FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Advent IV-B: December 18, 2011  

Luke 1: 26-38   

Harry T. Cook

 The Fourth Sunday in Advent in Year-B will take us on a detour into the early chapters of the Gospel according to Luke, and specifically to one of its memorable Marian passages. It may be that Luke took Matthew's briefer narrative at 1:18-25 and, with quite as many allusions to Hebrew scripture as we would expect Matthew to employ, laid out a highly graphic picture. Mary -- her name in Hebrew would have been Miriam -- is mentioned first in the synoptics at Mark 6:3, the venue being Jesus' "own country" and the familiar setting of the synagogue where it is said he taught to great effect.

The wonder was that he was a known quantity: "Is this not the carpenter (τέκτων -- tekton), the son of Mary ...?" That "Mary," the one designated as Jesus' mother, is not mentioned again in any connection by Mark. The sole parallel to Mark 6:3 is Matthew 13:55 where Mary is named. Several other allusions to Jesus' maternal parent, in which she is not named, appear in the gospels, viz. Mark 3: 31-35 (parallels at Matthew 12:47-50 and Luke 8:19-21) and notably at John 19:26-27, this later being the poignant scene of Jesus essentially bequeathing his mother to the Beloved Disciple.

There is no doubt that Mary is a beguiling figure, and it is no wonder that the Marian cult has flourished off and on in Christendom. Art in its various forms has given the character far more form and comeliness than the scriptural witness -- though Luke seemed to have gone out of the way to make her come alive. Even the Protestant Episcopal Church has given over a red-letter day to her (August 15), which not incidentally is the day on which the Roman Catholic Church since 1950 has officially celebrated the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven -- as incredible an idea as a hierarchy could dream up. The Anglicans glide over it in typical understatement in the Collect for the Feast: O God, you have taken to yourself the blessed Virgin Mary ... (Book of Common Prayer 1979, p. 243). That's how pervasive the Marian tradition is in Christianity. Even the most Protestant of Protestant churches will robe a young girl in blue for its Christmas pageant.

The Mary we encounter in the passage at hand is one Luke inherited in part from Matthew: a παρθένος -- a chaste or sexually inexperienced young woman; παρθένος is not a particularly apt translation of the Hebrew צלמה, which means approximately "pubescent woman." But somehow the Septuagint rendered צלמה as παρθένος, and the English texts read "virgin," with all the connotations we know.

Luke's άγγελος announces itself to Mary (1:28) with the news that she will carry and be delivered of a child along the lines of the one described in Isaiah 9: 6-7 and II Samuel 7: 12-16 -- a messianic figure in the tradition of the legendary David. The explanation given to the bewildered Mary, as Luke depicts it, is that "the Holy Spirit shall come over -- or overshadow -- you, therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God." Mary is made by Luke to acquiesce in a twinkling of an eye. Luke's drama is reminiscent of the scene depicted by the Yahwist in Genesis 18.

Luke gives for the venue of this event Nazareth of Galilee. Nazareth has its first mention in the gospels at Mark 1:9 where it is said that "in those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee ..." And Mark's unclean spirit (1:24) was depicted as addressing him as "Jesus of Nazareth." In seeming afterthought and in a typical effort to connect Jesus with Hebrew prophecies, Matthew at 2:23 says that after the sojourn in Egypt to avoid the depredations of Herod, Jesus' parents took up residence in Nazareth "that what was spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled, 'He shall be called a Nazarene.'" The trouble with that is we do not know what prophet or prophetic tradition it was because Nazareth finds no mention anywhere in Hebrew scripture. Not in Talmud. Not in Josephus. However, Nazareth enjoys 28 mentions in the whole of the New Testament, almost all connected in some way with Jesus.

Except for Matthew's stretch to have Jesus born in Bethlehem, the "city of David" to make him the Davidic heir to the messiahship, and Luke picking up on that dubious geography, it is probable that the various Jesuses we encounter in the canonical gospels were Nazarene.  

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A serviceable homiletic theme for Advent IV-B may be the extent to which Luke went to represent Jesus as the son of a peasant couple, who in adulthood seemed principally to be concerned with people in their material and physical needs and in their emotional unwholeness. The Good Samaritan story is one excellent example of the former, the parable of the prodigal son of the latter. We're talking here about a fully humanist ethic that makes Jesus special and is the justification for all of the poetry, drama and music celebrating his advent and nativity.

It is tempting for the homilist to wax eloquent about Mary and motherhood, but that is not what the gospel is about. Advent IV-B is an opportunity to lead a congregation away from the virgin business and toward the idea that whoever said and did all those things attributed to Jesus was one of us -- a human being with all the potential, all the flaws and all the possibilities of any human being. His birth was not any more or any less miraculous than the birth of any human child. Nothing is known about his upbringing. Only in early Christian literature is his existence positively attested. References to him or someone(s) like him otherwise are few, far between and undependable.

The homilist therefore has the opportunity to invite a congregation to take a look at the few sayings that can reasonably be attributed to the one or ones called "Jesus." Every one of them has to do with human behavior, i.e. how human beings can most successfully relate to one another for the creation and maintenance of a just and peaceful society. None of them has to do with doctrine, the rubrics of cultic practice or supernatural obstetrics.