Mary, the Blessed
Sermon Text || Year C: Advent 4
Mary, the Blessed
Dorothy Day once said, “Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily.” She didn’t want people to think that her passion for justice, her dedication to helping the poor, and her willingness to put herself in harm’s way for others is somehow beyond the capabilities of you and me.
The same thing happens when we think of Jesus and the Cross. “Of course he could live the life he did and die the way he did; he is the Son of God! Thankfully, he is a substitution for us so that we don’t have to do those things because we simply can’t because of our fallen nature.”
Yet, Jesus constantly told his disciples to take up their crosses, to follow him, and to teach us all things Jesus commanded us to do. In this way, Jesus didn’t die instead of us; he died ahead of us. We are called to be the children of God, which means we are called to a life self-sacrifice, love, grace, and even crucifixion and resurrection.
I think the same thing happens when we talk about Mary as being “blessed.” We put her on a pedestal so as to say that what happened with her and in her cannot be replicated in our own lives.
Today, we will explore the interaction between Elizabeth and Mary in Luke 1 to show how the blessedness of Mary is something that can be said of each of us.
Mary’s Faithful Obedience
Consequently, when Christ came into the world, he said, “Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. Then I said, ‘See, I have come to do your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of me).” Hebrews 10:5–7
Christ came into the world to do the will of God. It was Jesus’s faith and obedience to his calling that made him the “author and perfecter” of salvation (Hebrews 5:8-9). Perhaps he “learned” this obedience through more than just the things he suffered, as the Hebrews writer said. Perhaps he had an excellent example of faithfulness in his mother who gave of herself to give him life.
Anyone who has been close to someone who has been pregnant, either as the one pregnant or the partner, knows how much self-sacrifice is involved in carrying a child. The weight gain, the hormones, the random pains, the swelling, and then there is labor itself, but even that is just the beginning.
Some moms suffer from postpartum depression, diastasis recti, and other ailments. There’s the late-night feedings, clogged milk ducts, and dirty diapers. And again, that’s just the beginning.
In Luke 1, Elizabeth told Mary, “And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord” (Luke 1:45).
Mary was blessed because of her faith in the word from God. As Mary herself said in Luke 1:38, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38).
As Reginald H. Fuller points out in his book Preaching the Lectionary, “The word ‘blessed’ here [is] the same word used in the Beatitudes to mean "‘partaker in the eschatological salvation.’”1
In other words, just as Mary is called blessed, we are called to be blessed.
But Mary bore Christ in her womb! How could we ever have that level of obedience. While we may think this is strange, the apostle Paul did not:
My little children, for whom I am again in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in you, Galatians 4:19
Here Paul describes the Christians as being born from Paul’s womb and as being pregnant with the Christ themselves! This shocking two-part metaphor was sure to catch the Galatian’s attention. Timothy George described the meaning behind this passage:
Paul had just described himself as a pregnant mother determined to carry the Galatians to full term. The anguish of his labor over them had to continue, he said, “until Christ is formed in you.” The Galatians who a moment ago were described as being formed in the womb were now spoken of as expectant mothers who themselves must wait for an embryonic Christ to be fully developed (morphoō, a medical term for the growth of the fetus into an infant) within them.2
This explains why Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) said in equally shocking language,
We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly, but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of Man is begotten in us.
We might rephrase one of these lines to say, “And, what good is to me if Mary is blessed if I am not also blessed?”
When we put our trust in Christ, when Christ is formed in us, then we join Mary in being blessed. Her blessedness, which comes from God, becomes our blessedness, which also comes from God. Just as Christ dwelt “in” Mary, he dwells “in” each of us and us in him.
The Child Leaped
In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. Luke 1:39–44
I remember the times when my wife called me to come over to her to feel the baby kicking against her tummy. It was so strange to feel that little footprint just under her skin, and I can only imagine how it must have felt for her.
When mommies are awake and walking around, they rock the baby to sleep, but when they settle down to rest, the baby wakes up and starts to move around.
This unpleasant timing can make for some intrusions upon one’s sleep, and unlike children outside of the womb who take up the whole bed and wallow around in their sleep, you can’t exactly escape these kicks.
I imagine Elizabeth resting, which meant it was time for baby John to start exploring the use of his hands, with which he would baptize the Messiah, and his feet, which he would use to leave the temple and go into the wilderness.
But the movement she felt in her womb when John heard the voice of Mary was no normal motion; Luke, the physician, described this motion as “leaping.”
This physical prompting from her son was coupled with the Holy Spirit filling his mother and crying out, “Blessed are you among women!”
In this case, Mary is blessed because of “the fruit” of her womb. It is her connection to the incarnation and her being selected by God for this role that was the cause of her blessedness.
Yet, even in this Mary is not uniquely blessed. Jesus pointed to his disciples and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!” (Matthew 12:48). As the family of God, we are part of the Divine family. We share the honor of being in the immediate family of the incarnate Christ.
Blessed Forevermore
I don’t want you to get the idea that any of this somehow diminishes Mary’s role. She is certainly unique, and nobody could ever live out her calling exactly as she did. In the same way, I can’t live your life and you can’t live mine, but I can emulate your own faithfulness in my life as you can mine, and we can both follow in Mary’s footsteps.
The last time Mary is called blessed in this section of Scripture is in her “Magnificat.”
Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed… Luke 1:48
Mary was blessed to be a blessing. If we follow in her footsteps, we will also be able to say, “For the Mighty One has done great things for me” (Luke 1:49).
So let’s follow in Mary’s steps by consenting to the Holy Spirit forming Christ in us. Let us have the faith and obedience of Mary in our own lives as well as the joy of Elizabeth when we encounter the presence of Christ in others.
Lectionary Reading: December 22, 2024 - Fourth Sunday of Advent
Old Testament: Micah 5:2-5a
Psalm: Luke 1:46-55
New Testament: Hebrews 10:5-10
Gospel: Luke 1:39-45
Weekly Church Bulletin: When Christ Came Into the World
“When Christ came into the world, he said, ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure.’ Then I said, ‘See, I have come to do your will, O God’ (in the scroll of the book it is written of me).’” Hebrews 10:7.
The Hebrews writer here imagines Jesus as embodying Psalm 40:6-8. One of Christ’s purposes in taking on flesh was to do the will of God. Through obedience, Jesus became a living sacrifice, perfect and acceptable to God. Jesus’s birth, death, resurrection, and ascension are all important, but the thirty-three or so years between Jesus’s birth and death are equally important.
Without Jesus’s life between birth and death, we would not have a Savior who can identify with our rejection, loss, temptation, and sorrows. Without Jesus’s life, we would not have a model which to follow in our own lives. Jesus came to do God’s will so that we could follow in his footsteps by doing God’s will in our own lives.
In this way, we, like Jesus, become a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1-2).
What is God’s will for us? To offer praise? To offer prayers? To give thanks? Absolutely. But what God really desires of us is the same thing God desired of Jesus: obedience to his will. To put it another way, God is after relationship. To “keep the commandments” is to love Jesus and the Father (John 14:15).
We shouldn’t think about this as a transactional relationship or one in which all of our actions are being continuously monitored. Instead, our obedience flows from the love with which God has loved us. It flows from “the body prepared” for us. As another biblical author put it, we have been saved by grace to become God’s workmanship, created for good works (Ephesians 2:8-10).
Reginald Fuller, Preaching the Lectionary (2006). p. 392.
George, Timothy. Galatians. Vol. 30. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1994. Print. The New American Commentary.