While preparing a sermon that may or may not get preached this weekend depending on how this nor'easter sets up, I ran across an unfortunate contrast that Douglas Hare draws between Mary and Joseph in the Interpretation commentary on Matthew:
By focusing on Mary, Luke emphasizes the essential passivity of the human response to God's action: "Let it be to me according to thy Word" (Luke 1:38). Matthew, on the other hand, by selecting Joseph as his leading actor, stresses the active component in the human response. Three times Joseph is instructed by an angel in a dream, and three times he must do something.
I take it that, as a NT scholar and a Protestant, Hare doesn't buy into medieval Catholic notions of Mary delivering Jesus without painful contractions or a breach in her hymen. So what does he think the Mother of God was doing those nine months? Watching General Hospital and eating bonbons? How is consenting to a shotgun marriage more active than consenting to an unplanned pregnancy?
Granted, "He took her as his wife," sounds more active than "Let it be to me according to thy Word." The verb in the first sentence is transitive and indicative; the verb in the second is intransitive and subjunctive. (In English anyway; my Greek is horribly rusty).
But the difference is more apparent than real. Mary's response sounds like a variation on the Royal We, a more majestic way of saying, "I agree," or, "You've got a deal." Maybe one reason why Roman Catholics call Mary the Queen of Heaven is that she talks like one.
And granted, one could read the Annunciation as supine acquiescence to the sovereign will of the Almighty. One could interpret Gabriel's words as "An offer she can't refuse." He doesn't say, "Will you conceive?" but "You will conceive."
But one doesn't have to read it that way. Gabriel doesn't announce a fait accompli and depart. The climax of the story is Mary's "Yes" to the angel, and I believe that her Yes was genuinely hers. Indeed, she can only say Yes by the grace of the Son to be born in her, but God's grace does not create robots; it liberates men and women who were formerly slaves of sin to offer themselves wholeheartedly and willingly to God's strange purposes for their lives.
I wonder if Joseph's seems the more active response to God's action because in the back of our minds float traditional notions of who is the more active partner in the sex act, despite the fact that intercourse reportedly did not occur in this instance. But as Hugo Schwyzer points out, one can speak of a woman enveloping, engulfing and surrounding her partner just as easily as one can speak of a man penetrating his partner. That we don't has less to do with the biological reality of intercourse and more to do with the social arrangements in which intercourse is situated.
Likewise, if we fail to speak of Mary's agency in the incarnation event, that has less to do with the text itself, and more to do with the social arrangements in which the text is read and interpreted.
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