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Friday 16 August 2019

Blessed art thou amongst women


In recent decades we have discovered that Luke, as author of the third gospel-account, introduced some important lenses to his text that history had too easily ignored. Luke is the writer above all who favours the cause of women in the stores, finding in many of the women around Jesus examples par excellence of how we are to follow in the Messiah’s footsteps. Above all in his telling of the story looms Mary, the Mother of Jesus. And, close to the beginning of his Jesus-story, Luke gives us a song, placed on the lips of Mary, that provides something of a lens through which the whole story of Jesus must be seen, And, by and large history has ignored it.
I recall as a child at One Of Those Schools that the Magnificat came up in readings from time to time – as did the great Magnificat hymn-interpretation “Tell Out My Soul.” I was underwhelmed. The mighty may be plucked down from their thrones, but as one struggling to survive near the bottom of the Lord of the Flies pecking order, it was clear to me that the mighty seemed firmly entrenched on their thrones. It was just one more of the reasons that I chucked Christianity soon after my confirmation at the age of just-13 (and refused to sing the hymns). Yet in the years that were to come, as the seeds of faith that had been sown gnawed at my atheistic soul, the words kept on percolating. 
For a while after coming to faith they just seemed pretty. But I wasn’t a third world woman. It would be when I began to read feminist and third world feminist theology that I began to hear the texts enflamed with divine power.
For Luke’s Mary sees the world upside-down. The haves have not, the mighty are weak, the fat starve. And still I look around me and it is not true. Trump is not svelte, nor dis-empowered. The poor starve on the scrap heap of history. Women continue in most cultures to be deprived of control over their lives and their bodies. Was Mary – or Luke’s version of her – wrong?
Luke’s Mary should be a driving force compelling us to change the face of society. Perhaps in the Global North that we once called the First World or “West,” yes, the power structures are changing a little, though the fate of women in contexts of domestic violence remind us that a little is very little. We are challenged to keep striving for justice. it only takes words and actions like those of reprehensible Australian shock jock Alan Jones, suggesting that our prime minister should have socks stuffed in her mouth, and the impotent frat-boy silence silence that was Scott Morrison’s response, to remind us that women are never far removed from the threat or reality  of violence. It wasn't so long ago that Jones suggested Prime Minister Julia Gillard should be put through a chaff-cutter. 
There is another aspect of the challenge that some contemporary Christianity fails to acknowledge. For there is also the scathing doctrine of God’s judgement. It is easy to blithely ignore it as the opposite of pie in the sky when you die – a sort of ogre in the sky instead – but we are challenged not to cherry pick our doctrines. We can’t have a warm cuddly God of love without the God who chastises God’s people through all the books of our scriptures. We cannot merrily wave away a God of judgement; we should address the faults in our own lives as much as we address the faults in society’s life. The fact is we by and large – and I speak for myself – address neither.
The Church was ever thus. After the closing of the New Testament era womankind, originally liberated by the early Christian community, was silenced, and the mother of Jesus was pushed aside.  Slowly though the longing of many praying women generated a place for her. The feminine nature of the Spirit was re-gendered to a third bloke of the Godhead, and women devotees slowly found a friend in Mary. But the “masculised,” for want of a better word, church would have none of it. The men in power could not be rid altogether of Mary, but they could, inadvertently or not, push her to the outer regions of the universe, out beyond Sagittarius A*, the black hole cheerfully swallowing the Milky Way, out beyond Andromeda and who knows where, out to the fringes of the heavens. She was made queen of the heavens, given a sceptre, and told firmly to remain there, waving a blue wand and looking beatific.
Beware a disenfranchised woman! In the last century Mary has begun to wriggle free of bonds of male supremacy. In the Americas - the southern and central Americas, that is, not the complacent cosy nations of the northern continent - and in parts of Asia, Mary has begun to roar. The mighty if not yet torn down are trembling on their thrones. She is beginning to reassert herself, to remind us that where men have oppressed and repressed and ignored and mocked womanspirit rising they have done so at risk. The timespans of eternity are long, beyond our sight, but glass ceilings are cracking, and women in society and church are beginning to feel empowered. 
Luke is clear: Mary is not to be messed with. She does not replace or overrule the Holy One of God, but she stands close to the divine heart, and the divine heart hears, always, the cry of those who hurt most. A “marified” church or world will not be the eternal reign of God, for, in biblical terms, womankind too is marred by a propensity for evil. The rise of sexual abuse by women in schools is an alarming reminder of that. But however tragic it always is, it is a tiny glitch compared to the abuse suffered by women around the world. And, as a people called to proclaim and enact the justice of God, and as a people who will be judged by God, God the God who chose to dwell in the womb of a Palestinian peasant girl, we need to take seriously the demands that Luke sets before us. Are we prepared to envisage and act to encourage a world in which the hungry are fed and the mighty cast down?
The patron saint of this church is no blue statue, sterile and mild, but a feisty dwelling place of the God of all creation. That of course is incomprehensible, and should be, but at the very least we are challenged to fight for justice wherever we see that it is not present. May God, the God of Mary empower us so to do.

Amen.




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