“Mary at War”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, December 1, 2024
Reading: Revelation 12:1-6
I didn’t grow up in church, so I tend not to thrill to churchy words like “Advent.” Only in seminary did I learn something of what the word actually means: “Someone is coming. Get ready.” Now, as an unchurched kid, I knew to get ready for Santa. I knew if grandparents were coming to behave and dress in uncomfortable clothes, but they loved me, so that was fine. But who are we getting ready for in Advent?
That question is harder to answer than you might think.
Historically, the first Sunday of Advent was New Year’s Day in western Christendom. It only moved to January 1st later. In Advent, the church waits not for St. Nick or grandma, a Christmas bonus, or the NFL playoffs. We wait for the coming of Jesus Christ. Just as he came to our ancestors in Israel once, so too will he come again to heal all creation. In Advent, we stand on tiptoe, and wait to see, is she here yet?
Advent is Mary’s season.
Once I became an evangelical—reacting against my parents’ irreligion—I didn’t understand my fellow Protestants’ allergy to Maryam Nazariah, mother of Yeshua, our Jesus. My Catholic grandmother loved Mary and taught me, “it must have taken a pretty special person to be the mother of God.” Grandmother, she’s not the mother of God, she is only the mother of Christ. With patience only grandmothers can manage she said ... nothing I can recall. But once I learned theology, I would have reprimanded the younger me: if you say Mary is not the mother of God, you mean that Jesus Christ is not God. That’s the only real heresy we have in Christianity. My grandmother knew that, but she also knew that God is very patient, and we’re all more wrong than right about God. Mary is a red thread tied around the church’s finger: sure, God is almighty, all-knowing, all-powerful. You know what else God is? Human. Frail and weak. Tempted and afraid. Mortal. God can die. In fact, God already has died. Mary shows us our God has eyelashes and a pancreas, and a Jewish mom. That means, are you ready for this? That means God is ... Jewish. Every Jewish friend I have would say, for one reason or another, um, okay, run that by me one more time?
Confused yet? Good. You’re starting to get it.
In the divorce between Catholics and Protestants at the Reformation in the 1500s, the lawyers divvied up the spoils. We Protestants got the Bible, preaching, hymns, and eventually we created capitalism by accident. You’re welcome, world. I think. Our Catholic ex’s got Mary, the saints, the sacraments, the pope, and this one kills me: they got the visual arts. Try and find me a Protestant sculptor like Michelangelo or Bernini. Good luck. Music was 60/40: they got Mozart, we got Bach. Painting, closer to 80/20. Sure, we got Albrecht Durer but only my fellow art nerds have heard of him. Leonardo da Vinci? I mean, he has a ninja turtle named after him!
I learned this from my family too—divorce mostly hurts women and children. My grandmother was abandoned once, abused in another marriage, read Thomas Merton’s, Seven Storey Mountain, and found the nearest Catholic priest. She sold what little she had and joined an order of nuns. But they refused her too. The sisters were suspicious she had been a protestant, married twice, some mental illness issues. You know what my grandmother did? Took her lumps. Still went to mass every week, just not every day anymore. And when she was babysitting me once she surreptitiously baptized me in the kitchen sink. That woman was a warrior.
Just like Mary of Nazareth, mother of God. She is a warrior. Not was, is.
The word “warrior” is stretchy, like all good metaphors. The late justice Murray Sinclair was a warrior for indigenous rights and reconciliation in Canada. I told you a few weeks ago about Bruce Springsteen’s “fighting prayer for my country.” Now, war can be too stretchy. The war on drugs in my country of origin is a failure. The war on terror: another failure. We Americans don’t use the F word very often. But I think I’m safe on this side of the border as a New Canadian.
Listen to these words and if you know where they come from, pretend you don’t.
My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name;
indeed, his mercy is for 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 brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things
and sent the rich away empty.
He has come to the aid of his child Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
That’s about as Jewish a prayer as you can get, fitting for Miriam of Nazareth, a daughter of Zion. Like the Lord’s Prayer, the Magnificat doesn’t mention Jesus. Doesn’t mention Mary. Doesn’t mention the church. Doesn’t mention Christianity. Mary’s song in Luke 1 is a song of victory. God has crushed the proud, past tense. Thrown presidents and prime ministers and premiers and mayors from their offices. Emptied the Keg of paying customers and seated every housing insecure person for pinot and filet mignon (this is not a product placement: but I did eat at the Keg yesterday by coincidence, better enjoy it before Mary takes charge of the seating arrangements).
And Mary sticks her landing like a gymnast with this: God has not forgotten Israel.
Jim Harnish, whose book I’m drawing on for this series, we’re studying it Wednesday nights for Advent, calls the Magnificat an “aria of freedom.” The military junta in Argentina banned the Magnificat in the 1970s when protestors used it to denounce the regime. Another dictatorship in Guatemala banned the aria of freedom in the 80s (they called themselves evangelicals). The British East India company removed it from Books of Common Prayer. You can’t let people get Mary’s ideas in their heads, can you? They start demanding freedom too.
When we think of Mary, we’re not just thinking of our Roman Catholic siblings in Christian faith, though we are. We’re also thinking of our Jewish elder siblings in faith, as John Paul II called them. Mary is Israel and she is the church, not just Rome, but every church there has ever been. If you’re a Tolkien nerd like me, Mary is Lady Galadriel. She is all the beauty there is. She is also human, frail, tempted. And she is dangerous. More revolutionary than Marx, Lenin, Castro, Mao, or any other mass murderer who called themselves “revolutionary.” Mary is the revolution. And she’s coming for all of us. Gimli in one of the Peter Jackson movies’ extended cuts tells of the gift he received from Lady Galadriel. Gimli looks dumbstruck, in sloppy love, not lust, but in awe. What did you ask for Gimli? I asked only for one strand of her golden hair. She gave me three.
God hears what we most desire at our best and gives us triple.
The Magnificat is named for its first word in Latin, “My soul magnifies.” All Mary does is magnify her Son, our One God, and all our father. I don’t mean God the Father, though she does honour him too. I don’t mean Joachim if you know the Catholic stories. I mean all of our father... Adam. Her father. Ours, all humanity’s. Pope John Paul II himself said the Virgin gets cross if we pay her too much attention. She wants all attention on her glorious child. We Protestants have tried, in our clumsy way, to return the pope’s favour, with one song: “Mary, did you know?” which we play on a loop this time of year. Uh, have you read the story? Yeah, Mary’s the only one who knows. And her untouched womb started to swell with God: God’s elbows jabbing her ribs, God’s acrobatics keeping her awake, God’s head crowning and gasping for his first breath of air. But here’s the thing: that song has done more to help Protestants imagine Mary’s imagination than anything else in 500 years. And when we open up the Advent season to Mary, to the treasures of Latin Christendom, we get some of the most beautiful music ever written, not just in church, but anywhere.
This week I bumped into Eva. I don’t mean our youth group stalwart, mighty Ava. I don’t mean our nonagenarian Hungarian mother Eva. Nor Eve our greeter who calls herself our token Jew. I mean a woman who makes our building work, bless her. This Eva is a Christian from Syria. A refugee who will likely never return to her demolished country. She misses her friends and homeland, but as that country descended into chaos, Christians were a target. Much of her family is here now. But she has relatives who disappeared. Are they alive? In jail? No idea. They are simply disappeared. Here in Canada her family is free to speak Arabic, to grow a business, to practice faith. She goes to mass at her local Catholic parish sometimes, an Orthodox one sometimes, she’ll pray anywhere. She knows well this icon of Christ raiding hell and lifting out our first parents: Adam and Eve. You know who she is? She is Eve, mother of the living. She’s Mary, Catholic and dark skinned and magnificent. She is the Canada we’re proudest of as a haven for those in trouble. When we exalt Mary, we exalt femininity, womanhood, not just being a mom, which is great, but having a mom, which remains, stubbornly, the only way to be human.
We’ve been in the book of Revelation a lot lately. It wasn’t planned. It just happened. But I realize why: we’re talking about our vision as a church. The five pillars by which we’ll organize our life together going forward. And Revelation is a vision. Its writer is John the seer. He’s helping us see a future greater than any of us have imagined. Sometimes Revelation is known by its Greek name, Apocalypse. You’ve heard that an apocalypse is terrible news. Monsters, aliens, zombies, floods, as Bill Murray says in Ghostbusters, dogs and cats, living together, mass hysteria. There’s another conversation in that 80s blockbuster between Ontario’s own Dan Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson, an outstanding actor.
He asks Ackroyd, Do you believe in God?
Never met him.
Well, I do. Do you remember something in the Bible about the last days when the dead would rise from the grave?
And suddenly Ackroyd is a former Sunday School student. “I remember Revelations 7.12. “When he broke the sixth seal, I looked and behold there was a great earthquake; the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood.”
Judgment day. Both actors look glum. Ernie Hudson is a serious Christian. He’s barely acting at this point. “Has it ever occurred to you that the reason we’ve been so busy ghostbusting lately is that the dead have been rising from the grave?”
Now, Ackroyd is wrong in at least two ways. It’s not revelations plural. Anyone tells you they’re reading from the book of Revelations shows they’ve never read it. There is one Revelation, Jesus Christ, who rules the nations. And it’s not Revelation 7.12, it’s 6.12. But that scene is brilliant. Faith leaps off the Hollywood screen and into our laps. That’s all preaching is supposed to do, and a movie accomplishes it in 90 seconds.
Dispensationalist Christians think all of Revelation is about the future. This country will attack that country, there will be blood, and Jesus will return and destroy his enemies. Like some kind of Soviet era nuclear apocalypse. Historians tend to think all of Revelation is explained in the past. This beast is Rome. That one is Babylon. The seven emperors are these. They’re both doing the same thing. Reducing the mystery. Defacing scripture. Sometimes both are right. Sure, this could mean the future. This could mean the past. Meaning is a slippery animal: it’s a mystery. And both future predictors and historians are more often wrong than right. Here’s a third option. My teacher calls Revelation theopoetic. It’s rooted in the past, of course. It tells of a future, without question. But it is not reducible to either thing. We Christians are against all binaries. If someone says this is entirely right and so that must be 100 percent wrong, no. With us there are never only two sides. There’s always a third. The Holy Spirit. Who is nothing but love between the first and the second. A Jewish friend says we Christians should understand this above all because we’re trinitarians. This is why every marriage needs a marriage counselor. Two fight; three or more heal. Revelation is history and future and even more, it’s a love letter from Jesus Christ about the world he is bringing that is so much better than anyone has yet dared imagine.
Here’s what Mary thinks of our passage. Thinks, present tense. She is the summit of all beauty. Look at the image on our bulletin cover. That’s the moon under her feet. Stars around her head. You won’t be surprised some Protestant biblical scholars say that’s not Mary. Uh, okay, whatever dude. She’s pregnant and crying out in birth pangs. That’s contrary to modern Roman Catholic dogma, for which Mary is a virgin before and after giving birth, and she does so without pain. Uh, Father, I get that you don’t have a lot of experience in this area but ask one of the sisters next time. This birth is every mother’s nightmare: the delivery nurse is a great red dragon. Seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns. Numbers matter in the Bible, as they matter in nearly every culture except ours. These are emperors of Rome. Leaders of apartheid South Africa. And whatever other evil will come in the future. His tail sweeps a third of the stars out of heaven.
John Milton, 17th century English divine, imagines all the angels in assembly. And God announces a plan to become human. Some angels say hell no: you can’t. Become an angel instead, not a human. Homo sapiens are weak. Angels are strong and beautiful and fast and powerful. And Lucifer and the rest of the third of all angels fall. Because they can’t stand how humble God is to become human. The dragon is set to devour the Christ child, but Jesus is snatched away to safety. Mary is comforted in the wilderness for 1260 days.
Okay, fine, numbers mean stuff, but what’s up with all this?
Think with me of Israel’s story. Moses is delivered from death. That’s an image from an ancient synagogue celebrating the sisters who threw down Pharaoh. The dragon was ready for an army of men, not of midwives and nursemaids and women. Jesus is delivered from King Herod, another dragon, too. The Israelites wander in the wilderness for a generation, learning how to be free people. The wilderness is where every decent religion starts, and some of the indecent ones too. The desert is where you go for respite. To learn to be free. Where no one bothers to conquer you. Where you’re safe. Sounds good, doesn’t it? 1260 days? What on earth? This is where some clown is making money claiming to know when Jesus is coming back, right?
When Jesus preaches his first sermon in his hometown of Nazareth, everyone likes him at first. Then he turns on them.
No prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
So what? Well, three and a half years is attested nowhere else but here in the Old or New Testament. That’s how long Elijah prophesied in the desert. Before being sent to a widow from Israel’s mortal enemy. I don’t blame the crowd at Nazareth for turning on Jesus, ready to kill him. Mary will be comforted for three and a half years, the time of the prophet’s dangerous ministry. Because Mary is Israel’s last and greatest prophet, one whose comfort is as great as Elijah’s troublemaking.
Now is that Catholic or Protestant? Evangelical or liberal? Historical or future? Safe or insane? Good news or bad? Yes. Friends, the answer is yes. No more binaries! Mary births a child who will rule the nations. That’s our Lady of Perpetual Help: not just the church down St. Clair, but the most influential icon in world history. She looks at us, but he looks away, at his cross. This is a war Mary wins not with violence but with beauty. And you, me, and everything there ever has been or will be, will one day rejoice. Let it be so, God, and let it be so now. Amen.