“Elizabeth and Mary, women and mothers bringing their creativity to the movement for change.”

Rev Dr William Loader  
(Uniting Church New Testament Scholar)

This divine-human story celebrates women and mothers bringing their creativity to the movement for change. There is no marginalising of women’s stories here, although this is the exception rather than the rule in the early writings. The pressures would have been enormous to romanticise women’s roles into submissive stereotypes or limit their identity to pregnancy, childbirth, and child raising. …

Spirituality is not men’s business alone. Holiness is the companion of life, of intimacy, of pregnancy, of childbirth, of family. Holiness is at home with the unromantic and painful aspects of all of these. Holiness invites both men and women into sensing divine presence in the first stirrings, the foetal gymnastics, the soiled nappies/diapers, the tired nights, the teething cries, the not knowing what to do. Human business is holy business – and frequently messy business.

Elizabeth and Mary are not to be locked away in obscurity. Their sisters do not need male approval to matter. Their place is not back stage. In the real dramas of change throughout the world and its history they have leading roles, … . Beyond obscurity, beyond abuse – and Elizabeth and Mary would have had their fill of it in their time – Elizabeth and Mary are people, whose identity is to be defined ultimately not by their gender or ethnicity, but by their personhood which embraces and does not deny the specificities of their personhood.

There are usually people sitting in our services, both women and men, who have great difficulty thinking that holiness also wants to embrace their humanity, their sexuality, their intimacy, their struggles. If we diminish Mary (downwards or upwards), we diminish them. At its best the Mary stories have been the place where such people have found a friendly face, a relief from what became the austere Jesus and the remote Almighty. There will be worrying and busy Marys, sometimes unfairly carrying the burden of festive preparations, who can find Christmas very alienating, anything but holy or full of grace. They need to hear the story that they matter.

Christmas is fascinating as a place of marginalisation. Jesus is marginalised by Santa Claus – that we all know. Profit and exploitation marginalises good news for the poor – and make the Magnificat sound a little quaint. People like Mary are marginalised and along with that goes human sexuality, … which generates life and love, the ups and downs of pregnancy and parenthood. Religion gives us in return systems of power where men rule and women are men’s mums who are ‘behind every great man’.

Elizabeth declares Mary blessed (1:42). All generations will call her blessed (1:48). More is at stake than Mary and if we get it wrong with Mary, we will mostly get it wrong with all women (and men). If we put her on a pedestal, we are most likely to lift her into irrelevance or have her serve our own distractions. She has a way of defying her images and reaching out to real people. Today’s reading is an invitation to let it happen. Let her be a bearer of the Christ in her full Mary-nes.