First Day of Christmas: Mary the Spinster

My three-year-old daughter is fascinated with the nativity story, and especially with Mary. One of her frequent games is to put a towel or a blanket on her head, imitating Mary’s veil, and, with folded hands, look beatifically peaceful at whatever stuffed animal she has wrapped up to be baby Jesus.

My daughter knows what Mary looks like. At least, she thinks she does. Most nativity scenes portray her the same way: veiled, kneeling, looking peaceful and reposed. She is young, serene and unthreatening. Most preachers will portray her in a similar manner. I cannot count the number of sermons I have heard where Mary is described as “a young teenage girl” somewhere beteen 13 and 17.

When I look into the Bible to see what picture is drawn of Mary, I find something different. Nowhere is her age given. Her personality is presented in a few short speeches which do not suggest someone passive, non-threatening and demure. The longest speech given to Mary in the gospels is the Magnificat, the Song of Mary written in Luke’s Gospel 2:46-55, a poem celebrating the overthrow of the powerful and the exaltation of the downtrodden.

Many biblical scholars have pointed out that the narrative presented by Luke mimics the narratives of the Old Testament about women who conceived after long periods of barrenness. Mary’s song itself follows the style of the song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2. If we allow Luke to paint a picture of Mary’s age, his allusions to the barren matriarchs suggest that Mary was a woman who conceived after a long period of childlessness.

In Luke 2:48 Mary rejoices over the pending birth saying God “has been mindful of the humble state of his servant.” Her humbleness, her humiliation, has been reversed by God’s gift of this child. Even in societies like Mary’s where women were profoundly pressured to have children, it was not shameful for a teenage virgin to be childless. If Mary has a humiliation that can be taken away by having a child, that strongly suggests that she was not a young girl at all, but, like Hannah, someone old enough to feel the sting of seeing her peers have many children while she had none.

How does it change your image of Christmas if Mary was not a naive teenage girl full of dreams about the future, but a virgin in her thirties or forties, knowing the disappointments of life? What does that teach us about her hope and joy and faith in God?

I think it makes it immeasurably richer. The choice of Mary as Jesus’ mother was not only a gift to the world, but a gift to one woman. The advent of the long-awaited Messiah was also the birth of one mother’s long-awaited son. The fulfillment of hope to a disappointed and pain-filled world was also the fulfillment of hope to a disappointed and humiliated woman.

God’s love for the world is mirrored in his love for the individual. God acted to save the world; he also acted to heal a childless woman’s heart. On this first day of Christmas, may we know and believe that God’s love is both universal and personal, reaching as high as heaven, but reaching also to the innermost secret of the ordinary heart.

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And since I can’t offer you a cup of egg nog, refresh yourself with this:

JellyBean (at age 2) and Sweetpea (at 11 months). When Mama inconveniently failed to leave out laundry or dish towels for JellyBean to use to “be Mary,” she improvised by taking off her shirt to wrap around her dolly (playing the part of the swaddled baby Jesus) and popped an empty drawer from her toy chest on her head to be her veil. Then she and her sister celebrated her performance by knocking back a few cold ones.