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Thursday, Dec 10 - What DID Mary Know?<br />
The following link has been all over Facebook, so you may have clicked on it already, but if not,<br />
take a listen to this remix of one of my favorite Christmas songs - Mary Did You Know<br />
(Pentatonix).<br />
The song alone is worth pondering today as we reflect on Advent. However, as I listened, the<br />
question kept begging an answer in my mind - Exactly what did Mary know? Recently, Bay<br />
and I watched the old movie, Yentl, with Barbara Streisand. If you've not seen it, the story<br />
highlights a young Hebrew woman who longed to increase in knowledge, to have her questions<br />
answered, but she lived in an era when "it was a man's job to do the thinking and the learning,<br />
and a woman's job to marry, to cook, and to have babies." For a woman to read and study the<br />
Torah was illegal. Yet, bless his heart, Yentl's father taught her to read, to study, to discuss, and,<br />
even argue the Holy Writings...until he died, and Yentl was left with nothing. So, she cut her hair,<br />
dressed like a young boy, and set out to a new community, where she might enroll & live among<br />
the male population as a student, and satiate her greatest desire.<br />
Mary lived in such a society, perhaps a bit worse than Yentl's.<br />
Life for women in Mary's world was not easy, nor free. Women<br />
were no more than property owned by a man. As in Yentl's<br />
world, what Mary DID KNOW was that she wasn't allowed to<br />
think, to have a voice. What Mary DID KNOW would have been<br />
caught, as others talked, but she was NEVER taught. What<br />
Mary DID KNOW was that there would, one day, come a<br />
Messiah, and all young girls, who lived to marry and have<br />
babies, hoped that they might be the blessed woman to birth<br />
that child. Their belief was this babe would grow to manhood<br />
and rescue Israel from Roman reign. What Mary DID KNOW<br />
was limited to what the men<br />
knew, and even their<br />
picture of the Christ-tocome<br />
was skewed. The<br />
men expected a victorious<br />
warrior, a ruler to sit on the throne of David - a King who<br />
would release them all from persecution. Perhaps Mary was<br />
looking forward to a throne, not a tomb; a castle, not a<br />
cross.<br />
I know one thing - Mary didn't know Isaiah-the Prophet's<br />
words that it would be a virgin who would conceive, for her<br />
first question to the angel (after he settled her fears) was,<br />
"How can this be when I have not known a man?" If she<br />
was blind to that explicit truth, to what else was she blind?<br />
No one saw the Messiah as Isaiah painted Him in chapter<br />
53: a suffering servant. So what did Mary know? All we<br />
know for certain is that Mary DID KNOW what the angel<br />
told her, and every word built one upon another until they<br />
crescendoed in her mind: I will be the Mother of the Christ.<br />
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