Advent – 4A – George Yandell
I knew Mary. She was in first through third grades with me and she went to my Church. Mary was a freckle-faced strawberry blond who walked home from school with me. Her eyes were crossed and she wore light blue-framed glasses with thick lenses that swept up at the temples. She was shy and didn’t talk much. Sometimes in class she had to step up close to the chalkboard and squint to make out the figures Mrs. McGuffy had written. Once in Sunday School class, Mary was being made fun of by two nasty little boys because she couldn’t see too well. I’d never heard Mary raise her voice before that, but she lit into those two boys – “You don’t think I can see you making fun of me. I can. I’m smart, and I know lots of things you don’t know. For one, my name means ‘one who is loved.’ I know that God loves me, and even loves you. But I don’t know why He loves you. But He does.” And they were stunned to silence. As were all of us third graders. She earned my respect in a big way. For years after, whenever I heard about Mary, mother of Jesus, I always pictured her with light blue glasses, in the image of my friend Mary from down the street. They may have more in common than you’d think.
Mary of Nazareth was given a new title by teachers of the Church almost 175 years after Jesus’ birth. By 451 her title was considered orthodox and accepted widely by the Church. The title = Theotokos = God-Bearer. In today’s gospel, we’re like flies on the wall when Joseph wrestles with the fact of Mary’s conception. When the angel appears to Joseph in a dream and calmed his fears, urging him to wed Mary, the angel tells him to name their son Jesus. You can actually read that passage, “You shall call his name ‘Savior’ because he will save.” The gospel writer distills all that the angel told Joseph, saying, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet Isaiah, ‘Look, the young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us.’”
Such is the nature of hope for us. God is erupting in human history to be with us. Time collapses around events when the eternal intrudes into the finite. For God, there are (at least) two kinds of time: Fat time and skinny time. Skinny time is clock time – it only goes one direction – it is long and lean. Called in Greek “chronos”. My watch is called a chronograph, and so it is. Fat time is eruptive explosive time, time without boundaries. Fat time is birthing time. Infinity exists in fat time now – God who has no beginning and no end, lives primarily in fat time. In Greek, “Chiros.”
The prophecies Mary recounts in her song says that God makes fat time happen in skinny time. The result is that the low will be exalted, the hungry filled with good things. Essentially, God’s love will reign on earth; in fact, it already does reign. God is in the process, therefore the process is already full.
For this group of Christians here called out, hope is the pooled desires and needs of us all. It is hope that we will be transformed into the people of God’s love. Hope is faith facing the future. Mary gives us the template for living that hope. Mary began that process of transformation, yet unfolding. It requires us also to say “yes” to God daily. Our hope is too precious to be soft-pedaled. We need to live toward God as she did.
You can imagine, then, when leaders of the Church proclaimed Mary as “God-bearer,” that some would balk. Lots did. Yet the wisdom of the Church says that we can call Mary no less than the bearer of God than we can call Jesus any less than God’s own Son. The hope of Christians everywhere is fulfilled. It has all come to pass. A young woman said “Yes” to God, and Jesus was conceived in her womb. The event to come has already happened – we’re embraced by God’s Son even while we’re humans on this tortured earth. We are graced with heavenly hope – hope that took flesh and was nurtured in the womb of a peasant woman. “Our spirit rejoices in God our Savior.”
So what does Mary mother of God have in common with my neighbor Mary? I believe Mary of Nazareth was a simple young woman of faith, maybe 13 or 14 years old. The two Marys both stood up for themselves, and for others of us. I learned from my neighbor Mary that quietness doesn’t mean weakness. Same with the mother of Jesus. She opened her heart, her entire self to God, and became the bearer of God’s love. For that she was blemished in the eyes of her future husband, and certainly her family. Yet she was brave beyond expectations. And she led others to believe, beyond what they thought possible. More than anything, the two Mary’s have taught me that seeing with the heart is soo much more important than seeing with my eyes. That’s why when I think of Mary, I see God rejoicing with her, and all of us who stand up and proclaim God’s love come among us.