The Gospel according to Mark begins in media res, which is just a fancy Latin way of saying “in the middle of the story.” Honestly, every story begins in the middle of some other story, beginnings being arbitrary things and all…
Specifically, the Gospel according to Mark begins with John the Baptizer. Jesus is a grown up, not the “Sweet Baby Jesus” Ricky Bobby likes so much in “Talladega Nights.”
The Gospel traditionally attributed to John (the Disciple not the Baptizer) begins at the beginning, and by beginning I mean cosmic-before-Creation beginning, but then moves on to the concrete story of John the Baptizer, essentially the same starting spot as Mark.
It is only in the two gospels traditionally attributed to Matthew and according to Luke the Physician that we find Nativity narratives. Both are late gospels, using the Gospel according to Mark as a primary source, as well as another document, a long lost gospel that we call Q. And since they share these two primary sources, you’d think that their Nativity stories would be much the same or at least pretty close. You’d be wrong.
In Luke, there is a Roman Imperial census which forces mass displacement, sending the Holy Family from Galilee to Bethlehem to register. Luke’s is the version with a manger and shepherds. We know that census didn’t actually happen, but for a moment, let’s stay in the world of the story.
In Matthew, there is neither a census nor a manger, Jesus presumably being born at home. Scratch the shepherds too.
Matthew gives us some unknown number of wise people from the East. Their story intersects the efforts of Herod the Great to stave off challenges to his rule. Herod, Rome’s puppet king in the region, orders the slaughter of all of the male babies in Bethlehem, leading the Holy Family to flee to Egypt. Jesus was a refugee, an ancient illegal immigrant.
This fits the overall agenda of the authors of Matthew, for having Jesus come back from Egypt reinforces their assertion that Jesus is the new Moses, negotiating a covenant between humans and God in the same way Moses once negotiated a covenant between God and the descendants of Jacob.
In the same way, shepherds and a manger fit Luke’s emphasis on the powerless and oppressed, on making faith a practical and lived thing at the margins.
We happily mash-up the feel-good elements of these two different Nativity stories, though we never include the Slaughter of the Innocents in our pageants. But if we are honest, the only things the two stories share are that Jesus was born in the village of Bethlehem, that his mother was a young virgin named Mary, and that she was engaged to a man named Joseph.
We can look back and see exactly how the early Christians arrived at some of these ideas.
Humans encounter holy mystery and respond by constructing religion. The humans who constructed the religion of Christianity mostly didn’t read Hebrew, so they got their understanding of the Hebrew Scripture tradition from a Greek translation called the Septuagint, a text that mistranslates the passage we heard a few moments ago from Isaiah about a “young woman being with child” as a “virgin being with child.” They read Jesus through the lens of the sacrificial system of Jesus’ own faith, the atonement offerings made at the Temple.
Though it gets weird on the father side, since they understood Jesus as without sin, unblemished, because he did not have an earthly father, yet they also understood him as being descended of the House of David, and therefore a legitimate Davidic king, through Joseph, his not-dad, also the reason for Bethlehem, which may be shared myth or historic memory. We have no way of knowing.
But Mary became more than the mother of Jesus, as we all know. Some feminist theologians might argue that Mary was a counter force to an oppressive religious patriarchy. Others might argue that Mary’s “submission” to God just reinforced that patriarchy. She was called the Mother of God, granting her a cosmic significance, again a counter to an all-male Trinity, though many, including me, read the Holy Spirit as feminine as well, and “Mother of God” makes her seem more than human, and therefore very much less than human.
Then came the Protestant Reformation, and especially the Reform branch of Protestantism from which our particular tradition was constructed. There was a bold claim of “sola scriptura,” the Bible as the only legitimate authority for a Christian life. There was also the wholesale dismantling of what we might think of as “salvation by proxy,” the cults of the saints and relics. Discarded was the notion that living humans could pray dead humans out of purgatory or that saints could intervene on our behalf. The good Protestant prays directly to God in Trinity, depending always on God’s grace.
So what are we to do with Mary? And that was a legitimate question even in the early 16th century when there was still a whole lot of magical thinking about human reproduction, three centuries before Charles Darwin set sail on the HMS Beagle or the Augustinian Friar Gregor Mendel started us down the road to understanding genetics.
In the story, Mary is not just there at the birth of Jesus. When his ministry starts to attract the wrong kind of attention, she shows up with his brothers. You can play mental ninja to account for the brothers, but they are not, as some traditions would like to pretend, cousins. Mary shows up again at the Cross.
I don’t need Mary to be a virgin wrapped in blue robes, floating off into heaven, appearing to children in 19th century France. It is enough that Mary was a mom. That she was still his mom even when hundreds were following him. That she was a mom who heard his cries from the Cross. Maybe he cried out for her in the same way George Floyd called out for his mother on the pavement in Minneapolis.
Patriarchy has done an excellent job of drawing an artificial line between love and power. We don’t even have human words for the power aspect of maternal love, instead turning to the animal kingdom, “mama bears” and “tiger mothers.” But let me tell you, love is a powerful thing. And for those who have been blessed to experience it, maternal love is fierce and boundless.
You can try to strip maternal love, Mary’s love, of the holy, arguing that it is just a function of evolution, and sometimes a dysfunction of evolution. And it is true that species we understand as intelligent have fewer young than say a brook trout, and that in turn leads to greater attention to the survival of the vulnerable young, which is all true, but doesn’t lessen the holiness and mystery of the mama elephant or that matter of the brook trout.
Because evolution didn’t have to work this way. Because we are improbable on our best days. Because the act of creation is an act of love and is meant to create a bond, an entanglement that we see as Mary holds that infant, an infant understood as an expression of a simple idea, that God, mysterious and unknowable, so loves this creation that the holy erupts into this existence, and that Jesus was just such an eruption of holiness, that they would call him Emmanuel, God-with-us, that the power of creative love was so fierce in him that the broken, touching him, experienced wholeness, that the forces of death, seeing him, wanted him dead, and that death itself could not stop the flow of his love. Which begins with that baby in Bethlehem, and that mother.
Mary, contrary to some theologies, is holy not because she is unique, not because she is or is not a virgin, not because she is or is not Mother of God as experienced in the person of Jesus, not because she floated up into the sky or appeared to children at Lourdes or a peasant at Guadalupe. To be honest, I don’t care about those things.
Mary is holy because she is stardust and love, a billion quantum miracles a second. She is holy because she is a mom holding her kid in her lap in the E.R. this morning, each breath a raspy battle. Because she is marching into the principal’s office demanding an end to the bullying. Because she is fleeing across the border or going from store to store in search of baby formula or this year’s hot toy. Because she is awake and worrying, or just awake too darned early baking cupcakes for the fourth grade holiday party because she was too tired to bake them last night.
And that, that lived love, is more than enough.
Amen.