In a short devotional for Christian Standard magazine, Paul Williams wrote about an unusually bumpy flight he once had from Philadelphia to Long Island. Since he was a frequent flyer, Williams wasn’t too concerned about the turbulence. Other passengers, however, were grabbing onto their armrests or steadying themselves on the seat back in front of them. While observing the reactions of his fellow passengers, Williams took notice of one young mother caring for her baby. He watched as she “wrapped her arms around her infant and pulled the child very close to her breast. Then she dropped her chin, rested it on the back of the child’s head, and began to sing ever so quietly, ‘Hush, Little Baby.’”
The moment caused Williams to reflect on Christmas. He writes:
Helpless fragility is the lot of the infant. Those early days leave a lasting impression on the human psyche we never really resolve. That vulnerability stays with us all of our days, reminding us of the seemingly capricious nature of things—a bitter world that does not care if we exist.
But then God came—as an infant, unable to reach out and steady himself on the seat back in front of him, fully trusting a human, fallible mother to pull him close to her breast through the pitching, shaking nature of things.
What an extraordinary risk, to trust the infant of God to a frightened young girl. But then again—watching that new mother sing to her child all the way through the turbulent skies to the welcoming runway—I realized God knew good and well what he was doing. The power of love trumps fear, rewards risk, and brings meaning and life to an otherwise frightening world. Over and over again.
For a God who would become powerless for love, and to a mother who sings softly in her infant’s ear, I give my heart for Christmas, wholly amazed at the wonder of it all.
I think the mother to whom God entrusted the birth and care of his Son was truly an amazing person. Luke presents her to us as the model believer. Indeed, Mary is worthy of imitation. I want to look with you today at three acts of Mary that I believe we need to copy. Each act can be described with two words.
First, Mary submitted and accepted. When the angel Gabriel told Mary that she was to become the mother of the Messiah, and that without the aid of a human father, Mary’s response was: “I am the Lord’s servant. May your word to me be fulfilled.” (Luke 1:38)
Mary submitted to being the Lord’s slave. She accepted the Holy Spirit inspired word of the angel. Mary cooperated with God’s plan of salvation, and so became a model believer, the mother of Jesus, and the mother of the Church.
William Barclay once wrote, “Mary’s submission is a very lovely thing. ‘Whatever God says, I accept.’ Mary had learned to forget the world’s commonest prayer— ‘Thy will be changed’—and to pray the world’s greatest prayer— ‘Thy will be done.’”
Paige Byrne Shortal writes,
I wish I could always muster a classy yes like Mary’s. “Let it be done with me according to your word” is a far cry from my usual “OK, if you say so.” We do the best we can.
Mary’s fiat, as it is called (fiat being not a cute little car but Latin for “let it be done”), was a yes to the Unknown. These are the only yeses that really count.
Consider your average New Year’s resolution—lose twenty pounds, walk every day, write more thank-you notes, clean out that closet. These aren’t yeses to the Unknown. Most resolutions are really just a way of maintaining the status quo, only more comfortably.
A yes to the Unknown—this was the fiat of Mary as she accepted the impossible message of the angel. This was the yes of those Wise Men following the star to only God knows where. This was the yes of Jesus as he accepted baptism by his cousin John.
I remember my own baptism. It was somewhat irregular. At twenty-one years old, I had come under the influence of an energetic Jesuit priest who, two weeks after we met, invited me to become a Catholic. Part of the preparation of those to be baptized is to instruct them on the ritual response to certain questions. My priest forgot that instruction, and so when he asked me, “What do you ask of God’s Church?” I replied firmly, “Answers.”
(Wrong!) Jesuits are quick on their feet, and so he recovered with, “When there are no answers, will you accept faith?” (OK, if you say so.)
A few months ago we celebrated the baptism of my third grandchild. His parents, my middle son and daughter-in-law, stood in front of the congregation jiggling the baby while trying to keep their four-year-old from having a melt-down and their two-year-old from diving into the blessed water. They had that deer-in-the-headlights look of all young, nervous, sleep-deprived parents.
They were asked a ritual question, and they knew the right answer. First the priest says, “You have asked to have your child baptized….” Then comes the kicker: “Do you clearly understand what you are undertaking?” And my kids nodded their distracted assent. Just once I’d like to hear a parent respond, “Are you out of your mind? Of course we don’t know what we are undertaking! In fifteen years this little sweetheart will be an opinionated, sweaty, hormonal teenager who mumbles and sighs and shrugs and treats me like an idiot.”
In baptism and marriage and parenthood and most of life, we say yes to the Unknown. Mary’s yes to her beautiful baby boy was also a yes to the cross, and so it is with all such yeses….
…who knows where these yeses will lead? We don’t know, just like the Wise Men didn’t know that their star would lead them to a stable in Bethlehem. Or like Saul, the Pharisee, didn’t know on the road to Damascus that his new name would be Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles. Or like a new mother holding her precious baby doesn’t know what pain may someday lodge in her heart. There will be a cross. But the cross is never the end. This is our faith. With that faith, maybe we can say, Yes! …Let it be done in our world according to your word.
The second act of Mary we see in Luke’s Gospel is that Mary magnifies and rejoices. We read in Luke 1 beginning with verse 39 of what Mary did after she received the announcement of the angel.
At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea, where she entered Zechariah’s home and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. In a loud voice she exclaimed: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!”
And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”
Mary stayed with Elizabeth for about three months and then returned home.
Mary’s soul magnified the Lord. Her spirit jumped for joy in God her savior. Tom Wright asks: “What would make you celebrate wildly, without inhibition?” Then he contemplates various situations that might make us do that. He concludes that whatever might make us celebrate wildly, it would make us do things we normally wouldn’t do. In response to the news of the angel, and to her cousin Elizabeth becoming pregnant in her old age, Mary made up a song of praise to God, very much like Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel, or some of the psalms in which her mind and heart were steeped.
I wonder, how might we magnify the Lord and rejoice in him this Christmas as Mary did?
- Perhaps we might do it, as many Christians have done through the centuries, by reading, saying aloud or singing the very words that Mary used to magnify the Lord—her Magnificat.
- Maybe we might sing a Christmas carol, full voice, in the store while shopping this week, without a care for what others may think.
- Perhaps we might make up our own song of praise to the Lord.
However we do it, the important thing is that we magnify the Lord and rejoice in him.
I love that word: magnify. But why in the world would we need to magnify the Lord anyway? Isn’t he large enough for everyone to see? Perhaps he is. However, he is so large, so present everywhere, and we are so muddled in our sin, that sometimes we just don’t see him, even though he is there. Thus, it takes someone like Mary to come along and hold up the magnifying glass of her soul to the great deeds of the Lord and speak them with her voice in order for us to see and hear how great God is.
Rejoicing in the Lord—that is something we need to do all the time—not just at Christmas. Sometimes we live in a very sorry world—not because God made it that way—but because we have made it that way by our sin. So many people are downtrodden and depressed. They need us to come along and lift them up by our attitude of gratitude and rejoicing in the Lord.
I wonder—whose life might you bring light and joy to this week?
The third great act of Mary that we see in Luke’s Gospel is that Mary treasures and ponders.
When the shepherds received the message of the angels about Jesus’ birth we read in Luke 2 beginning with verse 16:
So, they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.
The word for “treasure” means that Mary was keeping a sort of mental scrapbook of the shepherds’ words.
Think about that. Mary lived in a time hundreds of years before photographs or scrapbooks. How would she keep a record of the amazing things happening to her, the astonishing things said about her baby son? She kept a record in her mind and heart. In this case, it was a record of the Spirit-inspired words of the shepherds. Notice that—the shepherds’ words were “rhema” (in Greek) just like the “rhema” of the angel who announced the conception of Jesus to Mary.
However, Mary did not simply make a mental scrapbook of all the surprisingly wonderful things that were happening. She pondered them. The word literally means: “to throw together”. Mary tossed the words of the shepherds around in her mind, along with the words of the angel, and the words of her cousin Elizabeth. She was looking for just the right scrapbook arrangement of it all, trying to figure out what it all meant, where it was all leading…
We live in a rather thoughtless world today. It seems like most people don’t take much time to think about much of anything. You seldom see or hear of people treasuring or pondering something in their hearts. Perhaps that is because we live in an age and culture that is just moving too darn fast all the time. The world urges us to live our lives at warp speed, and so we seldom if ever find time to contemplate.
Witness the rush of Christmas as an example. What a contrast our Christmas season of shopping, rushing here and there to concerts and parties and all the rest, what a contrast that all is to the way Mary spent her first night with Jesus. “Silent night, holy night”—if only we carved out room in our lives as Mary did for more silent nights, holy nights … and days.
In an article for Kyria.com, an on-line resource for Christian women, Mayo Mathers confesses that hosting parties, cooking up delicious buffets, and shopping for gifts brings out the “Martha” in her, like the Martha who spent all her time getting a meal ready for Jesus rather than sitting at his feet like her sister Mary.
Mayo Mathers had never given this much thought until she attended her church’s annual Christmas pageant one year. It was then she had a breakthrough moment:
As I sat in the candlelit sanctuary absentmindedly listening to the peaceful strains of “Silent Night,” I wrestled mentally with a list of things to be done. When the congregation stood to sing carols, my lips moved unconsciously to the words while my brain mulled over various menus for our annual Christmas Eve buffet.
As in every Christmas pageant, the usual parade of bathrobe-draped children marched down the center aisle. A pseudo-weary Mary and Joseph shook their heads in dismay as the innkeeper turned them away. Having watched so many similar renditions of the Christmas story, it had become commonplace to me.
Realizing this, I felt a stab of guilt and bowed my head. Father, I prayed, let me see the story through your eyes tonight.
The young girl portraying Mary began to sing a lullaby to the child in her arms. Her voice was so pure, so full of love and awe, that I stared at her, transfixed, my distracted musings forgotten. Suddenly, it was as if the congregation had disappeared, as if I had been transported back in time to the actual stable in Bethlehem.
As I listened to her song, wonder and immense gratitude settled upon me. Into my heart God whispered: If ever there was a time to worship me, it’s now! This season is about me only, but each year you crowd me out with the inconsequential!
Mathers closes her article with these words: “Beautiful, delicious dinners are nice. ‘Just right’ gifts are delightful. But I’m learning that only one thing really matters: while I tend to be more like Martha, at Christmas, ‘tis the season to be ‘Mary’!”
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