Some of you might know Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting
of The Annunciation; it is well-known, and very
beautiful. It is a painting which, in some ways,
perfectly captures the pre-Raphaelite School’s attempt to
use pure colour, giving it a luminous quality, the young
Virgin Mary bowing her head meekly to the angel’s message
and to the will of God; and the model for the Virgin Mary
was Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel’s sister and
well-known in her own right as a poet and thinker, who
wrote the words that became the carol ‘in the bleak
mid-winter.’
It’s a beautiful painting, but it is not at all the Mary
we meet, tramping over the Judaean hills, to greet her
cousin Elizabeth in today’s Gospel; for the Mary of the
Gospel does God’s will, utterly and completely, yes; but
she does it as a tough and straight-talking prophet –
indeed, the Hebrew form of her name is Miriam, the same as
the sister of Moses; and, just as Moses carried the words
of God from Mount Sinai, so the prophet Mary carries
within her the Word of God made flesh, the incarnate
Son. And of course, in this we see the scriptural
basis for the priestly and episcopal ministry of women;
what does a priest do? Bears the Word of God, in the flesh
of bread and wine, to the people of God – so, in the Roman
Catholic Franciscan convent in San Francisco, there is an
icon of Mary robed and vested as a priest; and a Bishop,
in a sense, is the Shepherd and Mother Priest of the
Diocese; the priesthood and episcopacy of women is
actually scriptural, and just about as ‘traditional’ as
one can get!
And Mary and Elizabeth, like a long line of biblical women
before them, like Sarah, like Miriam, like Rahab, like
Judah’s unnamed widow, like Miriam, like Hannah – are
smart, tough cookies; they have to be tough because their
circumstances, and in particular, their pregnancies, put
them beyond the pale as far as respectable society is
concerned; these are not pillars of the community and
members of the Mothers’ Union; Elizabeth’s barrenness for
so many years was a scandal, because God’s covenant
promises in the Hebrew scriptures are of land,
flourishing, and – descendants; children were a sign of
God’s favour, so not to have them, particularly for the
wife of a priest, would have been well dodgy. Mary
is poor, single, teenage and pregnant; and whilst in our
own society, poor, single teenage Mums have to be, and
often are, just about as resourceful as possible in order
to do the best for their children, we all know what the
so-called ‘great and good’ say about them.
Today’s gospel insists that God’s covenant promises quite
simply do not work in that way; it is not about
respectability and doing the right thing. And the
prophet Mary, like her namesake, raises her voice in a
great prophetic song, so familiar to us as the Magnificat;
God is God, and holy; God cannot be manipulated, or
annexed in the service of the rich and the powerful; and
God is a God of justice and mercy, a God whose new reality
is here already, here in the child in her womb, in which
the mighty are put down from their seat, the proud
scattered, the humble and meek exalted, the hungry fed
with good things; in fact, it is a reversal of everything
that our own consumer-focused society claims is
good. Sung beautifully in the grandest of
cathedrals, its radical message is utterly
inescapable. And this song of the prophet Mary is
the blueprint, if you like, for the ministry of her son,
particularly as it unfolds in Luke’s Gospel; the
shepherds, those outside the pale of respectable society
come to the manger; the boy Jesus put straight the great
and the good in the Temple; the 5000 are fed, the widow’s
son is raised.
And it’s the blueprint for us as well, as the body of
Christ, the priestly and prophetic people of God.
For, in the midst of a society oppressed by pleasure,
wealth and care, we are called to be something different;
to live God’s new reality of justice, mercy, and inclusive
love; we enact that reality in every Eucharist, in broken
bread and wine outpoured, that is the word made flesh; and
then are sent out to live it in our lives; to live that
radical equality, that strange justice, that odd mercy of
which Mary sings; to live the reality to which we have
given our lives:
That God was man in Palestine
And lives today in bread and wine.
Amen.