December 8, 2011 Cycle B
Luke 1:26-38
Two things seem clear when God chooses someone for a really important role. God usually chooses someone weak and insignificant and God chooses that person to die.
As a young girl Mary would not have been taught to read — young boys, yes, but not young girls. Ancient peasant cultures counted females, including wives, among a man’s possessions, along with slaves, oxen and donkeys. The selection of Mary’s husband would be entirely her parents’ affair. She could not refuse their choice. As a female Mary would be allowed to enter the synagogue, but had to remain in the back or in the balcony, behind a grill. If perchance she did learn to read, she was not allowed to read the Torah in the synagogue service. But God chooses the weak and insignificant to do God’s great work.
Mary was also chosen to die. There are many ways of dying. Mary did her dying in shame and pain, as a refugee. God called Mary to the shame of becoming an unwed mother... all of this asked of a girl of twelve or thirteen. And her deaths were just beginning. As a widow she would watch her son die the painful death reserved for the scum of society.
Mary had no role in Jesus’ public life. Hers was a hidden life. But Mary, as God’s secret, became one of the most influential, celebrated women in history … This secret, weak, unlettered Mother of God, who is our mother, is the wisdom of God, the power of God.
God’s call to Mary mirrors God’s call to each one of us. In baptism, God calls us, despite our own insignificance, weaknesses and inadequacies, to “give birth” to God’s compassion in our own Nazareths and Bethlehems. In that call, God calls us to “die” to our own doubts, fears, comfort and safety in order to embrace and be embraced by the new life of his Son’s resurrection both in this life and in the next. If Mary, the young, unmarried pregnant teenager, can believe the incredible event that she is about to be a part of, if she can trust herself and believe in her role in the great story, then the most ordinary of us can believe in our parts, as well. Amen. Amen.