Читать книгу Christmas - Adam C. English - Страница 7

The story of Christmas does not begin in Bethlehem with songs of angels, shepherds, and wise men. We must at least go back to the conception of our Lord in the womb of Mary months earlier. As we learn, this event occurs during the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with the baby John, Jesus’ cousin. And so, it is a story of conception within a story of pregnancy. One effect of this narrative setting is to remind us of the human dimension. The reader feels pulled down from the lofty heights of heaven and into the nursery. We find to our surprise and delight that the nursery is replete with theological mystery and spiritual truth. The enigma of the incarnation begins with the fact that for nine months the eternal and omnipotent Son of the living God curled up and gestated in the watery silence of the womb. In absolute helplessness and vulnerability he remained inside Mary and so identified with the tender beginnings of every human being on earth.

In addition to that, his beginning anticipates his end. As he was wrapped in the warm darkness of Mary’s womb, so he would eventually be wrapped in the cold emptiness of Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. As he submitted to the fragility of the fetus, so he submitted to the destitution of death. As he laid in the quiet heartbeat rhythm of gestation, so his wrung-out body was laid on a slab of stone. And so, the Son emptied himself twice over: once to life and once to lifelessness, once to the helplessness of infanthood and once to the defenselessness of death.

For now, we return to the grand gesture by which the Word of Life submits to the womb of Mary. But first, Mary must say Yes.

The One They Call Mary

Our chapter opens on the famous scene known as the annunciation when the archangel Gabriel drops softly from the clouds before the unwed girl Mary to announce the child in her womb. The scene is rich with aesthetics, meanings, and deep pools of reflection. I want to consider the moment just after Gabriel has made his pronouncement “you will conceive” but before Mary has consented to it. I’m referring to the blank space between verse 37 and 38, between Gabriel’s calm reminder that “with God nothing shall be impossible” (Luke 1:37, KJV) and Mary’s resolution, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38, KJV). The faithful archangel delivers his message concerning the child to be born and answers Mary’s worried questions about how this could be since she is a virgin. And then there is a moment, just a brief pause in time, when everything hangs in the balance, frozen, as we await the girl’s reply. This act of God will not be forced upon her. She must choose it, will it, acknowledge it, give her assent to it.

There is so much we would like to know about the setting and unfolding of this dramatic scene, and yet so much is left unsaid in the text. Does the annunciation take place at night, at daybreak, or in the afternoon? Does Gabriel appear to Mary in an open field or in the cramped quarters of her home? Does he stand straight-backed with wings outstretched or does he kneel before her with head bowed? Does his voice sound like the cracking of rock or like the combing of a brush through hair? Does Mary look upon her celestial visitor with calm curiosity or avert her eyes in fear? Does she answer immediately or does she take a moment of silence to weigh her response?

For me, at least, the moment of Mary’s decision is captured by the perfect grace of Leonardo da Vinci’s brush in his translucently painted annunciation on display at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Painted in oil and tempera on a wood panel when he was still a young apprentice, the work radiates the budding genius of da Vinci (1452–1519). The viewer feels less like someone looking at a picture and more like someone who has just stepped inside an internally lit diorama. In da Vinci’s painting, the angel, who has just alighted from heaven and landed silently onto a flowery lawn, lifts his eyes from his kneeling bow to meet those of the girl. He raises his right hand in the sign of peace and poses the question. Mary, one finger holding a page of text that she seems to have been reading, pulls her other hand back in surprise. But her face does not show open-mouthed shock. Neither is it giddy or girlish. She expresses wonder and composed resolution.

Bernard of Clairvaux narrates the dramatic moment:

The angel awaits your reply, for it is time that he should return to God, Who sent him. We, too, are waiting, O Lady, for a word of mercy we, who are groaning under the sentence of condemnation. See, the price of our salvation is offered to you; if you consent, we shall at once be delivered. By the Eternal Word of God we were all created, and behold we die. By your short answer we shall be refreshed and recalled to life. Adam, with all his race Adam, a weeping exile from Paradise, implores it of you. . . . Hasten, then, O Lady, to give your answer; hasten to speak.52

Here is the icon of faith and grace. Gabriel announces but does not compel. God invites but does not force. We cannot say that Mary acted independently of God’s Spirit. No, her pregnancy was dependent upon the work of God within her, but her response was her own. Gabriel awaits her Yes. Mary conceived the Word by faith in her heart before she conceived in her womb.53 God’s relationship with all of us is on display in the annunciation. As creatures, it is true, we depend upon a Creator; as children of the promise we depend upon a Father; as redeemed sinners we depend upon a Redeemer. So, in an important sense, we are never independent of God our Creator, Father, Redeemer, and Life-Giver. Nevertheless, the mystery of God’s good grace is that our lives and our actions are our own. God respects the dignity of our existence.

We return to the scene. For a brief but eternal moment, all of history holds its breath for Mary’s answer. Of course, the Almighty and Everlasting One could do the work of salvation without Mary. For that matter, God could do whatever God wants without any of us, but this is not God’s choice. Instead, God relies upon the unreliable and depends on the undependable, so strong is God’s faith and hope and love.

And what of Mary? What did she feel? Trepidation? Bewilderment? Astonishment? Gratitude? Resolution?

In the traditional depictions of Western art, the Madonna is depicted calm, composed, and placid. The focus has been on her serenity, her holiness, and her submission to the will of God. In recent years other artists have offered a much-needed corrective to this image. Take for instance Amy Grant’s deeply felt and devastatingly beautiful song “Breath of Heaven.” In this track from her 1992 Home for Christmas album, we hear the words of Mary’s self-doubt and fright at the heavy load she has been asked to carry. She wonders if a wiser one should have had her place. She worries that she must walk the path alone. Her heart stretches out in hopes that the breath of heaven hold her together. In the voice of Amy Grant, Mary’s prayer centers on the word “help”—first she prays for help to be strong, then she prays simply to be, and finally her prayer is stripped down to the essential plea: help me.54 We must remember Mary is young and alone. She shoulders so many different emotions. Nevertheless, whatever doubts and fears flutter through her mind, she finds her sense of peace and her courage to go forward.

And so, Mary submits humbly, “let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38) as a “servant of the Lord”—a phrase that is sometimes rendered more delicately as “handmaiden” of the Lord but could also be translated more bluntly as “slave.” She puts herself at the Lord’s disposal in complete trust—an attitude often depicted in statues and icons of Mary where she sits with rounded face framed by blue and white veil. This is the Mary who “pondered all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:19). Even if we credit Mary with unflinching faith, her resolute response to the annunciation is still surprising given her marital status.

As a young girl promised to a man but not yet married, she must know her fate teeters on a socially precarious needle. She has pledged herself to Joseph. As the husband-to-be, Joseph can exercise his rights and divorce her without recompense or explanation. Joseph, not Mary, holds the power in the relationship. It is perhaps for this reason that the Gospel of Matthew focuses on his encounter with the angel as opposed to hers. In Matthew, he is the active agent: Joseph receives the nighttime visit from the angel, Joseph marries Mary, Joseph names the child Jesus (Matt 1:18–25). But, and here is what is really surprising, it must be remembered that even in Matthew’s account, God usurps Joseph’s rights over the girl.55 Before Joseph has any say in the matter, “she was found to be with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:18, RSV). The angel of the Lord only consults Joseph after the fact. And what is more, for having such a seemingly central role in the drama, he is not granted any speaking lines. We have not a single recorded word from the husband of Mary.56 Gently then, God’s Holy Spirit lays a hand on the primordial privilege of patriarchy. The unquestionable rights and prerogatives of the head of the house have been side-stepped and overshadowed. The privilege is not broken, only loosened, and only for a brief festal moment. But the moment is divine, after all. The crack in male privilege is almost imperceptible, but it is there. By God’s grace it will grow.

But for now, we need to return to Mary. Can we get closer to her thoughts?

In March of 2004 a very unlikely meeting took place between the Nobel prize-winning peace advocate Desmond Tutu and a convicted criminal seven months from his date of execution in Texas. Dominique Green had been tried and convicted for a murder that occurred during the course of a robbery in Houston. While on death row, Dominique began a correspondence and friendship with the writer Thomas Cahill and, through a serendipitous series of events, Thomas Cahill was able to arrange a meeting between Dominique Green and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Archbishop Tutu sat down in a tiny cubicle facing a window of thick double glass and waited for the inmate to arrive. On either side of the glass there was a telephone receiver. Through the handsets, visitor and prisoner can converse with each other. Dominique was led in shackled at his wrists and ankles. After his hands were unbound, he sat down, facing the glass and Desmond Tutu. Dominique placed his right hand against the cold, thick pane of glass, a hand that his mother had permanently scarred when she held it over a gas burner, and Archbishop Tutu followed his lead and put his own polio-weakened hand against the glass. It was the closest the two would be allowed to come. Thomas Cahill left them to their own private meeting. As he waited in the adjoining room, he heard peals of laughter and the sounds of genuine friendship and knew that these two strangers would get along just fine.

After Archbishop Tutu finished his hour-and-a-half visit with death-row inmate Dominique Green, he thanked the warden and the prison officials, and then headed across the street to St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Livingston, Texas. The church had been asked to host him for the press conference. Swarms of media and news agencies had gathered to cover the story. The church, having graciously agreed to let him hold his press conference there, in turn asked him to celebrate Eucharist. Without hesitation he agreed. The Bible passage assigned by the lectionary for the day of his visit narrated Gabriel’s announcement to Mary of Nazareth that she was to become the mother of Jesus Christ. Speaking to the gathered congregants, reporters, and onlookers, Archbishop Tutu imagined Mary’s response:

“What? Me!! In this village you can’t even scratch yourself without everybody knowing about it! You want me to be an unmarried mother? I’m a decent girl, you know. Sorry, try next door.” If she had said that, we would have been up a creek. Mercifully, marvelously, Mary said, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word,” and the universe breathed a cosmic sigh of relief, because she made it possible for our Savior to be born.57

Desmond Tutu’s imaginative musing reminds us that Mary could have told the messenger of the Lord “No.” Indeed, she had every reason to say “No.” And yet, at the risk of her respectability, her standing in Nazareth and before Joseph, she mercifully and marvelously said “Yes.” Mary’s yes is the model for our own responses to God’s will. Her yes had moved Archbishop Tutu to say yes to the invitation to meet with a convicted criminal awaiting execution in Texas. In the face of the cold efficiency of the criminal justice system that cannot help but perpetuate the cycle of victims and offenders, the good Archbishop would have us risk as Mary risked, and be the bridge of salvation that only God’s mercy can build.

Handmaiden of the Lord

A common subject of fifteenth-century Renaissance painters was the annunciation, and sometimes these artistic masters would show a ray of light shafting through a high window onto the young Mary. We look at it and see it as a spotlight drawing the viewer’s eye to center stage, the submissive Mary. And it is that, but there’s more. Theologically, these paintings show exactly what happens in the incarnation: just as the light passes through the window pane without shattering, warping, or destroying the glass, so the Spirit of God implants the holy Son in the womb of Mary without shattering her person or wrecking her body. The light comes through the other side of the window pane unaltered, so the Light of the world comes through Mary unaltered—abundantly radiant and radiating. Or, to use another comparison from the tradition of the church, on the mountain of God and in the presence of Moses the bush blazed and crackled with fire, yet was not consumed. So the Lord of heaven and earth tucked and curled into the womb of the virgin, yet the womb did not crack or explode. The Holy Spirit overshadowed this young girl upon whom the weight of God rested, and yet she lived. We step back to wonder how. Even more intriguing, why Mary? Why was she alone chosen from all the women in the world who ever have existed or will exist to be the mother of our Lord? Why did she receive this honor? Did she distinguish herself by her own personal holiness or was she especially designed and groomed by God for this task?

The fourteenth-century mystic, Nicolas Cabasilas, tributes Mary’s own virtue and character. “The incarnation was not only the work of the Father, by His power and by His spirit, but it was also the work of the will and faith of the Virgin.”58 Bernard of Clairvaux goes one step further by saying that without virtue and humility, Mary’s virginity would not have been sufficient for her to be the mother of our Lord. Eve was a virgin when she ate of the fruit and sinned, which proves that virginity is no guarantee of virtue. Mary had both virginity and humility.59 Indeed, she was more than simply a not-yet-married girl, she was a woman after God’s own heart, a model of virtue and character. For this reason it is said Mary conceived in her heart before in her womb. She had faith before she had a baby inside her. She was found by the angel to be pure and unblemished.60 Mary proved herself to be a faithful servant of the Lord and allowed herself to be made the “mother of God.”61

Mary did not initiate these astounding events, of course, God did. Alongside Mary’s personal holiness we should pay attention to God’s grace. Prior to Mary’s virtue is God’s decision. Is it not the case that God selected, prepared, and sanctified the vessel of the Lord for this honor? Her unique privilege as the mother of God came about by a special act of divine will for the sake of salvation history. The Holy Spirit radiated, illumined, and sanctified the soul of Mary as it did Moses’s when he met the Lord God atop Mt. Sinai. Just as the blinding luminescence that glowed upon Moses’s face even after he descended from the mountain was not his own, so her light was not her own. It was a reflection of the true Light. To extend this “light” imagery, we might say that if God incarnate can be called the sun of the world, then Mary is the moon. She does not generate light herself, but as a reflector of the sun she is the brightest object in the night sky.