Parents Pondering

Text: Luke 1:26-38
Other texts: Luke 1:47-55

Advent is a season of reflection. At the beginning, we are encouraged to look at our past and our present. What have we been doing? What are we doing now? But gradually over the weeks our view changes. And by today, we find ourselves looking at our present and our future. That’s how scripture leads us. Today we see Christmas just ahead. Once we start talking about Mary and Joseph and angels making announcements, we know that Christmas, and the celebration of the birth of Jesus is the point. And that the reflections that are important are less ours and more Mary’s, who ponders her role as mother of God.

And we ponder with her.

I’d like to talk a little theology before we go too much further. A central joy—or a central difficulty, depending on your point of view—a central thing about Christianity is that it claims that Jesus was a person and Jesus was divine. Jesus was more than a good and wise teacher. And also: Jesus was more than God come down from heaven in a human being outfit. Different faiths usually end up emphasizing one or the other aspects of Jesus. More human, or more divine. Early Christian thinkers and writers (meaning third and fourth century ones) spent a lot of time trying to figure out how the two aspects of Jesus could coexist. There were lots of theories. The ones we don’t follow now were condemned as heresies. Jesus wasn’t really divine but only really good, said some. Jesus wasn’t really human, but only pretended, said others. Jesus multitasked, being divine sometimes and human other times, said still others.

In the end, what the church said was that none of these explanations was right. In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther spoke adamantly and forcefully, as he usually did, saying that Jesus was 100% human and 100% divine. How that all worked out in detail was not for him to say. Typically Lutheran, it seems an improbable position to hold. But we cannot say that sometimes Jesus does God things and other times does human things. Jesus is always both.

Nonetheless, the church has a tendency to lean a bit to one side of the issue. Usually we talk about the divinity of Jesus, especially when we talk about salvation and power and kingdoms and intercession and such things, as we often do in worship.

But Christmas is a gigantic celebration of the humanity of Jesus. There is a lot of divinity at Christmas, but the person of Jesus himself, the central character, is still just a baby boy. And the stories are stories of moms and dads and births, which are pretty common human stories. As we know here from experience. So today, still in Advent, we get to think about Jesus and things that are human. And especially his mother, Mary.

Mary was an ordinary girl, as far as we know. Not ordinary for long, of course, but there is nothing in the Bible story that says she was particularly good, or beautiful, or pure. Nothing special. She was probably poor. She was probably young, maybe thirteen years old or so. She was related by marriage to some folks who were priests.

Mary is distressed when the angel Gabriel comes to visit. As you can imagine. Our Bible says she was much perplexed and pondered Gabriel’s greeting. But a truer translation would be to say that Mary was freaked out. And also she was discombobulated. The word Luke uses here means she was trying to find words to make sense of a bunch of ideas that did not easily fit together. How could she, poor young ordinary Mary, have a baby who was going to be a king and called Son of the Most High?

It does not take Mary long, though, to see what this all implies. The world will change. In a good way. So Mary sings a song about it (which we call the Magnificat, based on the first word of the song in Latin).

Being thirteen, Mary first wants to know: what about me? How is this going to affect me? But the “Magnificat” is a song of gradually widening implications, as Mary the singer realizes that more and more of the world will be changed through her child. First, she will be: “all generations will call me blessed” and “the Almighty has done great things for me.” Then people like her: He has lifted up the lowly and fed the hungry. Then all of Israel: He has come to the help of Israel. And finally, all the children of Abraham forever.

Mary’s hopes seem grandiose. But they are not much different from the hopes of mothers and fathers generally. Children make us think in the same widening circles: me, my family, the world. When you think about having a child, you cannot help spinning out imaginary futures. Will my child be good, successful, happy, imaginative, respected, kind? Will we be good parents, can we handle this, what if it turns out to be hard, will we make the same mistakes our own parents made? Did Mary wonder about these things? What could the angel’s proclamation possibly mean to a new, young, mother to be? How could she imagine the future of her son?

When parents think about their children, their minds are full of conflicting ideas, just as Mary’s was. The future for all children is a mix of opportunities and problems, of sorrow and glory. No one knows how things are going to turn out in detail, even when an angel delivers the message.

Children are part of their parents, but they are part of the world too, and increasingly so. Jesus at one point denies his family, a moment which I’m sure was hard on his parents. But children do that. They sometimes have to. They become people who change the world, for good or for ill. And the world will have expectations of them. If Mary really could have foreseen the future life of her son-to-be, how would she have felt on the day he was born?

Mary and Jesus are human-sized human-feeling humans, which makes them like everybody. It is important for our theology and our faith to remember that. It is easy to imagine what Mary was going through, in spite of her since then being encrusted and distorted with centuries of church teachings. Mary was young, poor, frightened and confused, excited and worried and giddily hopeful, and I suspect Joseph was, too. As we would be or have been.

These days are not days for theologizing. Christmas, though it is the event of the incarnation, is not about theology. It is about human, creaturely events and thoughts. Christianity is an earthy faith. Especially for Lutherans, who at their best, like Martin Luther admire things that are physical and messy.

The good news on Christmas is simply divine. A child will be born. His parents will be amazed. They will wonder: what will happen next?