Mary and Joseph

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

"And Mary said, ‘Behold I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.’"

-- Luke 1:38

Listen to this quotation from a very famous book and see if you can guess its source: “The angels said, ‘O Mary, indeed God has favored you and made you immaculate, and chosen you from all the women of the world. So adore your Lord, O Mary, and pay homage and bow with those who bow in prayer’…When the angel said: ‘O Mary, God gives you news of a thing from Him, for rejoicing, (news of one) whose name will be Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, illustrious in this world and the next, and one among the honored, who will speak to the people when in the cradle and when in the prime of life, and will be among the upright and doers of good,’ she said, ‘How can I have a son, O Lord, when no man has touched me?’ He said: ‘That is how God creates what He wills. When He decrees a thing, He says ‘Be’, and it is.’” (Al-Qur’an  3:42-47 – trans. Ahmed Ali).

You might think this passage comes from a Christian source, and it could have were it not for the heresy at the end, where it calls Christ a creature, when we all know that he is generated not created, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, creator not creature, in our flesh. Nevertheless, at the same time as it denies his divinity our mystery source accepts his virginal conception, which is more than many so-called Christians do today.

Who do you think is the source of this passage? Would it surprise you to know that it comes from the prophet Muhammad, from the third chapter of the Holy Qur’an? Well, that is indeed where it comes from, and so I ask, “If the Muslims believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, why not all of us Christians? If we, unlike them, believe that Jesus is God incarnate in human flesh why do some of us balk at the virgin birth?” That is the way God chose, and who can second guess the divine and advise Him on how to improve His activity. “When you come it would be best if you come in the way we all come, because we think you should be just like us,” or some such absurdity.

But I have not quoted the Qur’an to enter into an argument about the virginal conception, rather I have done so firstly to counteract as far as possible and in the name of the Prince of Peace those Christian fanatics like Franklin Graham, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who have recently said such terrible things about Muhammad and  the Muslim faith, by reminding you of how reverently that faith approaches Mary and Jesus.  I wonder if those “super Christians” have ever read in the Qur’an.

Primarily, however, I wanted to get your attention for our meditation on the parents of Jesus, the two most important representatives of our human race in all of history. They are the door through which God came when He entered his creation to heal it from within and bonded with it absolutely. God did not send a messenger, He did not send a set of instructions, He did not send a get-well card, He did not send money, He did not send an email, He came himself, and the door through which he came has Mary as one of it posts and Joseph as the other.

Mary has always been central to the piety of Christians. We have taken quite literally the fact that God the Holy Spirit is the Father and Mary is the mother, of God the Son, Jesus Christ. Thus we have always believed that our humanity has been taken into the heart of the divinity, Mary’s egg and God’s Spirit conjoined in the mystery of the divine humanity of Jesus, who is  the second person of the Trinity. These days we are all becoming familiar with the intimacies of the earliest stages of human reproduction as we read in newspapers of the proposals and practices of cloning, putting the nucleus of one cell into the nuclear spot of another and thus producing blastocysts for experimentation and the harvesting of pluripotent stem cells. It would be tasteless to speculate on the process of the divine conception so I simply remind you that the Gospel is speaking of divine action at that most intimate level of physical reality, and why not? He who created the eye and the arm did He not also create the ovaries and the womb? And did Mary not acknowledge freely and joyously the divine ownership of all of herself?

Let me now give you three points to ponder, as any sermon must. First, Mary’s costly cooperation: She was a girl of sixteen, and by agreeing to what was an illicit pregnancy she accepted the social cost in a village where her life would be ruined forever. She would be convicted of whoredom and rendered unsuitable for marriage forever, or even stoned to death for adultery. She would have expected her betrothed to break the engagement and leave her exposed. “I am the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to your will.”

Second, Joseph’s costly obedience: because of a dream he did not leave her exposed but took her under his wing. He believed his fiancée’s strange story and lied to his friends and family and other folk in the village that the child was his. He bore the embarrassment of a conception prior to marriage. He could not bear the child but he could and did bear the responsibility for the child, and its vulnerable young mother. He made a place for them in the shadow of his own shame, and covered them with his strong claim, which happened to be partly false and altogether true. “They are mine, and don’t anybody mess with them!”

Thirdly, God’s revolution: in the birth of this baby God turned the world right side up. The word “revolution” was first used in English in the 17th century, by religious sectarians in Cromwell’s New Model Army, called Ranters, to describe the revolution of the wheel of history that brought the people in Parliament to the top and the King to the bottom. Revolution means the 180-degree change of the source and nature of power, from the top to the bottom. I recall vaguely that there is a song of the American Revolution called “The World turned upside down,” the people now on top and the king on the bottom. God’s revolution does something like that, only it turns the world not upside down but right side up. That is, God’s revolution restores the right order of things. And what is that right order?

The right order is that the first and great power in the universe is not the King ruling by divine right, not the republic ruling by popular consent, nor the processes of nature ruling by force and chance, but the love of a mother for a baby, and the love of a man for a woman and her child that is not his. This love is the door by which God comes into the human world, and all the world of matter. The whole scene is an instance of God’s own divine presence, since He makes Joseph and Mary what they are and by His birth as the baby opens the door His love has made as a way for His love to enter.

Let us ponder the nature of what we see here. It is the most profound moment we shall ever witness, and blessed is the one who can enter it in faith and meditation, in humility and awe. Both loves are freely given: Mary agrees to the pregnancy, Joseph agrees to succor Mary and the child. Nevertheless, there does seem to me to be a difference between the situations of Mary on the one hand, and Joseph on the other. Mary’s love for her child is organic, -I can’t think of a better word - while Joseph’s is heroic. We know from ethology how reluctant many species of ape are to raise the offspring of another. Joseph out of sheer obedience to a dream shelters the offspring of another, and shelters his mother. What kind of love is that? The love of a man for a woman quite apart from sexual relations, for Mary was to remain perpetually virgin? That is heroic love, which teams with organic love to be the doorposts for the entry of perfect, divine love.

This threefold love is the real power in the universe, God’s revolution, and that is why the song of Mary, so much like the song of Hannah before her, celebrates the bringing down of the mighty and the exalting of the humble, the turning of history’s wheel 180 degrees. Why? Because love is humble and might is crass, because might is weak and love is strong. “Sing out my soul the glory of God! Magnificat! Magnificent! Maid Mary and master Joseph! You are closest to God of us all!

Let me set you a meditation for this season: Imagine yourself into the experience of Mary, (and you mothers have the advantage there). What could it be like to see come forth from your body this perfect little boy, conceived without sexual intercourse? Imagine yourself into the experience of Joseph. Take that somebody else’s son into your arms and say, “His name shall be Jesus, because he shall save his people from their sins!”  Then try to imagine love like this as the most powerful thing in the universe, and align yourself with it.

Amen.