Sometimes, as in the Call of Isaiah, the experience of the holy evokes a sense of unworthiness and guilt: "Woe is me . . . for I am a man of unclean lips." God’s pure light revealing our darkness and shadow. But such is not the only experience of the holy, and we best not make it the norm of all worship or religious experience. Sometimes the holy comes in pure delight, bestowing blessing.
Sometimes God’s first word is: Greetings, beloved child of my favor; or, You are my beloved daughter, son in whom I am well pleased. And what streams forth from our hearts is not "woe" but praise and love and thanks.
"Do not be afraid," the angel said to Mary, "for you have found favor with God. And you will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus."
"How can this be, since I have known no man?" she replied.
If you say yes, Mary, if you say yes. In his Christmas oratorio/poem For The Time Being, W. H. Auden places these words in Gabriel’s mouth:
Mary says yes:
St. Augustine said that Mary conceived the Christ in her heart before she conceived him in her womb. Such is the Advent invitation to us all: To conceive the holy one in the imagination of our hearts, to make a space for the holy to dwell within -- and through us to dwell in the world.
The story moves now to the home of Mary’s older cousin, Elizabeth, who is also with child in a miraculous way. When Mary greeted Elizabeth at the door the child in Elizabeth’s womb leaped. And Mary let loose with a song we call the Magnificat, after its first word in its Latin translation.
But before Latin it was Greek and before Greek, Hebrew, for it echoed the song of Hannah, Samuel’s mother, when she, barren for many years, conceived Samuel. It is a song of the poor of Israel praising the greatness of God.
Hannah praises God for redeeming her from childlessness. She praises God for coming to save the Hebrew people:
This is the song of the powerless trusting in the goodness and greatness of God.
Such phrases can become murderous on the lips of people like Stalin, Mao tse Tung and Osama bin Laden. To believe that God makes justice on earth, however, does not justify the use of violence to achieve its goals. The ethical watershed of Jesus’ life and Jesus’ teaching is this: In the kingdom of God the means must be consistent with the ends. The ends are present in the means. In other words, you just can’t kill for Jesus, or Moses, or Mohammed.
Mary’s song echoes Hannah’s:
My soul magnifies the Lord
My soul rejoices in God my Savior.
To sing of God your Savior is to break the illusion of self-salvation. The Southern writer, Flannery O’Connor, a devout Roman Catholic, tried to teach Southern Protestants about grace -- a kind of reverse Reformation: "The religion of the South," she wrote in a letter, "is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I as a Catholic find painful and touching and grimly comic."2
Mary’s song is a song of grace, God’s saving where she cannot. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound."
It is also a song of justice, trusting in God, who cares about the poor and intervenes and inverts the unjust order of the world:
It’s like the song that made its way from slave ships through the Highlander Folk School to the civil rights movement:
Or like the hymn of the great black poet James Weldon Johnson which has become the African-American national anthem, and the anthem of all who believe in the God of Hannah and Mary.
That song is as close to Mary’s Magnificat as I can imagine. It starts with "Amazing Grace" and ends with "Lift Every Voice and Sing."
II
Now Joseph’s story. Luke emphasized Mary’s story; Matthew focused on Joseph. The incarnation required the faithful obedience of two ordinary human beings: that fourteen-year-old girl named Mary and her older husband-to-be Joseph, a carpenter.
He was older than Mary, how much older we cannot know. But the difference in age of this May-December romance has sparked the imagination of Christmas storytellers throughout history.
He probably never expected Mary to say yes, but when she did he found a new spring in his step. The customary aches and pains seemed to fade away, her love better than a bottle of super-strength aspirin. As they walked through town he heard the cracks: "Hey, Joe, you’re supposed to be building cradles, not robbing them!"
When he heard that Mary was with child, how could he not be devastated? He knew he was not the father. He was a simple man, not given to mystic vision and stories of angels and Holy Ghost conceptions. He could only suspect the obvious, that she had been with another man. By the laws of betrothal this made Mary guilty of adultery, and the law required either death by stoning or a very public divorce, reasons announced.
"But Joseph being a just man," the scriptures say. To call a man "just" or "righteous," the Hebrew title Tzaddik, was the highest honor you could give. His namesake Joseph in the Old Testament was known as Joseph the Tzaddik. To be a Tzaddik was one part justice and one part mercy. So Joseph, being that kind of man, decided not to have her put to death, but to divorce her quietly and try to go on with his messed-with life.
One night as he lay heartbroken in bed he finally fell asleep. As he did God sent a dream (again, as to his namesake Joseph) and in the dream an angel with a message:
Matthew adds the quotation from Isaiah (Isaiah 7:14):
The nativity stories are like those Broadway musicals based on a true story. Something happens; suddenly appears a song to give meaning to the moment. So here.
Actually two prophecies are being fulfilled: Not only will Mary bear a son who will be God-with-us; Joseph will adopt and name him as his own son and thereby make him part of the lineage of David, a son of David.
Joseph believed the message of the dream: God is in this. When Joseph awoke from the dream, he "did as the angel of the Lord commanded him." This is what a Tzaddik does. He took Mary as his wife and named the boy as his own.
W. H. Auden has fashioned this wonderful response to Joseph’s faithful act:
Can you see how fragile the conditions of Incarnation? God trusting God’s own son and the salvation of the world into our human hands and fugitive hearts? The Incarnation could not have been possible apart from the trustful submission of a fourteen-year-old girl to the mystery of God and the unknown processes of gestation and birth, or apart from the trustful obedience of a carpenter named Joseph who turned away from the obvious conclusions to obey the dream and join with Mary to love, honor and cherish her, and to love, honor, cherish and protect that life that was within her which was not just life of her life but life of God’s life as well and the life of the world. "The world is with child" is how Buechner puts it.
The salvation of God rests upon the simple, or not so simple, obedience of ordinary people who decide to do the difficult thing but the right thing.
Conclusion
What if Michelangelo had said, "I don’t do ceilings!"
What if Moses had said, "I’m a murderer and I stutter, I can’t go back and lead your people!"
What if Bach had said, "No more church music. These pastors are too hard to work for, and who should put up with the comments after worship: "The cantata was too long . . . How about a hymn we know?"
What is Abraham Lincoln had said, "I’m tired of losing elections; I’ll not run again!"
What if Martin Luther had said, "I’ll stay in law school. It’s what my father wants, anyway."
What if Martin Luther King, Jr., had said, "I’d rather not get into this messy business of politics. I’ll just preach the gospel!"
What if our church founders had said," It’s too much trouble to start a church. Pass me another martini!"
What if Rosa Parks had said, "What good can this one black woman do if she refuses to move to the back of the bus?"
What if Mary had said, "I can’t go through with this pregnancy?"
What if Joseph had said, "The real translation of Isaiah 7:14 is almah, young woman, not parthenos, virgin."
What if you . . . .
The salvation and the ongoing incarnation of God rest on young women and carpenters and people like you who
God give us some of that! And Mary, Joseph, Yahweh, praise!
1. For The Time Being, Collected Poems (New York: Random House, 1976), p.
279.
2. The Habit of Being (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979), p. 350.
3. Op. cit., p. 283.