Lent 1 — Luke 2.22-35
Neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin would concur with the way their Protestant posterity have diminished Mary to a character in a creche. For Lent, therefore, I will be preaching on the Seven Sorrows of Mary, journeying to the cross with the first disciple to follow him there.
I have a secret to spill.
Until now I have not shared it with anyone, save my friend who edits my sermons every Saturday evening.
Approximately fifteen years into my vocation as a preacher, my paternal grandfather passed. A child of the Great Depression, my grandfather grew up poor in a crowded house with too many mouths to feed. After World War II he parlayed the GI Bill into an engineering degree from Drexel University. He built naval ships in Norfolk, Virginia and later became a savvy player on the stock market, amassing a modest fortune and purchasing a mammoth cattle ranch in Broken Bow, Nebraska. When my grandmother entered a nursing home, he began attending worship services several times a week at a nearby Lutheran church. Despite his personal devotion, he expressed something more than chagrin that I had elected to answer Christ’s call upon my life.
Once we had buried him, the family gathered at his place to receive the specific items he had designated in his will for his children, step-children, and grandchildren. We stood in a circle and waited as his widow read a name and distributed an item. I did not receive his favorite straw Stetson, as my cousin did. I did not get the antique Colt revolver another received. Instead she handed me a fat, sealed envelope containing five folded pages. In his small, block engineer’s drafting script, he had written me a single-spaced, double-sided letter— ten pages in all— excoriating me for “wasting my potential and wasting his money on such a trifling pursuit.” After all, he had helped pay for my college education. He felt both betrayed and disgraced by the fact I had not pursued “a more profitable and enriching career.”
“You’ve wasted your life on Jesus, but perhaps it’s still not too late to do something worthwhile with your life.”
Those were his last words to me.
I remember standing in front of the fire place in that circle of family members, stuffing the letter back in to its envelope, slipping the envelope back in to my breast pocket, and desperately trying to keep my face from betraying the shame I felt.
The sorrow.
Standing there, to my surprise— to my disquiet even, I did not think upon Jesus but his Mother. Or more accurately, she just came to me. In the same unsettling and mysterious way that Jesus once appeared to me as a teenager at an ordinary suburban church and pulled me, against my will, into faith— in that same mystical manner— Mary was just there. It was not a vision per se but an ineffable presence. I do not know how I knew it was her; I only know that I knew it was her.
Here is another secret.
It is not the only time she has happened to me.
My friend and former classmate Matthew Milliner is a professor of art history at Wheaton College. Though he is an Anglican— a Protestant— his specialty is Marian iconography. Both in public lectures and in private conversation, Matt has remarked to me how resilient images of Mary the Mother of Jesus have been throughout history. “She keeps showing up where she’s supposed be absent,” he said to me not long ago. Despite the later Reformation’s periods of stark iconoclasm, images of Mary stubbornly abided in the Protestant Church.
“There’s something about Mary that meets believers in their need,” Matt told me recently, “She has persisted as essential to the church’s faith even in those parts of the church that have sought to evict her from her prominence in the work of salvation.”
When Jesus dispatches the twelve to preach the Kingdom of God to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he adds a disclaimer for the disciples:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law (a grandfather against his grandson).”
It sounds like a harsh word of prophecy.
Until you realize Jesus is merely stating reality.
I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.
Jesus is speaking retrospectively not prospectively. He is not alluding to the effect he will have on the world. He is acknowledging the impact he has already had on it, beginning with and in his own family, if not before then certainly from the time he was but forty days old.
Over the millennia, the church’s dogma and piety have heaped a plethora of honorifics upon Mary. However, foremost and first among her titles are two. One is an item of the church’s creedal confession; another is displayed by the church’s scriptures.
First, Mary is the Theotokos, the Mother of God.
Such a designation for Mary was inevitable once the Nicene Creed confessed in 325AD that her boy is truly God, “of one substance with the Father.” Just so, a century later the ecumenical Council of Ephesus stipulated Mary as Theotokos to be an essential article of orthodoxy, departure from which made one no longer a Christian.
Second, according to the scriptures Mary is the Mother of all of you.
That is, Mary is the Mother Believers. When Mary assents to the angel Gabriel, saying, “Behold I am a slave of the LORD; let it be with me according to your word;” when she assents to the annunciation, she becomes the first disciple. Thus the Mother maps for us the way to follow the Son in obedience. As the one who carries within her the Word of God, Mary is the prophet among prophets, the final and ultimate prophet, writes the church father Maximus the Confessor. And remember, no prophet is finally welcome among her own people; therefore, the Mother of Believers is simultaneously the Mother of Sorrows.
St. Luke begins stitching the thread of this plot in the opening chapters of his Gospel.
When Mary’s boy is between four and five weeks old, she brings him to the temple in Jerusalem for two rites prescribed by the law. Having given birth, Mary required ritual purification. That’s the purpose behind the price of the two turtledoves.
The second rite prescribed by the covenant is the law requiring the consecration of a mother’s firstborn son to the LORD. Over time however, the role designated for the firstborn son was assumed instead by the tribe of Levi. This is why the Book of Numbers provides a means by which a mother might buy back her firstborn son from the LORD. In Numbers 18 the LORD says, “The firstborn son you shall redeem…And his redemption price you shall fix at five shekels in silver”
Notice: Luke assumes you will catch what is missing.
Mary does indeed offer the two birds necessary for her purification. But when she brings Jesus to the temple to present him the LORD, she does not supply the five shekels. No priest receives the offering from her. She does not pay the redemption price.
She does not buy Jesus back from the LORD.
Simeon prophesies that a sword will pierce Mary’s heart.
But don’t you see— her heart already has been pierced!
Mary has offered Jesus as a living sacrifice, relinquishing her firstborn boy. In not redeeming Jesus, Mary she renounces any claim at all to his life.
As the Protestant biblical scholar William Glass writes:
“Although Mary receives a gift infinitely more valuable than what had been given to Hannah, she renounces the gift even more completely. Mary, in bringing her son to the temple, gives him wholly over to God. Though Jesus will live to God, he will be as dead to her. Mary renounces all benefits that her child was to bring her. Given the nature of the benefits, she makes an offering to God that no one could make who loved anything in the least respect more than God.”
Mary does not buy back Jesus from the LORD. It is no a trivial detail that in the very next scene Luke narrates Jesus is twelve years old. Mary and Joseph lose him in the crowd and commotion of the passover pilgrimage. Mary eventually discovers Jesus in the temple only to find her mother’s relief met with a blunt reminder of the redemption price she did not pay, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?”
There is no way for Mary to be the Mother of Believers but for Mary to be also the Mother of Sorrows.
Nine years before my grandfather died, she also happened to me.
My wife and I started the adoption process for the first time. After the initial medical tests and financial disclosures and background checks, we had to complete a form delineating precisely which maladies, diseases, and handicaps we were prepared to accept in a child. The form was longer than that letter my grandfather had left me. It was harrowing to reckon so with the reality that you can neither control your child’s future nor protect them from the contingencies of life.
Based on our responses, our social worker eventually contacted us to inquire if we would consider adopting an infant boy in Guatemala who had been born with a severe cleft palate. “Lucas will need considerable surgery,” she said to us, “And he may not survive the interim.”
He did not.
We said yes to him. And legally, on paper at least, he was ours. But he was nevertheless out of our hands. And he died before we ever met him. It was— is— a strange grief. A few days after we received the news, I was five miles into a run along the Potomac when anguish completely arrested me. I was standing on the side of the bike path and crying and in way attempting piety when she was just there to me. Not as a character in a history I believe to be true. Not as a comforting thought— it wasn’t comforting at all, exactly. She was there, a presence as real as the shoes on my feet. I do not know how I knew it was her; I only know that I knew it was her.
And when it was gone— when she was gone, I did not feel less sad.
But I no longer felt alone.
“There’s something about Mary that meets believers in their need,” my friend Matt said to me.
Of course there is!
Jesus alone carries the cross.
But Mary alone carries the sword.
He bears our sins.
She bears our sorrows.
And her grief is heavier than his tree because it shares all of our sorrows.
Ten years ago during my first bout with cancer, I was sitting in the infusion lab linked to a bag of poison. The book in my lap must have given away my gig, for the woman sitting across from me wagered I was someone she could trust with weird things.
“Are you a Christian? Or a priest? ” She asked me, nodding at my book.
“A little of both,” I replied.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I looked around the infusion lab,”It’s not like I’ve got a lot of other options at the moment.”
She started with a story.
And tears.
She was being treated for a cancer that had ended her pregnancy.
“A week or so after it happened…” and her voice trailed off as she tried to maintain her composure, “Mary appeared to me and consoled me. It was like a waking dream but it was real.”
She looked at the ceiling and sighed, “I’m not even Catholic.”
And then she looked back at me, “Does that sound crazy? Is it even possible?”
“Of course it’s possible,” I answered, “I talk to my grandpa just about every day and he died a few years ago.”
“That’s different,” she said.
“No, it isn’t. When we call the church the Body of Christ, we mean that Jesus does not wish to be known apart from his saints— living and dead. And chief among them is his Mother. Wherever Christ is, the saints are.”
“But…” she was working out the logic, “isn’t there the danger she’ll take the place of Jesus?”
“No,” I replied, “She doesn’t take the place of Jesus. She’s the place God makes for Jesus— still. It’s important that we call her Saint Mary. Wherever she is, he is.”
“But why would she come to me? Why not him?”
I said:
“It’s like the Bible says, Christ’s Body is made up of all kinds of parts and members. I reckon there are some sufferings Jesus thinks are best handled by his Mother.”
Mary doesn’t take the place of Jesus; she’s the place God makes for Jesus.
It is a grave error— and certainly not one Luther intended— we attend to Mary only around Advent. Such a myopic focus omits the most remarkable aspect of her calling. Against all natural inclinations— for the sake of redemption— Mary never redeems Jesus. She never pays the five shekels to buy him back from the LORD.
As William Glass writes:
“Like the mother of Moses, At the temple, Mary receives Jesus back for a time, but always under the aspect of one who is no longer hers.”
Just after Jesus calls twelve disciples to follow him, his mother and brothers call to him. The crowd informs Jesus, “You mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.”
And Jesus replies, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Looking at the crowd instead of Mary, Jesus says, “Here are my mother and my brothers.”
When his teaching elicits anger in Nazareth, those in the synagogue react with a sneer, throwing what they take to be the scandalous nature of birth back in his face, “Is this not the son of Mary?”
They do not say, “The son of Mary and Joseph.”
In Cana, when Mary tells Jesus the wine has run dry, he responds not unlike he had as a boy in the temple, “Woman, what concern is that to me?”
He doesn’t call her mother.
These episodes are not scandals however; they are sorrows.
They constitute the living sacrifice she consented to offer.
FOR YOUR SAKE!
She gives Jesus over to God; so that, the Father can gift him to the world. This is why she disappears and returns in the Gospels, as one only adjacent to her child. Finally at the cross Mary repeats the relinquishment she had offered in the temple. On Good Friday, Mary does what Eve did not do and, so doing, she reverses the curse.
As William Glass writes:
“Whereas Eve plucked the forbidden fruit from the tree, Mary waives her wholly legitimate right to the fruit of her womb, even when the rebellious crowd puts it on the tree of the curse. She refuses to take it down. Her fullness of grace, whatever it might mean, cannot mean less than her unfailing love for God and neighbor, the love that opens her hand and elicits from it the gift of everything of value that she has.”
Mary does not do what Mary Magdalene attempts to do at the empty tomb.
Mary does not cling to Jesus.
As Mother Maria of Paris, who was martyred by the Nazis, puts it, “Mary is the creaturely echo of the Father’s generosity.”
Last Friday, I lamented to my oncologist all the agony I had experienced in the preceding days. And I told him that more so than the physical pain I hadn’t been able to shake all week, I felt sorrow that I might not be able to do my job if this new normal will be permanent.
Sorrow— to suffer in the Spirit- is the right word.
My doctor adjusted my medications and then said to me, “You could always go on disability.”
I shook my head, “Got any other ideas?”
“Say a “Hail, Mary,”” he said.
He’s Greek Orthodox.
So I do not know whether he was joking.
He need not have been.
“I reckon there are some sufferings Jesus thinks are best handled by his Mother,” I said to the woman in the infusion lab.
I went back to reading my theology book. After a few minutes, she said to me, “I’ve been going to church my whole life. It never occurred to me until just now how we get to believe some really weird things.”
I smiled and nodded and went back to my book.
And then she reiterated, “I’m not even Catholic!”
“Neither am I,” I replied.
She shot me a look, confused.
There is no way for Mary to be the Mother of Believers but for Mary to be also the Mother of Sorrows. We know Mary’s sorrows. The Gospels make those plain. But exactly what does Mary believe? The angel’s annunciation is short on details. He does not divulge the particulars. He does not reveal the path ahead. He whispers a hint neither of the cross nor the empty tomb. Despite the Christmas song, she does not know.
She does not know because…
Gabriel does not tell Mary the plan.
Gabriel only gives her a promise, “Nothing will be impossible with God.”
It is the only such promise in the New Testament. As Fred Craddock says, it is the creed behind the creeds. Nothing will be impossible with God— that’s Mary’s only handhold. That’s all she knows. Knows by faith. Mary is the Mother of Believers because she is the first to trust the not-impossible power of the LORD. Mary is the Mother of Believers because she trusts that the not-impossible power of the LORD is yet greater than the sum of all her sorrows. She is the first disciple to follow Jesus to the End, clutching only the promise that nothing is impossible for God.
Like the messenger to Mary, I am in no position to unveil for you the LORD’s plan. And anyone who purports to know what God is up to, right now, in our world is a liar and a thief.
Nevertheless, Jesus has called me to hand over a promise.
Like Mary, a promise is all you get.
Not the particulars of the plan for your life— only a promise.
Therefore:
As sons and daughters of the Second Eve, hear the good news.
Whatever sorrows you ponder in your heart, no matter the swords that have pierced them, despite what you may be suffering in the Spirit, even if Jesus has proven a shard that’s cut divisions in your family or among your friends— one day all sad things will come untrue.
They will.
And if you ache over the state of the world, if you are disoriented by the chaos of these recent days, if you feel shamed and scared by “fork in the road” emails— one day all things will be rectified.
They will.
I know it can sound absurd. I know I cannot provide a plan that shows how we get from here to there. I wish I knew the plan for me! I only know the promise— I believe it: “Nothing will be impossible with God.”
Speaking of impossible possibilities, come to the table.
Because Jesus does not wish to be known apart from his saints, he may be the host but it is not wrong to say that Mary invites you to this table, that my grandpa invites you to this table, that any loved one whose loss is your sorrow invites you to this table.
There is a whole other half circle to this table we cannot see.
They’re all here.
Come to the table.
How loaf and cup can be him for us is but one of the weird things we get to trust.
(image from Chris EW Green)
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