched Emma embody the serene Mary, and kept Michael’s pronouncement in mind, it allowed me to think how much we know about Mary.

Once upon a time, in a Galilee far, far away, there lived Mary, a teenager, a Jewish peasant girl. And, God help her, she was pregnant and unmarried.

She dwelled in a land occupied by a great and mighty empire, Rome ... a land occupied, controlled by an army ... a peace enforced by the threat of violence or actual violence: you choose.

The occupation of Mary’s land meant that Mary’s heart and life, and her people’s hearts and lives, are also occupied, occupied by insecurity and fear.

Young Mary chafes at occupation ... at its degrading fear. She decides to undertake an inconvenient, costly journey to visit her elderly cousin. Did I say elderly? Let me tell you about Aunt Elizabeth: she is as old as the hills.

Mary’s journey from Galilee to Aunt Elizabeth’s home in the hill country is probably 80-100 miles. (Imagine an unmarried, pregnant teenager undertaking a journey from Cincinnati, Ohio to Columbus, Ohio, by foot.)

It is a journey and undertaking of many days and many nights. This is a young woman of some spunk and determination, of imagination and resolve. Days later, foot-sore and aching, Mary finally arrives in the hill country. She asks for directions, locates the home of her Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zechariah and knocks.

Aunt Elizabeth opens the door. She is, as Mary expected her to be: old ... old as the hills. Aunt Elizabeth is not just old, she too is pregnant. Ancient Aunt Elizabeth is roundly, profoundly, astoundingly pregnant.

Young Mary and aged Aunt Elizabeth embrace: pregnant tummy to pregnant tummy, womb to womb. Tangled in each other’s arms they are by turns crying and laughing.

And Mary—the young, pregnant, unmarried teenager from Galilee—starts singing. That’s how the gospel of Luke tells it. Mary breaks out into song. It is an old song, old as the hills and saturated in the ancient texts and stories.

And, yet, Mary’s song is also new ... new and fresh, surprising and uprising.

It is a bridge, this song: between the Old and the New, between the past and the future, between the way it is—right now, today—in this occupied, violent, grief-drenched world and the way it will be ... in God’s time.

Listen!

“My soul magnifies God, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.” God has looked with favor on a spunky, defiant, unmarried, pregnant, peasant girl in an occupied land.

It is quite a song. It is a song of reversals and revolution. Make no mistake about it: Mary’s song is a revolutionary song for a revolutionary religion. It is a song that issues from the very being of a God who upends human contrivances.

You know what Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and the Marquis de Sade all said about religion ... that it acts as an opiate ... pacifying us and mollifying us ... numbing us to violence ... inuring us to injustice ... to human suffering. Maybe. Maybe some religion. But not the religion of which Mary sings. This is no opiate. I remember once reading an observation by C. S. Lewis where he wrote about Mary’s song: “The Magnificat is terrifying. It should make (y)our blood run cold.”

I guess I am thinking about revolutionary things today anyway—I am off to see the movie version of Les Miserables. In the movie, the young men will ask, “Do you hear the people sing?”

Here we are at the start of a new year—Are you ready? Are you able? Are you willing to join the revolution? Are you willing to be among those who lift up of the lost, the least, the lowly?

On this New Year’s Day I will repeat a poem I love:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the king and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.


Blessings to you for the new year!