Mary the Insubordinate

Another excerpt from Defying Tyrants

[My new book, Defying Tyrants: Following Jesus in a World of Christian Antichrists, will be published on October 6th. I’m publishing here a few excerpts in the lead-up to publication. The incarnation of Jesus is one of the major themes of the book, and I have a whole chapter on Mary, the mother of Jesus, and on her theology. This excerpt comes from that chapter.]

Source: Ben Wildflower’s excellent protest art (https://benwildflower.com/)

One of the great mysteries of the incarnation, one that Christian sages and scholars have debated for two millennia now, is how much the humanly growing Jesus knew of his own divinity. On the one hand, it seems implausible that the child we read about in the Gospels was strolling about first-century Galilee thinking, “I’m the second person of the Trinity enfleshed!” That would mean he somehow integrated all later Christian doctrine into an anachronistically Jewish and pre-Christian mind. On the other hand, Jesus in the Gospels strongly claims the title of son of God, even safeguarding it, with a cone of silence at times. He frequently told his closest friends to stop referring to him as the son of God in public, while affirming that title in private. Clearly, to believe the portrayal of the Gospels (and we have scant other sources about the man) is to think Jesus knew he was something different.

Whatever Jesus’s cognizance of his divinity, Mary taught Jesus humanity. She taught him how to lace his sandals, how to cry well, how to pray, how to act around the cops (Roman soldiers), when and when not to laugh.

Mary brought God into the world not just in one night but through a childhood into adolescence. Mary dealt with moody Jesus, heartsick Jesus, too-big-for-his-britches Jesus. She was the one who taught Jesus to stand up to bullies. Mary knew God in a way that no other person possibly could. We Protestants have esteemed Mary too little.

Given Mary’s utterly unique experience and position, we should be particularly interested in how Mary viewed God. How did the Incarnator herself (so to speak) understand the coming of the kingdom of God in her son?

Mary doesn’t just speak of God and the incarnation; she sings. She hymns. In what we know as the Magnificat, she offers a canticle of praise that echoes the deepest and truest hopes of the Jewish people since their enslavement in Egypt.

Whether every word and stanza of the Magnificat is original to Mary and spoken spontaneously in a moment, or whether it’s more a reflection from the early church, a prism through which they understood Mary’s theology, we cannot know. But the memory of the early church was that Mary was around for a while after Jesus’s death and resurrection and that she was a guiding force to the early community. Luke, who renders her poem, evidently got some material from Mary (or someone close to her) to write the vignettes that are told from Mary’s perspective. If we want to understand the incarnation, it behooves us to listen to what Mary thought it was all about.

In the opening of the Gospel, Luke creatively weaves together the story of the birth of Jesus and his cousin John the Baptizer, so that John’s expectant parents (Elizabeth and the unspeaking Zechariah) orbit around Jesus’s expectant parents (Mary and the unspeaking Joseph). Pregnant Mary goes to stay with pregnant Elizabeth, and their moment of meeting is the occasion of Mary’s song.

After Elizabeth greets Mary and blesses “the mother of my Lord,” Mary breaks out in our third incarnation hymn. And what a very dissident chant it is:

My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

For He has regarded

the low estate of His servant;

surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

For He who is mighty has done great things for me,

and holy is His name.

His mercy is on those who fear Him

from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with His arm;

He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He has pulled down the mighty from their thrones

and exalted those of low degree.

He has filled the hungry with good things,

and the rich He has sent away empty.

He has helped His servant Israel,

in remembrance of His mercy,

as He spoke to our fathers,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever. (Luke 1:46–55 MEV)

Mary sings with the diction and emotion of the Hebrew Bible. She echoes the lamentations and exultations of the Jewish people, the Psalms and the musical panorama of the Old Testament.

In fact, Luke’s entire shaping of this story echoes the life of “Miriam the prophet” (the sister of Moses and Aaron), who led the women of Israel in song after the crossing of the Red Sea and liberation from Pharaoh (Exodus 15). Mary’s name is simply the Aramaic (and then Greek) version of the Hebrew name Miriam. Luke is calling our attention to the parallels between these two women who both sing about the toppling of empires. Both stand on the shores of a new age, harmonizing with other women and dancing for liberation. In fact, at one point, the Qur’an appears to conflate the two biblical Miriams, referring to Jesus’s mother (the only woman named in the Qur’an) as “O sister of Aaron” (Q 19:28). Some Christian interpreters have viewed this as an error on the Qur’an’s part. I find it illuminating.

If the strange genealogies of the Bible are to be believed, there’s a bloodline from the Hebrew women on the banks of the Red Sea, singing of liberation, down through the famed and frustrated women of the Bible: the migrant outsider Ruths, the abused-but-heroic sex-worker Rahabs, the trusting and sacrificial Hannahs, the stronger-than-a-man-but-still-in-his-shadow Deborahs. This is the victimized but valorous lineage that links the two Marys. Indeed, that lineage and those songs go back beyond Miriam, sister of Moses, back through shunned Leah, barren Rebecca, laughing Sarah, all the women prophets and priests, and all the way back to Eve. Back to that most primal of all dominations that we humans cannot shake: “In pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16 MEV).

The “fall of man” was always a particularly raw deal for women: Adam got hard work in the fields and a deathward return to dust. Eve got partnership turned into domination, equality and intimacy transformed into an unequal power struggle. Mary’s, like Miriam’s, is a song for all the women of God, a song for equality, a song for freedom from male dominance and demands.

Mary’s incarnation poem is not the cosmic descent and ascent of Philippians 2 nor the meditation on the mystical union of Word and flesh we find in John 1. Hers is a literally “down to earth” poem. She sings of the inverted order her son will bring to the world: Servants of “low estate” like Mary are blessed and honored, the proud are scattered, the mighty rulers have been brought down from their thrones, the rich are going without, and the poor, the hungry, and the downtrodden are being lifted up. Falling down to the lowest level of humanity, the descending God knocked down every intermediary rung on the ladder. Mary anticipates this upheaval: an overturning of human hierarchies by the baby growing in her womb.

She does not linger on the metaphysics, but this is the logic of Mary’s song: The Highest One has descended to the lowest and dignified humanity from the bottom up. In Mary’s gospel, the message is at first bad news for the rich, the mighty, the proud, and the tyrannical. She puts on notice all who would build tiers of humanity, all who would aim to dominate, manipulate, threaten, and overpower other human beings. God is the disrupter of hierarchies. As the King James Bible so marvelously translated Peter, “God is no respecter of persons” (Acts 10:34).

Mary is not a blissful maiden staring mildly off to heaven, as so much bad Christian art has depicted her. Mary is insubordinate. She is a hopeful, righteous dissident. She’s not merely some quaint first-century Jew singing rapturously. Mary is a revolutionary theologian. She’s leading the quiet, underground rebellion for liberation. Mary is Eve, vindicated and restored.

As we will see in the next few chapters, Jesus was a courageous man who defied the empire. He learned how from his mother.

A note on why I share this:

The passage above is from my forthcoming book, Defying Tyrants (Broadleaf Books, October 6), and I’m posting excerpts here at Reckonings through the fall.

As a mostly independent scholar, Substack is one of my main sources of income. If this work is worth something to you, I’d be grateful if you’d become a paid subscriber.

Additionally, I’m still putting together all the details of my fall speaking tour around Defying Tyrants. If you would like to bring me to your church or community, please reach out: https://www.chaffeemanagement.com/matt-taylor