Luke 2:41-52 "Something About Mary - Part 1"

         My younger sister could at times be a drama queen when she was a child.  An example from her “tween” age years – say when she was around 12 – would be when my Mother would take her “school shopping” for new clothes in the late summer.  She would bring outfit after outfit to Sue who would have holed herself up in the department store dressing room, turning down each skirt and dress and sweater combination because they were too long or the wrong color or simply wrinkled where she felt they should be smooth. 

         Another example would be the time when Sue was quite a bit younger and lost her favorite teddy bear. She got over the loss though the bear remained gone for several years.  Then, one day, she was cleaning out her bedroom closet.  At the back of it, hidden away, she found an old and battered pink patent leather suitcase. 

When she opened it, she found the teddy bear sequestered inside along with a pair of underpants and a toothbrush.  The circumstances all came back to her.  You see, she had packed that suitcase long ago, so she would be prepared to run away from home if things really did not go her way. 

         Raising a child is no easy matter – as Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Joseph found out.  They thought they were doing all the right things as first time parents.  They had taken Jesus to the temple, as required, to be dedicated by the local priest, Simeon, when the child was eight days old.

Mary, as his mother, was responsible for seeing that his proper religious training began in a timely way. After all, according to Jeremy Myers, one blogger I read this week, 85% of a child’s character develops in his or her first five years.

Myers also wrote that Jewish boys were expected to learn the Torah at age 5 and the Mishnah or Jewish law at age 10.  Then they should learn the Talmud, the Jewish commentaries on the Old Testament, by age 15.  We can only presume that Mary abided by these recommended guidelines just like those of us who raised children before the age of the internet depended on Dr. Benjamin Spock for advice on child-rearing. 

         But then came the incident in the Temple when Jesus was twelve.  Mary and Joseph had packed their bags as they did every year and had gone to Jerusalem for the annual week-long Passover holiday.  The festival had concluded, and they were heading home when the trouble began.  They traveled caravan style, of course – with lots of other people – for safety sake. The unspoken presumption was that they were a sort of makeshift community with everyone looking out for everyone else in order to avoid rapists, drug dealers, human traffickers, and the like. 

Baptist pastor Dwight Moody describes the circumstances this way: “That day this road was crowded with thousands of pilgrims heading home after the holidays. They were on their way to the Jordan Valley, or Galilee, or even further: Syria or Persia, perhaps. Friends and family, all of them Jews, traveling, talking, singing, eating, laughing.

For them it was a religious obligation: not a burdensome one, but a delightful interruption of the rough and rugged routine of regular life. "How delightful is your dwelling place, O Lord." That is one of the songs they sang.” The caravan had traveled a whole day before Mary and Joseph realized that Jesus was not elsewhere in the caravan as they had presumed.  He was missing. 

I remember friends of ours were once traveling on a vacation with another family.  They had four young sons, and the other family had several children as well.  They had stopped for a meal together at a local restaurant and then piled into the two family vans to continue their journey. 

 They had gone quite a distance before encountering a police roadblock.  The officers were searching for the family that belonged to the small child left at a restaurant 50 miles back.  It turned out that our friends’ youngest son had gone to the bathroom, and when he came out, both families had left the restaurant, presuming that all the children were in one car or the other.  It can happen to even the best of parents.

And so, for Mary and Joseph, the question was: "Where is Jesus?" And in an instant, the joyful journey home became a frantic search for their young son.  Maybe he stayed in Jerusalem. Maybe he started the journey home but turned back. Maybe when he saw his parents packing up and heading out, he hid somewhere or snuck out or darted away when he got the chance.  After all, as one blogger I read this week noted, the human brain is not fully developed until about age 25, so we can expect teenagers to do some pretty stupid things and make a variety of very unwise choices.

Mary and Joseph found Jesus, of course, in the Temple kibitzing with the priests and elders.  However, let’s not let Jesus off the hook. After all, he should have told his parents where he was going.  No wonder Mary and Joseph, though certainly overjoyed and relieved to find him, were, at the same time, extremely angry. 

It was his mother who blasted him, reproaching Jesus with undoubtedly an angry look on her face as well as an irritated voice: “Young man, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.”

And that really is all we hear about Mary in our four Gospels after the birth of Jesus (except for the story of the Wedding at Cana and one other brief instance) until the end – some thirty years later - when Jesus is in agony and dying on the cross where he had been crucified in the city garbage heap outside the walls of Jerusalem. 

He somehow found it within himself to spare a few kind words for his mother and for the young man whose only name is “the disciple he loved” who also grieved at his bleeding feet.  In a sense, Jesus gave them to each other, asking each to care for the other when he could no longer do so himself.  And that is all we know about Mary.

However, in spite of these scattered Biblical references, Mary has taken on a full and rich life of her own in legend and church tradition.  Over centuries, she has accumulated the titles of Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM for short), Mother of God, Queen of Heaven, Our Lady of this, that, and the other thing, St. Mary, Ever-Virgin, All Holy, and Queen Mother. 

More specific titles have arisen from her reported miracles, such as  Our Lady of Good Counsel, Our Lady of Navigators, and even Our Lady, Undoer of Knots.  This last title, by the way, had nothing to do with rope but rather with some early 17^th century matrimonial ties that were tangled to the point of an impending divorce. 

Mary also holds a singularly exalted place in Islam. She is the only woman who is given a name in the Quran, which refers to her seventy times and explicitly identifies her as the greatest of all women and the only woman whom Satan never touched.

Mary probably deserves all those titles – and more – simply for putting up with Jesus as a child.  Though our four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) have no information about the youthful years of Jesus, other sources like the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas – most likely written in the mid to late second century and not considered authoritative by any stretch of the imagination but filled with delightful legends about Jesus (and indirectly then about his mother).  The Infancy Gospel was clearly written to fill in the gaps about the formative years of the Messiah for questioning minds in the early church.

According to these legends (and please remember that we do indeed refer to them as legends and not as Gospel truth), Mary really had her hands full. One of the episodes in this narrative involves Jesus making clay birds, which he then proceeds to bring to life.  In another passage, a child spills water that Jesus has collected, and our little Messiah kills him.

And that was not the first time that Jesus did such a thing. The Infancy Gospel also spins the tale that Jesus at age one cursed a boy, which caused the child's body to wither into a corpse. Later, Jesus kills another child by cursing him after he accidentally bumps into Jesus, throws a stone at him, or punches him (depending on the translation).  Boys will be boys, I guess.

When the neighbors complain to Mary and Joseph about his unseemly antics, Jesus miraculously strikes those neighbors blind.  His parents hire a tutor, but Jesus arrogantly tries to teach the teacher instead, understandably upsetting the rabbi who suspects that Jesus has some sort of supernatural origins. Subsequently Jesus resurrects a friend who is killed when he falls from a roof and heals another who cuts his foot with an axe. 

After various other demonstrations of supernatural ability, new teachers try to teach Jesus, but he proceeds to explain the law to them instead. In another set of miracles reported in the Infancy Gospel, Jesus heals his brother who is bitten by a snake as well as two other children who have died from different causes. 

Yes – according to legend, Jesus was quite the handful!  However, again according to legend (and not found in our Bible), Mary was well-equipped to handle her son because she came from good, godly stock.  Her parents, Anne and Joachim, were, in their time, as virtuous as they were childless, giving two-thirds of their resources to the temple and to the poor.  In addition, they pledged to give their offspring to God if their prayers for a child were answered.

According to one source I read (Vocationnetwork.org), “after Joachim, from a priestly family, is denied the chance to bring his offering to the temple—his childlessness is ridiculed by the high priest as a sign of God's rejection—Joachim retires to the territory of shepherds in shame, afraid to return home. There he meets an angel who promises him the birth of a highly favored daughter and is urged to meet his wife at the golden gate of Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Anne at home receives a similar angelic messenger, and rushes to the gate to meet her husband.  (They embrace with a kiss, and Mary is born not long after, some legends say by immaculate conception).

Joachim and Anne keep their promise and deliver their daughter Mary into the service of the temple at the age of three. In this way, we learn how Mary is prepared for her unique life of purity and grace” – and, I would add, for the challenging role of mothering an exceptional child who apparently knew for the tender age of 12 exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up.

Some traditions have it that Mary married Joseph when she was in her early teens and he was 90, thus ensuring her perpetual virginity. Other traditions say that she gave birth to several other children, making Jesus not an only child but one with a variety of siblings. Mary is often depicted in paintings wearing blue, the color of the sky or heavens. Less frequently, she is seen wearing rose, the color of kings.  Her symbol is a white Easter lily, a reminder of her purity and grace.

Though Mary is less important in Protestant traditions such as ours, she is venerated particularly in the Roman Catholic church.  Though her death is not recorded in Scripture, Catholic doctrine has her assumed, that is, taken bodily into heaven – not unlike Elijah and Moses.  In fact, Mary’s assumption into heaven is Catholic dogma. 

There she resides, according to Catholic tradition, where she can protect and intercede for the faithful.  She does not take the place of God in answering prayer, but serves as a sort of funnel to the Holy One. 

And so, we find stone statues of Mary in gardens and grottos and plastic ones on the dashboard of cars.  We find chapels with her portrait, - calm, loving, and welcoming - chapels that are dedicated to her and are lit by dozens of flickering votive candles in the hope of answered prayers. 

I remember as a seminary student spending a few days with fellow students at Mt. Savior Monastery in Elmira, New York.  At the end of each day, the Benedictine brothers retreated to the chapel crypt for their last worship service before bed. At its conclusion, they gathered around a statue of the Virgin Mary and sang to her a lovely song:

Now in the fading light of day,
maker of all to you we pray,
that in your ever watchful love
you'll guide and keep us from above.

Help and defend us through the night,
danger and terror put to flight.
Never let evil have its way.
Preserve us for another day.

Father Almighty this be done,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord your Son,
whom in the Spirit we adore,
who reigns with you forever more.

         It was a prayer to God, but it was sung to a statue of Mary, the candlelight in the crypt creating ghostly shadows of Our Lady on the walls and ceiling.

         Though we do not know much about the mother of Jesus through the four Gospels, we can guess that she was undoubtedly patient with her son as he was growing up.  Perhaps she encouraged him in his vocation, or perhaps she simply pondered it in her heart, as she had the story of the angels that the shepherds excitedly had told her at Jesus’ birth. 

I like to think that she encouraged him, but we do not have any basis on which to say that she did. 

Maybe it is more likely that Mary simply watched her child grow and pondered his passion for ministry and rabble-rousing and structural change to an oppressive society, attributes she saw demonstrated time and time again, leaving her at the outset with the nagging sense that he would bring her only sorrow.