There are two women pregnant with the future God was planning. They meet today in our gospel lesson. This is a momentous event. More than that, it is a veritable turning point in history. For they will give birth to two children who are decisive for God’s plan of salvation. The first, whose name is John, will announce it. The second, whose name is Jesus, will fulfill it.
Of the two women Elizabeth is the older, but she defers to the younger. How could it be otherwise? The child in her womb is secondary to the one that Mary will bear. After her child grows up and fulfills his role of preparing the way of the Lord, he must decrease. It is not her own child, but rather the one that Mary bears that Elizabeth calls “my Lord,” even before he was born.
If the child to which Mary will give birth is “Lord,” then that makes Mary the “mother of the Lord,” as Elizabeth acknowledges. Let those words sink in. In them is contained a profound mystery. “For us and for our salvation, the [eternal Son of God] came down from heaven; he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and was made man,” as the Nicene Creed states it.
In light of this mystery, which shines so brightly this time of year, it is understandable why so many titles have been accorded to Mary down through the centuries. She’s been called not only Mother of God, but also the New Eve, Daughter of Zion, Lily of the Valley, Our Lady, Help of Christians, Queen of Heaven, to name only a few. The power she’s exerted on the collective imagination of the peoples that Christianity has reached is reflected in art. Go to any museum, and you will be impressed by the number of paintings that have Mary as the theme.
Really, you don’t even have to go to a museum; you can just go to the post office. The Christmas stamp issued by the U.S. Postal Service features a detail of Our Lady of Guapulo, an 18th century oil painting. In fact, we bought a roll of these earlier this week when we were preparing to send out our Christmas letter. A crowned Mary is bedecked in a jeweled robe holding a scepter made of roses and leaves. She looks down at a similarly adorned Christ Child on her left arm. It is clear that in this painting she is portrayed as the Queen of Heaven.
We have the special privilege today, the Fourth Sunday of Advent, of contemplating this remarkable woman, whom several Christian traditions around the globe rightly venerate—this woman, to whom, or rather, in whom the fulfillment of God’s plan of salvation, the hope of all the nations, has come.
To help us here, two titles, which we haven’t yet mentioned, seem to suggest themselves in our lesson. These two are closely related, perhaps even interchangeable. The first is Mary as Mother of the Church, and the second is Mary as Model of all Christians. These titles are useful because they help us to see how her story extends to include us, the church. God gives us this story to show us how his power works, and to teach us through Mary and Elizabeth, how to respond to it appropriately and for our benefit.
Mary is the model of all Christians. We say this insofar as she is the first Christian, the prototype. She is the first person in Christ, because Christ is in her. Of course, that is quite literally true, but we are speaking here in a spiritual sense. This is how the great church father St. Augustine explains it. He writes: “Mary was more blessed receiving the faith in Christ than in conceiving the flesh of Christ. The maternal bond would have been of no avail to Mary, had she not been more pleased to bear Christ in her heart, than to bear him in her body.”
Mary indeed bears Christ, not only in her body, but also in her heart. And we know that when the heart is full, it animates the body and moves the tongue. Mary cannot stand still. Realizing the full significance of what is happening to her, she has to go and tell someone. We have known or at least witnessed this experience. Consider that whenever a woman is pregnant, especially when the pregnancy is wanted, she has this irrepressible urge to share the news with those closest to her. Or consider that whenever children learn or accomplish anything in school, they cannot wait to get home and tell their mom or dad all about it.
Here we can see how Mary is the mother or prototype of the church. Author Max Thurian tells us that the church bears within itself the Word of God, as Mary does both physically as well as spiritually. And it has to go and tell the world. That is its mandate, its mission. To be more exact, the church’s mission is to go out into the world with haste to proclaim this Word, which brings peace, divine favor and salvation to all who receive it. But the good news about the salvation God has planned is first entrusted to Mary. She is the first to go out and share it when it was first accomplished in the world.
This, in fact, is recounted in the first verse of our gospel lesson. With haste Mary sets out and makes the journey to a Judean town in the hill country, where she enters the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth. Her purpose is to share the good news with Elizabeth. Author Mark Villano reminds us that with love and favor comes mission. As the recipient of God’s love and favor, Mary learns that she is to have a part in a plan that is bigger than herself. She is part of God’s purpose for humanity, and that purpose gives her purpose.
Incidentally, this is a popular theme in the contemporary self-help movement. We are told we are to find our purpose, or we are to live our purpose. As Christians, as recipients of God’s love and favor, we affirm this theme, provided that we are allowed to add to it this important qualification: we live our purpose insofar as we are aligned with God’s purpose for us. That involves witnessing to the world in whatever we say or do to the peace and good will and favor that God extends to all people through Jesus Christ, the one born of Mary. When we are aligned with God’s purpose, that is when we truly find our purpose.
Our lesson does not disclose to us the words of Mary’s greeting. But according to tradition, she repeats the words that the Angel Gabriel used at the Annunciation: “The Lord be with you.” If that’s so, they certainly take on added significance in this setting. Christ the Lord is really here in Elizabeth’s home; to be more precise, he is really in the womb of the young woman Mary, whom Elizabeth welcomes into her home as her guest.
The unborn baby in the womb of his mother Elizabeth responds appropriately to this reality. John the Baptist leaps with joy. Luke’s choice of verb here is deliberate. Bible students understand this detail in light of messianic prophecy: “But for you who fear my name the Sun of righteousness will rise with healing in his wings. You shall go forth leaping like calves from the stalls” (Malachi 4:2). John the Baptist can also be compared with David, who leaped with joy before the Ark of the Covenant as it was entering into Jerusalem (1 Chronicles 15).
The arrival of the Ark into the holy city was greeted by the Levites during David’s time with great shouts, and the same verb used of the Levites then appears here to describe Elizabeth’s response to Mary’s greeting. Again, the choice of the verb is deliberate. Remember that the ark was a kind of gold box that contained the signs of God’s presence and activity among God’s people as God led them in the wilderness: the two tablets of the law, Aaron’s staff that had budded, and the jar of manna.
Please note what our lesson is implying here. The signs of God’s presence and activity in the Ark find their fullest reality in the unborn child in the body of his mother. He is God’s presence and activity among his people in the supreme sense. That helps us understand why among the many titles for Mary yet another one is Ark of the Covenant.
What follows is a spontaneous eruption of Spirit-inspired praise. Now it is Elizabeth who cannot contain herself. She has to worship. In our most recent newsletters I have been writing about Presbyterian worship. I made the point that as we are drawn into the divine presence in the Call to Worship, our response is to offer a hymn of praise, in which we often recount the great things that God has done. Is this not what is happening to Elizabeth? Note that she is not giving a blessing to Mary. She is declaring that Mary has already been blessed. That blessing consists in the great work that God has done for her and in her, a work which evokes a song of praise from Elizabeth.
Elizabeth also adds a personal response. “Why me? How is it that I am granted this privilege of welcoming into my home the Savior of the world?” Bible student Chelsea Harmon points out that becoming pregnant with John in her old age was already the best blessing she thought she could ever have (Luke 1:24-25) and now she’s realizing that there are even greater things to come from God’s hand for her—and not only for her but also for the whole world. If this were happening today, Elizabeth might have said, “How did I get so lucky?”
Elizabeth concludes her song of praise with these words: “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
Who is the “she” referring to here? Certainly, Mary, as Augustine, whom we quoted earlier, acknowledged. For she received the faith in Christ even as she conceived the flesh of Christ. But even if it is Mary, Elizabeth could certainly include herself as one also blessed. For she believed the impossible is possible with God, she chose to live by faith despite the circumstances.
In this regard, Elizabeth’s words are not just true for Mary. They are true also for herself. And they are true for us, if we choose to stand firm, with faith, in the promises of God, believing that with God all things are possible, and look to him as we wait for him to work in our circumstances.
Praise is contagious. Elizabeth’s praise evokes Mary’s owns spontaneous outpouring of praise. We refer here to Mary’s song, otherwise known in the church’s tradition as the Magnificat. Mary’s song is called the Magnificat because that is the first word in the Latin version. “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.” We have already mentioned that when the heart is full, it moves the tongue. Out of the overflow of her heart, Mary’s mouth speaks. The lyrics of her song reflect the conditions of her life as a poor peasant girl from the hill country of Galilee. She contrasts God’s strength with her weakness, God’s abundance with her poverty, God’s majesty with her lowliness, God’s mercy with her need. But the source of her exultation is what God is and does on behalf of her and her people.
We do well to listen to her song. In her joy she proclaims a hopeful vision for the future. She is a prophet, which enables her to see farther than the rest of us, who live in a world very different not only from hers, but, even more significantly, the one in her vision. Her message should keep us from giving in and giving up. She invites us to hope in the merciful and mighty God who has chosen to come to us through the weakness of a Galilean peasant girl. From this unlikely place God will work out his justice and peace in ways that only the divine wisdom can conceive.
The theologian Karl Barth finds the theological significance of the church’s confession “conceived by the Holy Spirit” and “born of the Virgin Mary,” precisely here. No justice and peace on a universal scale, justice and peace that is total and unending, could ever be conceived in the heart and mind of man. Humanly speaking, it’s an impossibility, just like a pregnant virgin. It is a divine reality, which only the Holy Spirit can conceive and work out.
This is the mystery of Christmas to which our hearts must remain open in a world of darkness and suffering and unbelief. We need the Christmas message today more than ever! Social researchers tell us that they are seeing the highest rates of anxiety, mental illness, and suicides since the Great Depression of 1929. We are living through a dark time. Let us be sure that we share in the joy and praise of Mary and Elizabeth, so that we may draw the world into the light that shines with the birth of the Savior. Amen.