“Here am I,” she says, “the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” When Mary speaks those words, “Here am I,” she echoes the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures. God called to Moses from the burning bush, and Moses answered “Here am I”(Ex. 3:4). An angel of the Lord called to Abraham, and Abraham answered “Here am I” (Gen 22:11). God called Samuel and Samuel answered “Here am I” (1 Sam 3:4). “Here am I, send me,” said the prophet Isaiah to the Lord (Is 6:8). Mary’s response is a reporting for prophetic duty, according to the traditions of her people. Here am I.
In stepping up for her duty this way, Mary gives herself over to a universe of unknowns, trusting only in the word of God’s angel. She is young and insignificant and unmarried. In her village word of her pregnancy will spread quickly. She would risk humiliation, the end of her engagement to Joseph, the pain of being his betrayer. She might well risk becoming an outcast, living in poverty. She might well face violence like the woman Jesus will one day rescue from stoning. Even if all those around her are kind and understanding and they somehow rise to this occasion, pregnancy itself is a deadly risk. She will become heavy and awkward, at best. And even if, somehow, she is surrounded by people who accept that her child is the offspring of God, she will forever walk among her friends and family as the embodiment of God’s absolute strangeness. From this moment on, no matter what, Mary will do the work of testifying that God is with us. As we know, and as Simeon later tells her, she will pay a terrible price for that awareness. A sword will pierce her heart.
Mary is not without questions. To her “How can this be?” the angel says that she will be overshadowed by the power of the Most High. He tells her that her cousin Elizabeth will also bear an impossible child. And he tells her that nothing will be impossible with God.
“Here am I,” she says, and yes, ever since that day all of us Christians who walk so improbably alongside her might look upon her and think, “Well, here you are.” Here you are with child, a strange and compelling figure for all we fear and all we hope for from God. Here you are on intimate terms with the sheer unlikeliness of all God’s work among us. Here you go about your daily work while bearing God’s unending glory and God’s limitless humility. You, more than any of us, know that we will see our redeemer in our flesh, in these mortal bodies.
You’ve received the angel, and now we struggle to receive you. Yours is a legacy we desire and fear. Yours is an example we are willing to paint in pictures and celebrate in song but not a one of us can know what you know.
So we struggle to receive you, to welcome you. And in that struggle we receive all that we are as the church, all that we might be, all that might be possible with us if nothing is impossible with God. So it’s hard for us to do: to wrestle with the weight of that particular glory. To welcome Mary and to accept that she is a figure for what we are.
I say that we walk with Mary in the sense that her life has been the life of the church, that as the bearer of Christ she has prefigured every life in which Christ is present. The life of the church throughout history and the church throughout the world, but also specifically my life and yours. The work of this parish. The Mass at this altar. Wherever Christ is borne. We see our lives in Mary and we see again in this young girl the strangeness, the vulnerability, the absolute improbability, of the faith we live right here and now.
It might help us, just now, to remember the difficulty of being Mary or even just walking alongside her. It might help to be realistic about her, to remember that she is such an unlikely bearer of our salvation. It might help to remember her as a vulnerable young girl who willingly accepts danger, shame, discomfort, humanity uneasily inhabited by the divine. “Here am I,” she says.
In this moment we are waiting and watching while a virus overshadows great swathes of the life we are accustomed to living. We know that it is bad, and we aren’t sure how bad it might still be. We know that school and work and home are all upended. We are unsure about what happens next to the poor, the weak, the vulnerable. We are not sure how close the virus will ultimately come to each one of us, but we see it coming near to many whom we love. We see others sick and dying. We or people we know are in deep mourning. Loss is everywhere.
And again, as it has done continuously for two thousand years, the church asks us to accept Mary, carrying her heavy burden so awkwardly but with such hope. How are we to live in these dark days? How are we to see ourselves? How are we to trust God?
We are to welcome young Mary, this awkward pregnant woman. “Here am I,” she declares, and we are to take her in. It’s our job to hear her strange experience and to accept it as prophetic. It’s our job to understand the shame under which she labors and to see it transfigured into blessedness. We are to trust her trust. And in welcoming her we become like her. We become the church: ready to carry the word of God, ready to be overshadowed by God, not without our questions but in the end ready to learn that nothing will be impossible with God.
Receiving Mary as Mary received the angel, we may find ourselves so much more alive to the presence of God in this unpromising time. When others mourn we may know God’s presence in our own words of comfort, or in the compassion that moves us silently. We may see in mourning a reflection of the beauty of each human being. Where we are told to see only restriction and isolation and masks, we may begin to see the outlines of heroic sacrifice for the greater good. Where poverty and hunger are growing so too may our care for the poor and the hungry. Where there is social destruction we may begin to see the chance for social transformation. These are not quick fixes but they are marks of God’s presence, intimations of God’s grace.
“Here am I,” Mary says to the angel, and here we are, the ones with the power to care and to help and to keep our spirits strong and to pray and to see God where no one else does. We have been trained by Mary to be the church. She has trained us both by accepting what the angel says to her and by offering herself to us to be accepted. Remember, you don’t just love Jesus, you also love the one who risked everything to bear him. Her quiet readiness has shaped your heart. The humility that let her face danger and shame and mystery is also yours, if you are willing to recognize what she did as a prophetic act in the most glorious sense of the word. She carries a mystery in flesh and blood, God’s own life. And though we may never fully understand what it is to be the church as she is the church, we are nevertheless in it with her.
Stay in it with her. Cherish her prophetic courage. Commit yourself, as she did, to flesh and blood and danger and salvation. “Here am I,” she says. And here are we, so awkward, so improbable, and yet so full of grace.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
20 December 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia