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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