Mary the Mother of God

Yesterday, the fifteenth of August, was a major festival in some parts of the Christian Church.
It was what’s called the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary,
which celebrates the belief that her body, as well as her soul,
was taken to heaven after she’d died.
Or possibly even before, it’s not clear.
Either way, it’s a very old tradition,
going right back to the early years of Christianity,
even though there’s nothing about it in Scripture.
And even those Christians, like us,
who don’t necessarily subscribe to that doctrine,
do still consider 15 August one of the Festivals of Saint Mary. And even though we Protestants don’t really think about Mary much, the fact that she’s such an important figure in so much of Christianity means she’s probably worth thinking about from time to time.

So what do we actually know about her from the Bible, as opposed to tradition? She first appears in our Bibles when Gabriel comes to her to ask her if she will bear Jesus, and, of course, as we all know, she said she would, and Joseph agreed to marry her despite her being pregnant with a baby he knew he wasn’t responsible for.

I do rather love Luke’s stories about Mary – how one of the things the angel had said to her was that her relation, Elisabeth, was pregnant after all those years. And Mary rushes off to visit her.

Was this to reassure herself that the angel was telling the truth?
Or to congratulate Elisabeth?
Or just to get away for a bit of space, do you suppose?
We aren’t told.

But Elisabeth recognises Mary as the mother-to-be of the promised Saviour, and Mary’s response is that great song that we now call the “Magnificat”, which we heard in our Gospel reading.
Or if it wasn’t exactly that –
that may well be Luke putting down what she ought to have said, like Shakespeare giving Henry V that great speech before Agincourt –
it was probably words to that effect!
I think she was very, very relieved to find the angel had been speaking the truth, and probably did explode in an outpouring of praise and joy, and of wonder that God would come down to a relatively poor young woman in a dusty backwater of the Empire!
I’ll come back to that in a minute, but for now let’s go on looking at what we know about Mary.

After Jesus’ birth, the next time we see Mary is when Jesus is twelve and gets separated from them in the Temple.
I spent a lot of time with that story when my daughter was a teenager –
how Mary and Joseph say to Jesus, “But why did you stay behind?
Didn’t you realise we’d be worried about you?”
and Jesus goes, “Oh, you don’t understand!” –
typical teenager!

We don’t see Joseph again after this – tradition has it that he was a lot older than Mary, and, of course, he had a very physical job. It wasn’t just a carpenter as we know it – the Greek word is “technion”, which is the same root as our “technician”; if it had to do with houses, Joseph did it, from designing them, to building them, to making the furniture that went in them! And tradition has it that sometime between Jesus’ 12th birthday, and when we next see him, Joseph has died.

But we do see a lot more of Mary.
She is there at the wedding at Cana, and indeed,
it’s she who goes to Jesus when they’ve run out of wine.
And Jesus says, at first, “Um, no –
my time has not yet come!” but Mary knew. And she told the servants to “Do whatever he tells you”, and, sure enough, the water is turned into wine.

There’s a glimpse of her at one point when Jesus is teaching, and he’s told his mother and brothers are outside waiting for him, but he refuses to be diverted from what he’s doing. And, of course, it could have been that it was just random people who said they were his relations to try to get closer to him.

We see Mary, of course, weeping at the Cross –
something no mother should ever have to do.
And Jesus commending her into the care of the “beloved disciple” John.
And, finally, we see her in the Upper Room in Jerusalem when the Holy Spirit came.
That’s really all we know about her from the Bible, but other early traditions and writings, including some of what’s called the apocryphal gospels –
they’re the ones that didn’t make the cut into the New Testament as we know it –
tell us a bit more.

They tell us that her mother was called Anne and her father was called Joachim, and that she was only about 16 when Gabriel came to her.
One source has it that Anne couldn’t have babies, and when Mary finally arrived, she was given to be reared in the Temple, like Samuel.
And traditional sources also tell us that, after Pentecost, she went to live in Ephesus, probably with John, and died somewhere between 3 and 15 years later, surrounded by all the apostles.
And that her body was taken up to heaven, which is where we came in!

Well, that’s all very well, but how did they get from there to the veneration of her, not to say worship in some cases, that we see today?

This may be something you find difficult to understand – I certainly do – and that’s okay. We aren’t required to do more than honour her as the Mother of our dear Lord; we mention her when we say the Creed, of course, and there are lots of churches dedicated to her. My family church in Clapham – the Clapham in Sussex, that is, not the one in London – is dedicated to St Mary the Virgin, as are loads of other churches around the world.

But we do not think of her as quasi-divine in some way.
We do believe that Jesus was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by ordinary human means,
but that this was something that happened in time, not in eternity!
She became the Mother of God –
she was not the Mother of God before Jesus was born.

I think it’s probably largely to do with the fact that, back in the day, when the head of your family, or tribe, or whatever, converted to Christianity, you had to, too. And if you were used to worshipping a mother goddess of some kind, maybe you found in Mary something of what you were used to, and what felt natural to you. After all, although we do sometimes use female names for God – Love, for instance, or Sophia, Wisdom – they don’t always come naturally. It is, perhaps, significant that in Italy, 15 August is known as Ferraugusto, and was originally a festival of the goddess Diana – you know, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”, that one – and has been a public holiday since the days of Caesar Augustus! Diana, whose Greek name is Artemis, is associated with the moon, the hunt, and virginity! So a festival dedicated to a virgin goddess is now dedicated to the Virgin Mary!

Anyway, the point is, what does this have to do with us? The various Mariologies, or Marian theologies, are fascinating, although I don’t pretend to understand most of them, but what can we learn from it all?

From Mary herself, of course, I think we can learn obedience to God. We know how very brave she was saying “Yes” to God’s request that she bear Jesus; I also like to remember that, at the wedding in Cana, she says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you!” – and that’s not a bad motto to live by! Do whatever Jesus tells us.

But there’s more to it, isn’t there?

“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
 he has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.”

Mary may well have thought, if, indeed, she had ever even thought about it, that when the Messiah came, he would come in spectacular fashion, a king above all kings, acknowledged by all, revered by all, worshipped by all. But that’s not what happened! Instead, God came as a human baby, born in a house so crowded that the only available cradle was an animal feeding-trough, born in an occupied country whose rulers were ruthless in putting down resistance and dissent.

We see how Mary’s words were later echoed by Jesus – in his teachings, it is quite clear that those who are rich in material things will find it very difficult to be God’s person; those who are self-satisfied won’t be able to find God. Those who think they are righteous probably aren’t. Remember Jesus’ stories of the Pharisee who thought he was righteous and the tax collector who knew he wasn’t – and it was the tax collector who went home right with God. Similarly, it was the poor widow who gave what was probably her food money for the day who was blessed, where the rich man who gave what looked like a lot, but was really only peanuts to him was not.

It is those who are poor, weak, hungry who can find God, who can trust God to fill them with good things. I imagine – well, I hope – that most of us here this morning have decent housing, enough to eat, enough to wear, access to the Internet and so on. But all too many don’t. Our soup kitchens, our food banks, our warm spaces in the winter, and so on, are still desperately needed, and I’m sure we all give what we can, although probably not enough.

But it’s not just about physical hunger – it’s about spiritual hunger, too. We need God. All of us need God, whether we acknowledge that need or whether we don’t. All of us here this morning probably do acknowledge that need, and have committed ourselves to being Jesus’ person.

But it’s all too easy to become complacent, to forget that we need God. There’s a song we sometimes sing at Brixton Hill that begins “May your struggles keep you near the cross and may your troubles show that you need God.” We don’t like struggle and trouble and ghastliness – but what if it is bringing us closer to God? Not just as individuals, but as churches! You here at Lambeth Walk know what it is like to struggle as a church, both when you were trying to build this lovely building, but also before then when you had to split up from St Mary’s. King’s Acre Church united with Brixton Hill many years ago now, but before then we, too, had to leave our Local Ecumenical Project and become purely Methodist. It was not an easy few years, and quite heartbreaking when we had to cease being a separate church, although it was the right decision. But God has blessed us, and I’m sure you will tell me that God has blessed you, too. We knew we needed God.

And more recently, too, during the pandemic when we were not allowed to worship together for so many months. Yet God was there, as we learnt how to be Church on Zoom, and how to livestream our services, which, like many churches, still do at Brixton Hill,

Yet, are we still aware that we need God? Mary, I think, knew that she needed God her whole life long.

“He has filled the hungry with good things!” Are we hungry for God? Am I? Are you?