In the company of Mary

The women that Matthew includes all have another thing in common: They were all outsiders, foreigners to Israel, although Mary is a Jew. This reinforces a biblical theme that is played out, comically, in the tale of Jonah and in many New Testament parables. “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham”. Israel, the people who chose to live by the covenant, are constantly shamed by outsiders. We must understand that it will be the unbeliever who will shame us in our faith, it will be those of a denomination and a theological orientation that we despise who will prick our religious balloon. It may even be a little child.

The Hebrew root for the word “holy” is “other”. The holy is always other to us, always strange, always scandalous, always an affront to the way we are used to things going. So Matthew sets up the story of Jesus which ends in the worst scandal of all, his crucifixion on the cross, as a common criminal and blasphemer. This is the fate of Mary’s son, the one who will save the people from their sins, the one who is called Emmanuel, God with us. The power that weaves through the stories of the four women and through Mary’s story and through the story of the death of Jesus is the power of the Holy Spirit. That is why the angel can tell Joseph that Mary is pregnant by the Holy Spirit, the same spirit that was with the four women of dubious character who acted to beget the ancestors of Jesus.

This is none other than the Spirit of God, twisting Her way through human history, surprising us, upsetting our precious morality, and opening a new future for us. The strange thing is that people think that churchgoers must be more conservative, cling to hard and fast standards of morality, be closed to the real world around them, to actually be in flight from the “real” world. But exactly the opposite is true, Church goers are those who travel light, who would give up all, who await the new thing of God even if that new thing has unpromising beginnings. We are not in thrall to the PR of the age, to celebrity, money and power and fame, but we look to the underside of history for the coming of our saviour, the one who will make us truly human.

This Christmas we celebrate the coming of this one, saved from disgrace by an angel in a dream, born in mean circumstances, disowned by his own family, received not by his own people, the descendent of doubtful women.