A Christmas Meditation: Mary the mother of Jesus

A Christmas Meditation

Mary the mother of Jesus

We can easily become over-familiar with the Christmas story and forget how amazing it is.

Take Mary, for example. We don’t know how old she was when Jesus was born. All we know is that she was a young woman. In the culture of the Middle East at that time, people married very young. Mary was probably a teenager when the angel came to her, and she may have been as young as 14.

It’s not surprising that when the angel came to her and greeted her –  “Greetings, you who are highly favoured! The Lord is with you!” – that she was greatly troubled. But she was a feisty young woman and when the angel told her she was going to have a baby, instead of stunned silence, she said, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

Mary was relieved that Joseph went ahead and married her – there was huge shame about being an unmarried mother in those days. Joseph would have been within his rights to break off their betrothal when he found out that Mary was pregnant. But the Bible says that he was a righteous man and did not want to expose her to public disgrace. While he was wondering what to do, an angel appeared to him in a dream and reassured him that the baby Mary was carrying had been conceived by the Holy Spirit and that he should not be afraid to marry her.

And then when Mary was obviously pregnant there was the trek to Bethlehem. The Bible tells us that the ruling Roman Emperor – Caesar Augustus – had decided to carry out a census of the whole Roman world. (That was probably to make it easier for his administrators to gather tax!) Everyone had to go to their home town and that meant that Joseph, who was descended from King David, had to go to Bethlehem – King David’s ancestral home. Now in all our nativity stories and plays, Mary rides on a donkey. It has to be said that the Bible makes no mention of a donkey. We have to hope, for Mary’s sake, that Joseph was wealthy enough to own a donkey.

Our nativity stories have Mary giving birth to Jesus in a stable because there was no room in any of the inns. And a superficial reading of the Bible suggests that is true. But in all probability they would have stayed with Joseph’s relatives. The word that traditionally is translated “inn” is better translated as “guest room”. Peasant houses in that part of the world were very simple (and still are today) – there would have been a large communal room, where the family cooked and where the animals were kept overnight. There would have been a smaller room, probably upstairs, where the family slept and, if they could afford it, there would also have been a small guest room. It seems that all of Joseph’s relatives had been overwhelmed with family members coming for the census and all their guest rooms were full. Joseph and Mary had to make do with sleeping in the main room along with all the animals, and it was here that Jesus was born, and so he was put in the manger – or animal feeding trough. We can think of it as Jesus entering the world in extreme poverty. But another way to look at it is that it is all very ordinary – it could have happened to any peasant family.

But the next thing that happened was far from ordinary. That same night a bunch of smelly shepherds turned up to see Jesus, gabbling some story about angels coming to them in the fields on the hills near Bethlehem and telling them that the Messiah – who had been eagerly awaited by the Jews for centuries – had just been born in Bethlehem. Mary wondered what to make of all this and she remembered all that had happened and often thought about it and tried to make sense of it all.

On the eighth day, when Jesus was circumcised, he was given the name Jesus. (Actually he wasn’t – the Jewish name he was given sound more like Yeshua. ‘Jesus’ is the Greek equivalent. Greek was the language that was widely spoken around the Mediterranean area; a bit like English is spoken around the world today.) Jesus – or Yeshua – means “he saves”, or Saviour, and it’s the name that the angel said that he should be called.

Now the Jewish law says that “every firstborn male is be consecrated to the Lord” and because Bethlehem is near Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph were able to take the baby Jesus and present him at the Temple. Because they were poor, and couldn’t afford a lamb or goat, they made an offering of a pair of doves.

There were two odd characters in the Temple. They were both old and they were both very godly, and God spoke to them. The first was a man called Simeon who lived in Jerusalem. God had told him that he wouldn’t die until he had seen the Messiah. When Mary and Joseph were at the Temple with Jesus, the Holy Spirt prompted Simeon to go to the Temple. When he saw Jesus, he knew that he was the Messiah, so he took the baby Jesus into his arms and said:

“Sovereign lord, as you have promised,
          you may now dismiss your servant in peace.
For my eyes have seen your salvation,
          which you have prepared in the sight of all nations:
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
          and the glory of your people Israel.”

And then Simeon said to Mary: “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that is spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too.”

The second was a woman called Anna. The Bible calls her a prophetess. We would probably call her a religious fanatic. She was 84 years old. She had been widowed after just 7 years of married life and she had devoted herself to prayer. She never left the Temple precincts, day or night, and she often fasted. She immediately recognised that Jesus was the Messiah and told everyone in the Temple who would listen.

There was another time when Jesus went to the temple.  Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover.  When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, as usual.  After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents didn’t know. They thought he was in the party that they had travelled with, so they went on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they couldn’t find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding.  When his parents saw him, they were astonished. Mary said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

“Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”

Again, Mary wondered what to make of it all. She could see that Jesus was not an ordinary child, but she didn’t know what would happen later in his life.

Now at this point, we have to say that we don’t know what happened to Joseph. The Bible doesn’t mention him again after the incident in Jerusalem. We can only assume that he died – people often died young and sometimes older men married younger women and died some years before them. The Bible does tell us that Mary and Joseph had other children after Jesus: that Jesus had brothers and sisters.

What we do know is that Mary had to decide how to relate to Jesus as he started his ministry and healed people and taught large crowds.

Early on in Jesus’s ministry, Mary was invited along with Jesus and some of his disciples to a wedding. In fact in was the first recorded miracle that Jesus did, and Mary was involved.  The wine ran out and everyone was embarrassed. Mary knew that Jesus could do something about it but Jesus didn’t want to be bounced into starting to do miracles too soon. Nevertheless, Mary persisted. “Do whatever he tells you,” she said to the servants. Jesus told the servants to fill six massive jars with water and the water miraculously turned into wine – gallons and gallons of it. Very good wine at that. So much so that the master of ceremonies commented to the bridegroom that he had saved the best wine until the end.

On one occasion it seems that Mary and Jesus’s brothers had decided that Jesus had gone too far: that he was putting his health in danger because he was too busy to eat, or that he was letting his popularity go to his head. Either way, they came to take him home. But they couldn’t get inside the house where Jesus was teaching because of the crowd. They sent a message in to Jesus that they were outside waiting, but Jesus ignored them and carried on, so they went home empty-handed.

By the time that Jesus died on the cross, Mary had become one of his followers. We don’t know what happened to change her mind . But we do know that when Jesus died on the cross, Mary was there, with the other women who followed him, a short distance away, watching Jesus die. And we do know that Mary went with the other woman to the tomb where Jesus’s body had been laid, intending to put sweet-smelling spices on his body, only to find that the tomb was empty because Jesus had risen to life.

Mary had travelled a journey, even harder than the one from Nazareth to Bethlehem when she was pregnant. She had travelled the journey from being someone who pondered about all the things that she saw and heard to being someone who was a devoted follower of Jesus.

And that is the challenge that faces us today. We may ponder within us all that we have heard about Jesus. We may consider ourselves to be a spiritual person. But are we willing to make that transition, like Mary did, into someone who is fully devoted to Jesus and to following him wherever it takes us?