“…for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me.” Luke 1:48
One day, doing some channel surfing, I caught this preacher on TV boasting of how greatly God had blessed him. He had a private Learjet and his own pilot to fly him wherever God calls him to minister. He’s also blessed with a fleet of Mercedes-Benz and a chauffeur to get him around anywhere the Lord calls him. Oh, and he also has three vacation homes for his rest and retreats, and a large country manor-I mean, ministry center—that sits on over 100 beautiful acres, with a swimming pool, and armed security guards at the gates. He went on to say that, God could bless you the same way, too, especially if you give generously to his ministry.
If the saints who have passed from this life to the next are watching and aware of what goes on this side of eternity, I imagine that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is rolling her eyes and shaking her head at that TV preacher. She’s saying, “You so don’t know the half of what I meant by ‘blessed,’ when I said, ‘From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me.’ We have very different ideas of what the word, ‘blessing’ means, very different ideas of the ‘great things’ God does for us.”
Mary might also say, “I didn’t even know the half of all the ways I would be blessed when these words first came rushing out of my mouth.” Twenty centuries later, nor do we, always. Christians have prayed and sung these words of Mary in such ways that we have nearly rendered them as powerful and striking as old, cold oatmeal. But these are some very fierce, fighting and feisty words coming out of one very strong, assertive woman. If anyone had ever reported these words to Herod or Caesar, they would have sent spies and soldiers out to find her and put a stop to them.
And that despite “the humble state of God’s handmaiden.” As a poor Jewish peasant in Caesar’s Empire, and as a young woman who could not go to Sabbath School as boys her age did, who was not encouraged to learn to read and write, she still eagerly soaked up her Hebrew Bible, and lived and breathed it, as well as any man. Her whole song is full of Old Testament quotes and allusions. It’s a fierce, feisty, fighting confession of faith.
For this prayer alone, we could call Mary the patron saint of all the courageous women, and some men, now coming forward to say, “I am not here on earth just to be the plaything of powerful and predatory people. Let’s show some reverence, respect and restraint, for a change, toward the people, the bodies, and the way by which we all come into this world.” (Can I get an Amen!)
In her song, Mary seems to expect the great upheaval and upending of all that is wrong with the world, which God had long promised through the prophets by…..next Tuesday at the latest. It’s still happening, I believe. But not how nor when Mary seems to have expected it. Whatever she had in mind when she first said, “All generations shall call me blessed,” she had to learn how God really intended to bless her, the way we all do, through time, experience and struggle.
Given what we know of all she would face in the years to come, would we still call Mary “blessed?” Would she still call herself “blessed?” Like when Mary was pregnant before her marriage to Joseph? How to explain that to family and friends? What about that long journey to Bethlehem in the last days of her pregnancy? And when there was no place to give birth in privacy except among the livestock, how blessed did Mary feel then?
Contrast Mary’s confident, triumphant song with the words of the prophet, Simeon, when he told her, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed.” What most parents want for their child is to get on the school honor roll occasionally. Or the junior varsity squad. But Simeon went on to tell her, “And a sword will pierce your own soul too.” How blessed did Mary feel then?
How about the years of living as refugees in Egypt, for fear of King Herod and his henchmen? Later, while living in Nazareth again, the rumors, innuendos, and suspicions of illegitimacy must have raised their ugly heads anew from time to time. Such suspicions dogged Jesus into his adulthood, as we hear in John’s Gospel, when the Pharisees retort to him, “We aren’t illegitimate children,” and by implication, someone here is. What kind of blessing is that?
When Mary heard that Jesus’ ministry was stirring up trouble and garnering enemies, she probably wanted to walk around with a paper bag over her head in public. When she and his siblings came to take him home and straighten him out, in her very presence, Jesus asked the crowd around him, “Who are my mother, by brothers and my sisters, but those who do the will of God?”
“What?” I can hear Mary saying, “I’ll show you your mother, your sisters and your brothers! Don’t even think of coming home for Thanksgiving until you apologize for that remark!”
There is no way I can overstate how every child, and the birth of every child, are such awesome blessings. Yet, at the heart of parenthood, family, church and community is this seemingly impossible crazy-making dilemma: children come from us, but they are not us. That’s beautiful, but it’s also difficult. Teachers, mentors, and anyone else who cares about the next generation, know this dilemma too. A child is like a piece of us walking around in the world over which we really have no control. What that piece of us feels, good or bad, happy or sad, we feel it too. That’s great whenever they’re happy. But then, you see a toddler about to bump his noggin on the coffee table, too quick for you to stop it from happening, don’t you to feel it in the exact same place where he’s about to hurt, even before he does, and almost as bad?
And not just physical or emotional pain. Whenever we see children making bad choices and doing stupid things, don’t we often fear their coming emotional and spiritual pain, and feel it, too? You shake your head and say, “I know somebody taught you better than that; now it looks like the school of hard knocks is going to have to teach you the hard way what we tried to teach you for free.” That just comes with parenting or teaching or mentoring any children.
If normal childhood can be such a roller coaster ride, how much harder was it for Mary to parent the sinless Lamb of God, whose nature and destiny she could never be expected to understand? When the powers of hell and of the world targeted and attacked her son precisely because of his virtue, his calling and his faithfulness? That kind of suffering had to be worse than seeing your child suffer the consequences of some misbehavior. Then you can’t even have the last cold comfort of saying, “See? Didn’t I tell you?” Not in Mary’s case.
Then, finally, came the last and worst thing a parent ever wants to experience. Some of us here know, so sadly, so painfully, this inconceivable, unbearable sorrow. If God has called us to parenthood, of course we expect that our children will attend our memorial services, and not, God forbid, that we should ever have to release them to death, as Mary did. Mary was one of the few faithful saints at the cross, watching her son’s death by suffering an agonizing, public shaming, a death by lynching on a tree that she had no power to stop, not even to alleviate. Then, indeed, did a blade pierce her heart as well.
If Mary could have foreseen all that was to come, would she still have said to the Angel Gabriel, “Yes, let it be…..let it be to me according to your word?” Would she have still called herself “blessed?” Would we still call her “blessed?”
I believe that Mary would say, ”Yes, call me blessed, but blessed in ways I could never foresee nor understand when first I sang my song.” I think she would go on to say, “And call me blessed in ways that you can share with me, ways in which you too can be blessed.” God’s blessing to Mary was not for Mary alone.
There are at least two blessings that we can share with Mary. They are: the blessedness of the God-bearing life, and the blessedness of the God-sharing life. Such blessings God offers to us, too. As for the God-bearing life: Only one person carried the Son of God, physically, in her womb. Only in one person’s body did “the Word [of God] become flesh and dwell among us,” and that by the power of the Holy Spirit. That makes Mary unique.
Yet today, the Word of God still seeks to become flesh and dwell within us, also by the power of the Holy Spirit. Not to bring forth Jesus in his flesh and life, (once was enough), but to show forth Jesus in our flesh and lives. The Christian life, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, and the fruits of the Spirit, are not things we manufacture and do for God in the power of our human natures alone. God offers the Christian life to us as a gift, in which God lives in us, so that we, in a sense, bear God about in the world. That’s what I mean by “the God-bearing life.”
Signs that God is dwelling in us include Christ-like faith, hope and love for friend and foe, the assurance of God’s love for us, the stirring of desires and longings for all that is holy, true and good, and grief and sorrow over evil. We don’t gin these things up by force of will: they come from God within us. As these traits and qualities grow in us, we might even say that Christ is taking shape and growing in our innermost being, as men and women, as he did in Mary’s womb. That, again, is the God-bearing life.
This is not only for our own personal blessing and comfort. The God who comes to us is the God who also comes to the world through us. Like Mary, we are not only bearers of God in the world; we are bearers of God to the world. Those Christ-like things we do and say that represent Christ most faithfully, they are the result of God’s Spirit working through us. Then we can say with Paul, “not I but Christ lives in me,” and through me. Thereby do we join Mary as God-sharers, as well as God-bearers.
That’s what I think Mary might also say to the TV preacher I mentioned: “Those cheap and tawdry toys and trinkets about which you were boasting are so sad and sorry, compared to the blessing about which I sang” (And by the way, the government took them all from him for fraud). Mary would go on to say Call yourself “blessed” for being chosen, called and empowered to accept and receive Almighty and Infinite God within our weak and little selves. We are most blessed by bearing God within ourselves through the Holy Spirit, and then sharing God with others through that same Spirit, calling and blessing them.” Then I think she would say to us, “That’s the blessing my Son came to purchase for all of you.”
So, how do we receive the blessing of the God-bearing life, and the God-sharing life? I think that Mary would tell us, “Do what I did and say what I said: ‘Here I am, the Lord’s servant; Let it be to me according to God’s Word.’ Say, ‘Yes, let it be; let God fulfill his promises and purposes for me.’ Say it, pray it and mean it; offer yourself to the God who offers himself to you, even if you can’t understand everything that this blessing will mean or demand of you, because I certainly didn’t and couldn’t, at the time.”
But that’s okay; trust that God will make it all work out for a blessing greater than what we can ever conceive, as he did for Mary.