Nice Girls Don’t Change the World

God learned the gospel on his mother's lap

Luke 1.39-56

One day, years from now, when the promise in her belly is all grown up, Mary will sit down in the grass along a hillside, her knees too tired and old and stand. She’ll sit there unnoticed, anonymous, among a multitude of seekers who’d come out of curiosity and outcasts and riff-raff who’d come seeking something much more specific. If the sea of people had anything in common it was all that of them, like her, were poor. Many of them were sick or troubled. Most of them were weary of the world as it was and just wanting a chance to have a touch at him. If they’d already had all the answers, they wouldn’t be there on the mountainside. If life was already everything they’d ever dreamed, they wouldn’t be there, among the crowd, listening to a different dream.

One day Mary will sit in the hillside grass and listen to her boy— her first, most unusual child— grown up now. And grown certain in his vocation. Her youth now turned to middle age, Mary will sit and listen to her boy teach this fragile people:

“Blessed are you who are poor, yours is the Kingdom of God. And blessed are you who hunger now for your bellies will be filled…but woe to you who are rich for you have already received your comfort and woe to you who are well-fed now for you will go hungry.”

And Mary will watch this desperate crowd listen to her boy’s words, listening as if his words themselves had the power to change their circumstances, listening as though his words alone could fill them and their emptiness.

And if people asked where her boy got such teaching, he might say: “the Holy Spirit has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” Or, he could confuse them with some cryptic language about how he and the Father were one in the same.

Or, he could say simply, for it would be true, “My mother taught me.”