Readings (Year C):
Micah 5:1 – 4a
Psalms 80:2 – 3, 15 – 16, 18 – 19.
Hebrews 10:5 – 10
Luke 1:39 – 45
Reflection: Far from subservient
When I was a young teenager, I used to lie awake worrying that God would ask me to carry the next savior. I had learned about Mary, a young girl engaged to be married and then impregnated by the Holy Spirit. She was just a normal teenager—like me. And it didn’t seem like she had much choice in her marriage to Joseph, her pregnancy with Jesus, how she gave birth, or really much of anything in her life. What was to stop God from deciding to derail my life by choosing me to be the next young girl to save humanity?
It turns out that all the images of Mary looking demurely down as the Angel Gabriel announces her pregnancy, or smiling beatifically at the tiny baby in the animals’ water trough, have done Mary—and teenage girls everywhere—a disservice. While we don’t know much about Mary, we do know that she wasn’t a passive object God used to further God’s salvation plan.
In a recent interview with me and Rebecca Bratten Weiss for our Glad You Asked podcast, scripture scholar AJ Levine shared that Mary probably was not as young as we are often taught; it is more likely that Mary was 19 or 20 and Joseph was maybe a decade older. Jewish women of the time had access to their own money, traveled freely, and could choose to divorce their husbands. In other words, despite the patriarchal society in which they lived, young girls weren’t married off and forced to have babies against their will—not even by God. And even though scripture doesn’t tell us much about her, there are hints that Mary was a fierce young woman who freely chose her life’s path and who fought for her son.
We get a glimpse of that fierceness In today’s gospel, when we read about Mary leaving her home—while pregnant—and traveling “in haste” to visit her cousin Elizabeth. When Elizabeth hears Mary’s voice at the front door, we are told that the baby inside her womb “leaped.” Elizabeth cries out, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb!”
Now, maybe Elizabeth is just happy to see Mary—especially after six months alone with her husband, who, if you remember, doesn’t speak a word during her entire pregnancy. But in all of scripture, there are only two other times that phrase, “blessed are you among women,” is used: to describe the Hebrew Bible figures of Jael and Judith.
Jael’s story is found in Chapter 4 of the Book of Judges. The Israelites are being oppressed by King Jabin of Canaan and his commander, Sisera. Deborah, the judge of Israel at the time, orders the Israelite army to attack Sisera’s forces, promising them that God will lead them to victory. The Canaanite forces are defeated and Sisera flees on foot away from the battle. He finds refuge in the tent of someone he thinks is his ally: Heber the Kenite. Jael, Heber’s wife, welcomes Sisera, offering him a drink and a place to rest, lulling him into security. Then, while Sisera sleeps, Jael takes a tent peg and drives it through his temple with a hammer, killing him. Deborah then praises her as “most blessed of women.”
The second example of this phrase being used is in the Book of Judith, a deuterocanonical text that is found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but not Protestant ones. The story has a similar setting: A foreign army is trying to defeat the Israelites. Assyrian King Nebuchadnezzar has sent his general, Holofernes, to besiege Judith’s town, cutting off the water supply. So Judith devises a plan to save her people. She enters the enemy’s camp, claiming she has information to help Holofernes. Once she reaches his tent, she flirts with him, intriguing him enough that he invites her to a private banquet.
After he falls into a drunken stupor, Judith beheads him with his own sword. She returns to town with his head to rally her people. Because of her bravery, Uzziah, the magistrate of her town, refers to her (in chapter 13) as “blessed by the Most High God.”
Jael, Judith, and Mary: three biblical women blessed by God. Far from the meek, subservient model of traditional biblical womanhood we often see today, these were women who fought in battle, killed their enemies to save their homes and families, and sang songs about casting down the mighty from their thrones and sending the rich away empty.
Perhaps instead of using Mary as a model to teach young girls that God and men demand unquestioning subservience, we can lift Mary up as an example of how they too have an active role to play in saving the people around them and building the kingdom of God on Earth—a kingdom where the oppressor’s might is brought low and where everyone has food to eat and the resources they need to live.
