Loving Mary Again for the First Time [1]

It’s four days before Christmas, and I’m sensing again my annual discomfort with “gentle Mary” beside the manger. I have a confession: I don’t like that Mary very much. I don't like her ephemerality, her not-quite-human glow, her immaculate presence out of place in a barn. She's not real, but a porcelain send-up of a person.

It wasn’t until I reread a passage in Jürgen Moltmann’s The Way of Jesus Christ, that it finally dawned on me that it was possible to see Mary another way. To explain, I need to spend unpack a little of Moltmann’s Christology, so bear with me.

Moltmann seeks to develop a “pneumatological Christology” – a way of understanding Jesus

that does not begin with Jesus himself. It begins with the ruach/the Holy Spirit. It is the coming of the Spirit, the creative breath of God: in this Jesus comes forward as ‘the anointed one’ (masiah, christos), proclaims the gospel of the kingdom with power, and convinces many with the signs of the new creation.[2]

The core of Moltmann’s theology is his emphasis on the fact that the Risen One of Easter is none other than the One crucified. For Moltmann, the resurrection is the eschatological moment, the moment in which it is clear that, in Christ, God’s promised future has broken through and is present in history. The new creation has begun. But Moltmann is clear that this eschatological moment reveals the nature and character of the whole of Jesus’ life, and is not merely a divine “stamp of approval” placed like a period at the end of a sentence.

The eschatological moment of his raising from the dead must therefore also be understood as God’s eternal moment. So the raising did not merely happen synchronically to the dead Jesus; it also happened diachronically to the whole Jesus in all the moments and aspects of his life and proclamation. That is why he is present in the power of the Spirit, not mere in his last moment on the cross but in all his moments from birth onwards. He is raised and present in the Spirit, not only as the one crucified, but also as the one baptized, as the healer, the preacher on the mount, the friend of sinners and tax-collectors, and the one whom the women accompanied to the moment of his death.[3]

If I understand him, Moltmann is arguing that Jesus does not grow up an average boy and become a normal man who then, by the power of God’s Spirit, is at some point transformed into the Christ, to live thereafter as the Messiah. Rather, he is arguing that the “eternal moment” of the resurrection transforms Jesus not merely in the tomb but in all the moments of his life, so that in every moment, by the power of the Spirit, the risen Christ is already present.

Moltmann suggests that the One in the manger is not merely “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” but the Risen Christ. The one whom “shepherds guard and angels sing” is not merely a defenseless baby, but the Christ raised from death and strong to save. Indeed, as the old spiritual goes on to claim, “we didn’t know who you was.” Not the one who will be, but rather the one who was and is already the Risen One, the Christ of God.

Now for the passage that has made me rethink Mary. In his section on “Christ’s Birth in the Spirit from a Theological Perspective,” Moltmann says:

If the Christ is to be called the Son of God, then to be consistent we have to talk about the Spirit as his divine “mother.” He therefore comes into the world from the Father and from the Spirit, and with his coming God’s Spirit takes up its indwelling in the world, first of all in the messianic Son, through his birth – then in the fellowship of the children of God through their rebirth (John 3:6; I Peter 1:3, 23) – then through the rebirth of the whole cosmos (Matt. 19:28). The birth of the messianic Son of God through the Spirit is the beginning and the sign of hope for the rebirth of human beings and the cosmos through God’s Shekinah.[4]

To put it another way, Moltmann removes Mary as the central character in the manger scene, and in her place casts the Spirit.

For me, there are two valuable learnings here. First, Moltmann helps me straighten out what we mean by the virgin birth. For too much of Christian piety, the focus is on Mary’s virginity. Holding high the miraculous nature of Jesus’ birth is a way of reassuring ourselves that Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah. If we can’t explain it, it must be God. But Moltmann’s point is that the birthing of the Spirit, not the virgin birth, is the sign of Jesus’ divinity. He reminds us that, for the early Church, the emphasis was not on the “virginity” but on the “birth” – as a way of proclaiming that Jesus was no less human and real than the rest of our woman-born race. The assurance of Jesus’ divinity, his essential identity with God, is a function of the Spirit in God’s eternal moment of the resurrection, the moment that transforms all other moments, before and since.

Second, Moltmann helps the Protestant in me know what to do with Mary. All the pious devotion to her as the “mother of God” seems to direct attention away from the Risen One in the manger and onto a woman who is neither Risen nor the One. But Moltmann reclaims for Mary her proper place in the story:

If we take the birth of Christ from the Spirit seriously, then much of what the Church has ascribed to “the virgin Mary” is transposed to God the Holy Spirit himself, and Mary can once again be what she was and is: the Jewish mother of Jesus. Mary is a witness, and … she also embodies the indwelling of the life-giving Spirit. … If in the history of Christ Mary has this ministering function, a function that points away from herself, then and then especially she will arrive at her full significance in the history of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.[5]

I love that Mary. I love her because she is not rarefied and immaculate, set apart from the gritty reality of life and aglow with the aura of divinity. She is a woman, like the women of faith that I know, who with the witness of their daily labors of faith and practice give birth to a Church that is itself the witness to Christ. She bleeds, she loves, she hopes and fears. She might even curse the pain of childbirth; surely she curses the poverty and pointlessness that curses all the children she bears. I love her because I love the Church, and that’s what the Church I love is supposed to do.

______________
[1] With apologies to Marcus Borg.
[2] J. Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993, p. 73)
[3] Moltman, The Way of Jesus Christ, p. 76.
[4] Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, p.86.
[5] Moltmann, The Way of Jesus Christ, p.86.