Mary had always been one to treasure up things, one who returned to memories and pondered them in her heart. But in light of the most recent events in her life it is was particularly appropriate, she thought, to return to her journals, to the diary of the astonished young girl she had been when all this had begun. The song she turned to wasn’t exactly at the beginning, but it was the first moment that she really believed it was true. Before that it could have just been strange dreams or the upset stomach…
May 16th 1 BC
Dear Diary,
How Humiliating! At least I think it’s going to be…I’m so confused, On the one hand:
I'm bursting with God-news;
I'm dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I'm the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others (The Message)…
I didn’t believe it at first, thought maybe it was just a girlish fantasy and an upset stomach, but now I’ve seen it with my own eyes, Auntie Elizabeth is pregnant! Yes Auntie Elizabeth who is really cousin Elizabeth, but all us kids call her auntie because she is so old, is pregnant.. Old lady having a baby pregnant, like Sarah pregnant and like Hannah pregnant from the stories of old, like a gift from God miracle pregnant, like if its possible for her to be pregnant, pregnant then its possible for me to be pregnant, pregnant. And if I’m pregnant then…then…well I’m so overwhelmed not just because who am I to mother a Son whose father can only be God himself, not just because I don’t deserve this honor …but I’m overwhelmed because what are people going to say,
I’m bursting with self-consciousness
I’m dancing a tight rope between privacy and deceiving my parents
…what is my dad going to say?
Joseph is going to take one good look at me and what will happen
…how humiliating
I’m never going to forget that God did this to me!
That all looked so different to Mary now, of course she would have preferred to have been married, preferred a lot of things, like not giving birth next to the slop trough in a barn, but her definitions of humility and humiliation had changed. Those things were humbling, reminders of who she really was; the good and the bad. Chosen and specially favored by God: yes. The wife of a poor and poorly connected carpenter: yes to that too.
But to her, humility had been redefined: that the promises God made to her people throughout time, the very spoken words of God had some how taken off divinity and wrapped themselves in flesh in her womb, inside her body. That was humility. Mary’s measure of humiliation had changed, drastically. If she had feared that her pregnancy would be a curse, now she had seen what it meant to be cursed, to be broken and bruised and despised. In a mother’s nightmare she had seen her own son in the mouth of death, not simply his own, but the curse itself, that fate that death and inevitability is in the world. She had watched it hang him humiliated on a tree, a fate that was not his own (Galatians 3:13)
June 24th 1 BC
Dear Diary,
He Kept His Promise!...if the way that I felt when I woke up this morning is any indication then, God is doing what he said he would do, not just what he said he would do to me, but what he has been promising since he named our people Israel, since he started making promises…
His loving kindness is as faithful as waves on the ocean
Oh I need to not think about oceans or I’ll be in the bathroom again..
What was I saying, I can’t remember I loosing my marbles…oh yeah
The bigger I get the more I’m reminded that he is remembering his promises and piling up his mercies on his people…
It's exactly what he promised he’d do
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
All of these promises are being kept, all of our prayers are being remembered and I am being reminded of it every morning and four times every night!
I wonder about Joseph, he says nothing has changed, but I don’t know how to read him, he doesn’t communicate, boys drive me crazy
Will he keep his promise and marry me?
I know you don’t always work like this God, but couldn’t you just like tell him that it’s you, couldn’t you just tell hm that I love him, couldn’t you like visit him in a dream or something and tell that I haven’t been unfaithful??
Mary had known before the first little kick that this child, this Jesus was going to be God’s promises fulfilled, she had known it was finished before it began.
The life that grew in her was literally who God was talking about when he said to father Abraham in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. The tiny heart that had fluttering away in her tummy was the new heart of flesh that God had promised to put within his people, his new spirit to replace our rebellious hearts of stone (Ezekiel 36:26). That little baby was the Lord that King David called the Lord. (Matthew 22:44-45).
November 13th 1 BC
Dear Diary,
Really Really down today. For one: I’m as huge as a water buffalo, I feel gross and it’s still like a month away. Everything is uncomfortable, my saddles are cutting off the circulation to my gi-normous feet, my borrowed maternity robe is crazy tight because Elizabeth only gained 30 pounds when she was pregnant with John who is like the most perfect baby ever born of a woman! And we have to travel and Joseph has borrowed a donkey, a donkey! I can barely climb out of bed..how am I going to climb onto an animal and ride it! We have nothing, we have no place to live yet, we not married…oh and by the way the baby in my womb is the King Israel and we can’t even afford diapers. I think maybe God made a mistake. Nothing is like I thought it would be …Everything is Upside down.
Looking back now, to Mary, it was all grace. Everything was Upside-Down! But as it turns out, that had become the very definition of God’s grace in her life. The good news that her Jesus had come to bring was that the world had it backwards!
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
From the very beginning he had chosen the weak , unmarried virgins, vulgar shepherds , unclean women, filthy drunks and thieves and overwhelmed them with love and grace they didn’t deserve, but that they knew they needed. It wasn’t who she was that had made her worthy to be the mother of God, but simply that he had chosen her, because of his love. And that had set her free.
He had not demanded allegiance and commanded authority because of his majesty. In fact he had forced himself upon no one and yet the rich spent lavishly to get rid of him and powerful had quaked at the mention of his name…and still did.
He forces himself on no one and yet the humble and honest are compelled by his sacrifice, their hearts are captured when they realize not their worthiness but the need that they cannot fill themselves.
For Mary his love, the love of her son, the love of her Lord was more than a sentimental memory between mother and child or a holiday wish, it was a love that had accomplished with action what it had promised from the beginning of time…God’s promise and humanities desire: redemption.