Mary of Nazareth: Icon of Humanity

Faith of Our Mothers 32

Few women in history have been as idolised, reformed and refashioned in human imagination down the ages as Mary of Nazareth. Indeed, it is hard to relate to Mary’s humanity, given the attributes of virginal, sainted mother, sinless and pure which she has accumulated in popular religious piety.

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Protestantism has also been in recent centuries very wary of anything to do with Mary, the Mother of our Lord, citing apprehensions about Roman Catholic veneration of Mary being some kind of misdirected adoration of Christ. Mary has also been narrated as the image of perfect womanhood in her passivity to God’s agency through her utterance of “Let it be done to me according to your word”, resulting in her conception of Jesus. It is not difficult to see how such religious language could be abused; the righteous woman is obedient, passively submissive and sexually ‘pure’, (where virgin, which can simply mean ‘maiden’, is somehow equated with sinlessness). Womanhood is also idealised as finding meaning and purpose through maternity. It is not difficult to see how Mary has become the object of unhealthy projections about womanhood, sexuality and power.

In all this, the wisdom and witness of Mary of Nazareth may be lost. There was a gentle story told by poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama, in 2011 at Greenbelt Festival about his own mother’s encounter with Mary. Pádraig’s mother, who had a number of young children, had suffered from post-natal depression for some time and had recently lost her own mother. She had been sleeping, as was her practice in the afternoon, and woke up because a strange woman walked into the room. Dressed plainly, with grey cropped hair and nothing extravagant in her dress, Pádraig’s mother said she knew it was Mary, the mother of Jesus. She describes feeling ‘the depression on the bed’ as the woman sat down next to her and said, “You never liked me much, did you?”

Pádraig’s mother said, “I wasn’t sure how to relate to my own mother and I don’t know how to relate to you.”

Mary answered, “That’s okay”, and then Pádraig’s brother walked in.

His mother looked back and the woman was gone.[1]

After that time, Pádraig relates that his mother felt a renewed sense of connection with her own motherhood, and the motherhood of her own mother. There was something in the honesty of the question, “You never liked me much, did you?” that enabled a release to greater self-acceptance.

Given the oppressive associations, many women might relate to a deep, likely suppressed desire to tell Mary, the mother of God, “I never liked you much.” Maybe we need to begin again by recognising the twisted projections which have robbed Mary of the very best thing which she offers us: her humanity. Her appearances in scripture celebrate so many common human experiences even as they carry cosmic significance, from telling her son to step up at a wedding when the wine runs out, to being full of anxiety when that same son goes missing on the road back from the temple, to taking in her dying son’s friend as her own son.

One of the most important Gospel texts where Mary is the central player is set near the beginning of her story in the gentle everydayness of the meeting before Jesus’ birth with her also pregnant cousin, Elizabeth. While there is much that is extraordinary here, it is the ordinary that is at the heart of the joy of two women meeting, offering the kind of mutual support women have always offered one another in the experience of pregnancy and childbirth. From this connection between these two of different generations, sharing the joys and hopes of a first and unexpected pregnancy, a song of praise to God’s grace erupts from Mary. It is one which begins in the domestic and the personal but swells into the political. Mary’s song expresses the longings of human experience, for her time and for all time, that the life of even the smallest person matters, and that those who exploit and oppress will not have the last word. Far from being passive and obedient, Mary’s ‘Magnificat’ is the outcry against tyranny and a call to action, vocalising God’s urgent desire for justice and peace in the world.

When the time comes for Mary to give birth to her child, God is again being revealed in the most intimate of domestic scenes while carrying the hidden power of political disruption and cosmic glory. That there is no room on earth for this child is underlined in the Lukan Gospel text. The Greek word for inn is “kataluma”: meaning an upper room where guests could stay. The narratives tell us Joseph was returning to his hometown, probably where there was extended family, but with so many people in town there was no ‘upper room’ left for Mary to give birth to her child. Instead, they most likely needed to settle into the family’s main living area where animals also came to shelter in the night. Here, Mary’s labour probably proceeded in the same way women have given birth down the ages; listening to her body and likely with the physical presence and support of other women gathered in that overcrowded household. Despite the aura of holiness around Mary, it is the ordinariness of this event that should awaken us to the shock of divine disruption to the oppressive powers of this world through such a domestic scene as this young mother labouring on the family room floor to deliver her first child.

The Mary who is wholly other- pure and distantly, inhumanly perfect- is far less dangerous to powers that dominate and control than this earthy, embodied human woman who in her courage and faithfulness births into this world a new union between divinity and humanity. While images of power and might are associated generally with the masculine and transcendent, the immanent and feminine is less easily corralled by those in power as it works through the sacred relationships of all things and acknowledges the potential for a divine rebirth in any moment and in any human life.

Totalising regimes and external purity codes that seek to codify and control life always serve the powerful and colonise the vulnerable, making it a painful irony that Mary, who sang the freedom of the Magnificat, has been used and exploited as a symbol to maintain such control over women. Hierarchical control resists the power and suppresses the diverse possibilities of life. Mary’s story is relational at every turn, and it is from this groundedness to place and to people that her voice is raised in triumph, singing of the God who looks with favour on the lowly, scatters the proud, casts down the mighty and fills the hungry with good things.

It may be said that Mary, the singer of songs of liberty and bearer of the Christ child, is an icon of new beginnings. Icons are windows into what is most real and gateways for entering what is possible in God’s dream for the world. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul writes that “Jesus is the image of the invisible God”. The Greek word translated here as ‘image’ is icon (eikón). Jesus is a window into the likeness and the mystery of God, the clearest sign we have revealing God’s nature. Mary is similarly an icon, but a window that reveals the possibilities for humanity and who we can become. Mary, ‘the mother of God’, reveals the new beginnings possible when divine life is brought to birth in our hearts and lives that we, too, may be Christ-bearers to the world. At the heart of the idea of Mary as God-bearer is a sense of the sacramentality at the heart of everything. The human nature- and by extension all creation- has been divinised. The world is aflame with the glory of God -the separation between creator and creature has been overcome.

So often, what we need is not God as transcendent other, but God with us, present in the everyday, drawing us into the possibilities of this present moment. This Christmas maybe Mary - maiden, mother and icon of humanity - can again be for us a sign of God waiting to be born anew in us and the promise of who we can become.

So let’s pray:

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God of promise and possibility,
Whose Word was enwombed in Mary 
and whose glory revealed
around domestic hearths and family tables,
offering hospitality to strangers
and comfort between friends.
Give us, like Mary, the faith to birth 
your peace in our lives,
to love without counting the cost,
and to let our joy erupt into songs of justice.
Lead us each day to become more ourselves
as we allow your presence to be born anew in us.
through Jesus Christ, Mary’s child.  Amen. 

Rev’d Suzanne Grimmett has been serving in ministry roles for the last 20 years. She adores her three adult children and their partners (and their dogs) and loves serving in her current role as Rector of St Andrew’s in the Brisbane riverside suburb of Indooroopilly. Initially employed in Chaplaincy in Lutheran schools, Suzanne was familiar with the pain and loss of the pathway to ordination not being open to women. The Anglican church for over a decade has been a place of vocational freedom and grace for her, where she has enjoyed cathedral, school and parish ministry and the chance to meet all of her heroes through the On the Way podcast which she records with friends.

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[1] https://www.greenbelt.org.uk/talks/our-lady-of-greenbelt/

The image is “Mary Breastfeeding Jesus” by Kelly Latimore. Used with permission.