Title: Mary, Mother of the Lord
Mary, mother of the Lord
Luke 1:39-45
December 12, 2010 Second Sunday Service of Advent
Professor Mi-Jung Gu
(Department of Christian Education, Soongsil University)
It is a pleasure and thank you to see you again, dear members of Saegil Church. Today, the story I want to share with the members of Saegil Church is about Mary, the mother of Jesus. I think it is a story worth meditating on once during Advent. I hope that this time will be as meaningful to you as the grace that I realized and discovered.
In the text we read together today, the woman who first catches our attention is Elizabeth. In today's terms, Maria, who is a 'single mother' without a hitch, came to her house and fled to her house, but when she saw her like that, how did she get here? Who is the father of the child? . Rather, it says, “You are blessed among women, and the fruit in your womb is also blessed” (verse 42). It is a view that completely subverts the worldly perspective, worldly standards. It is said that “the filling of the Holy Spirit” (verse 41) is necessary to have such Elizabeth’s eyes, so-called spiritual eyes or insight. In that sense, being filled with the Holy Spirit is the task of all Christians in the coming generations.
Elizabeth, who is filled with the Holy Spirit, calls Mary the ‘Mother of the Lord’. It literally means our Lord, the Mother who gave birth to Jesus, but I would like to interpret that in a deeper meaning.
The situation at that time was very bleak. For 400 years after the prophet Malachi, who decorates the very end of the Old Testament, it is a dark period in Israel where prophecies ceased and signs disappeared. Moreover, it is a historical fact that you all know well that it was a colony of the Roman Empire. What philosopher said that the darkness is deep when dawn is not far off? Suddenly, in the deep darkness, God begins to plan things. Just through one woman. It is not the capital of the Roman Empire. It is not even the capital of the land of Judea. This is the outskirts of Nazareth in Galilee. God is doing great things through Mary, a poor country girl. What you have been doing since the moment you came out of yourself as the ‘God of Exodus’ in history, bringing liberation, freedom, justice and love to this world as a God of the oppressed, is now happening through a woman.
His exact personal information is unknown. At the time, the name Maria is the only clue, but at the time, this name was as common as 'Youngja' and 'Sunja' in Korea, so it's not a very important clue. Just to point out that the name Mary is the Greek form of the famous prophetess Miriam in the Old Testament. So, symbolically, Mary is the incarnation of Miriam, who devoted her whole body to freeing the Hebrew people from slavery in the Egyptian Empire. At least that was the fate of women named Mary in the New Testament. True to its name, she had to take on the role of a prophetess of a new age.
According to the records of Matthew and Luke, Mary was engaged to Joseph at the time? In Israeli marriage customs, an engagement has the same effect as marriage, so it is safe for the two to have already started their marriage. But for some reason, Joseph had not slept with Mary. I don't know why. (It may have been because Joseph, who was originally from Bethlehem, came to live in a foreign land called Nazareth, and was not ready to take a wife.)
Anyway, around that time, Maria was pregnant. Of course, the baby in the womb was not Joseph's seed. If so, it is customary that Mary would be sentenced to death by stoning to death. But according to the Gospel of Matthew, an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him not to doubt Mary's chastity. “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid; take Mary as your wife. The child conceived in that body is by the Holy Spirit. Mary will give birth to a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:20-21).
Judging from this passage alone, Joseph is undoubtedly a prince riding a white horse. Not only did he save Mary's life, but he also saved and harvested seeds that had nothing to do with him. However, while Matthew deals with Joseph in this way, and portrays his character and role in detail, Luke does not do so much. In fact, Luke deals with the birth of John the Baptist before the birth of Jesus. It's also very dramatic. The important thing is that the main characters in the first chapter of Luke are definitely women. The way he sees and interprets the situation is completely different from Matthew, who struggles to somehow connect Jesus with King David by elaborating on genealogy stories covered with male names.
Luke focuses on how strong the faith of Elizabeth the mother of John the Baptist and Mary the mother of Jesus are, and how these women help and depend on each other, forming a fateful bond. In Luke 1, Joseph, Mary's fianc e, is only briefly mentioned by name, but has not yet appeared in earnest. Meanwhile, Elizabeth's husband, Zacharias, says that her job is a priest, and she does not believe the words of the angel who holds her son and becomes mute. Women actively accept and take action on the incomprehensible things that happen to them, while men are either distrustful or passive. At this point, aren't men slowly getting angry at the biased reporting of Luke's Gospel? (Still, please be comforted by the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is located “before” the Gospel of Luke.)
The highlight of the story of the birth of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke lies in Mary's obedience. This is in stark contrast to Matthew's emphasis on Joseph's "obedience." In the Gospel of Luke, the person the angel is talking to is Mary, not Joseph. Also, the angel directly visits Mary's house during her birth, not in a dream. It comes right before the text we read together today. “Do not be afraid. Mary, you have been blessed by God. Behold, you will conceive and give birth to a son, and you shall name him Jesus.” (Luke 1:30-31) According to Luke, it was also Mary, not Joseph, to whom the angel gave the name of Jesus. Even in the case of John the Baptist, it is not his father Zacharias who names him, but his mother Elizabeth.
All human beings are prisoners of selfishness. At the worst, when even religious people pray, will each one pray and pray for the best for himself? Even while saying that we will do ‘God’s will’, it is a human being to deceive and force ourselves to wish that our will is God’s will. Reversed prayers do not come out well. A prayer to make God's will become my will, and a prayer to tell me what God's will is, since my will will be completely destroyed.
The mother would have realized when her son denied the ordinary life of a human being and decided to live a spiritual life according to the image of God he found in him. Just as water turns into wine, our mother-child relationship must also undergo qualitative change. Oh Sang-ah (吾喪我) in the eldest son, that means that the task of killing and burying myself is not a task given only to Jesus. Maria, too, had to do that homework all her life.
Thus, to use the words of Meister Eckhart, the great mystic thinker of the Middle Ages, Mary is indeed the eternal 'virgin' in the sense that she was thus "free, subject to nothing, and selfless." The word virgin as Eckhart understood means “a person who has been freed from all false images, a person who is detached as if he did not exist.” In that sense, Jesus is also called a ‘virgin’. But Eckkart adds that if a person is always a virgin, it will bear no fruit. In a spiritual sense, the virgin accepts all the good gifts from God, but does not bring them back to God. Therefore, a virgin must become a mother again. To use Eckhart's words, all of us believers must become “God-bearers.”
What other theologian could have interpreted the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Lord, so clearly? Within the framework of Eccartian understanding, Mary is truly both a ‘virgin’ and a ‘mother’. It is the epitome of a true man who showed with his whole body the homework to live by giving birth to God every moment to the people of every state in the coming and coming generations.
God wants to be born through us even at this moment. Our eyes are so greedy and our souls are so blinded by foolishness that we cannot see, but God's seed is planted in everyone. Mary is a woman who realized that there is a seed of God in her, and prayed and sang so that the seed would grow properly. Just like Mary did, we must continue to sing the song of life so that God can fulfill His will in the world and usher in a new era over and over again. In that case, we too can become mothers who give birth to God.