In the whole of the New Testament, this episode is unique: it is the only instance of two women holding centre stage: and both are pregnant. What’s more, both pregnancies are shrouded in mystery: Elizabeth’s is completely unexpected; Mary’s is completely inexplicable.
The birth of any child, of course, is never anything less than a miracle, but the hand of God is more miraculously manifest in these two births than any other. Indeed, it could be said that both are parables of a miraculously new world, a world in which fertility and fruitfulness depend, not on material advantage or physical prowess, but on the power of God’s providential generosity.
By every worldly measure of importance, Mary was a total nonentity, legally, socially, and economically. Yet, she was enabled by grace to do what no other human being before or since has been able to do: she put her entire being at her Creator’s disposal, consenting, without the benefit of clear knowledge or preparation and neither passively nor meekly, but actively and courageously, to play a unique role in God’s giving of Himself to us in our flesh and blood.
The language Luke uses to describe Mary’s unique role echoes unmistakably the Old Testament story of how the Ark of the Covenant was brought back to Israel, followed by the cloud of glory. But now, Mary contains within her very self the glory of God, his and her son. Quite literally, within her, God’s presence returns to Israel.
But for all that high imagery, the fact is that the climax of Israel’s history is brought about by a pregnancy outside wedlock and dependent on the free consent of an unknown, young, Jewish woman. Think of it: God’s saving work hangs on the consent of a human being whom he created; and note, a female human being.
As all mothers know, nothing in the whole of creation is more intimate, quite literally, to a human being than the carrying of a child. And nothing is more life-changing than the birth of your first child. Every mother-to-be spends much of her pregnancy wondering about her child, whom she knows long before anybody else: about what he or she will be like, and what difference this new life will make to the lives of her and her husband.
Such thoughts as this must have occupied Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth. But, in their unique and mysterious situations, we can only wonder what other thoughts preoccupied them. What must have been in Mary’s mind as she entered more and more into the mystery unfolding around and within her? The Magnificat is the poetic response put on her lips by Luke, affording us an insight into her thoughts. But the Magnificat also gives us an insight into the significance of her son’s birth for us all. It tells us that the world will be recreated around her divine Son. It tells us that the order of things in this world will be reversed: the arrogant and haughty will be humbled and the genuinely humble will be exalted. The starving will know hunger no more and the riches of the wealthy will count for nothing.
This birth will be the righting of every wrong, not by the exercise of power or political acumen or intellectual acuity, but by God humbling himself in our weak and vulnerable flesh. Babies may be weak and vulnerable, but they impress themselves on us in powerful ways, two in particular: first, in their capacity for deafening noise, usually perfectly timed to coincide with their parents’ desperate need for sleep; and secondly, by their capacity to evoke in us a depth of tenderness and compassion that is unique.
St Augustine had the first in mind when he said in a Christmas sermon in the fifth century that Jesus penetrates our deafness and rouses us from our slumber by his loud crying. But, he adds, the inarticulate gurgling of this child will give way to the utterances of the Word made flesh. And as for the other way in which babies make their presence felt. It’s obvious, isn’t it? If God chose to come among us in this way, it can only have been to make himself irresistible to us. Just as a new-born child awakens, especially in its mother, a unique and entirely new kind of emotion, a love deeper than any other, so the coming of the Word made flesh awakens in us all the same new intensity of love. And that is the point of Christmas: to renew and refresh us in heartfelt love, for God, who is Love Itself, and for one another, his gifts of love to us.
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