Merry Icky-Sticky Christmas
When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, our church went to this “Living Christmas Tree” at a local college. The choir was situated in a giant wooden cut-out that looked like a tree. They stood in the tiers and sang a Christmas concert. (I’ll put a link at the bottom of this post with a pic) They were singing Hark the Herald, “offspring of a virgin’s womb.” I leaned over to the pastor’s daughter I was sitting beside and asked “What is a virgin?” She replied, “Oh, that’s someone who hasn’t had sex.” I grew up on a farm so there weren’t mysteries, as far as reproduction, but I hadn’t ever really considered the reproduction details in the conception of Christ.
Luke 1:28 And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” 29 But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. 30 The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. 31 And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. 32 He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. 33 He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” 34 Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” 35 The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. 36 And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. 37 For nothing will be impossible with God.”
The details of reproduction were not lost to Mary either. This was one of her first questions. This detail of conception has been much written about. There seems to be an obsession with keeping the humanity of Jesus as “clean” as possible. Sure, Mary is a virgin in scripture, but I’m not interested in arguing if that is a fact - I think that God can work through people conceived through traditional reproduction or the Holy Spirit’s immaculate conception. I do think it is interesting that Jesus had to be not quite human but was entirely human. There’s a long-held tradition that Mary experienced no discomfort and no pain in childbirth. There was even some speculation that Mary herself had to have been conceived immaculately in order to be worthy to be the God-bearer. In Botacelli’s depiction of Mary even learning about her call to bear Jesus, she’s in a separate room so as to not be tainted by the presence of an angel in her bed-chamber.
In much of my personal theology, incarnation, when God became human, is kind of the point. For me, the idea that the creator of the universe came to earth and submitted to the constraints of space and time, then became human, only to submit to all of the most human acts: birth, life, death - that’s the whole point. Humans are not human without God and God does not want to be God without humans. These incarnational actions, to me, show the true nature of God. Not a set-it-and-forget-it God, but one who wants to be in the muck with us. There seems to be so much tension between an obsession with Mary’s purity and God’s ability to work through her - and each of us.
A professor at my seminary wrote an article sort of on this idea. The article pulls in references to Luther, who as a married reformer, was a lot more comfortable with reproductive biology than most monastic theologians before him. The article (linked below) highlights Luther’s metaphor that Mary’s “yes” in Luke 1 was her mental conception of Christ and that each of us can mentally conceive of Christ as an incarnational force in our lives. But are we missing the point in this? Isn’t the point that Mary didn’t conceive only mentally? For me, the point is the incarnation.
It feels like doing mental backflips trying to “prove” Mary’s purity while also saying that God can be incarnate in all of us. Even those of us personally acquainted with reproductive biology.
I’ve had three kids. I was insane and wanted to deliver all of them naturally and with as few interventions as possible. I delivered at a birth center, not in a hospital, snapping at the delivery and health care staff “don’t touch me.” Each Christmas I was pregnant, these birth and conception metaphors took on different meanings. Advent took on a different meaning. The heaviness of being 10 months pregnant makes the idea of giving birth a lot more attractive. Anticipating holding the child, whom I’ve held for 10 months in my body, in my arms brought incredibly new meaning to the anticipation of Advent. “Only birthed son” in John 3:16 means a lot more to me because of the incredible amount of discomfort heaviness, and pressure that is involved in pregnancy and birth. Because I’ve given birth, my body will never be the same. I imagine that the experience also was changing to the Godhead in begetting and birthing Christ. There was sacrifice - there was blood sweat and tears- removing any of that is significant to the story of Christ and the involvement of the Trinity.
I can’t see Mary’s bearing of God into the world without the discomfort. I can’t see the immense task of raising a God-child without the struggle of birth. I can’t see Jesus coming to the temple to be circumcised and named without also seeing his mother with leaking breasts and a sore body from recently giving birth. For me, that is part of the story. I imagine her getting a milk letdown when he cries out after his bris, her grabbing for him and holding him to her breasts, he is after all, not only God’s son, but he’s also her son.
To my theology, the intimacy that God willingly undertakes, living the first weeks of life with a cone head from being a first-born to a young mother, being a baby at a bris, being a breastfed and growing child, being a teenager who got acne - all of these very intimate and human things make it all the more miraculous that God is God and chose to also be God with us. I don’t understand why we try so diligently to distance the humanity of Jesus from our own humanity.
Do we just really hate ourselves so much that we don’t believe God could ever want to work this closely?
Are too many people writing theology who don’t have first-hand experiences of pregnancy or birth?
Why has so much of the humanity of Mary and Jesus been erased? So much of what Jesus did was tending to human conditions, healing illness, mending relationships, and teaching all who would listen. Maybe it is my very human condition in the present experiencing a pesky bout of COVID, but it kind of seems like discounting the humanity of Jesus lets the rest of us off the hook. If we only point to the fully God portion of Jesus and not the fully human part, it means that we who are only fully human can’t possibly be Christ-like.
This Christmas Eve, I would like to advocate for an embodied celebration of the incarnation. Let us not make Mary some separate entity, but maybe just a woman who says yes to God. Let’s remember that Christ was fully God AND fully human. The miracle of Christmas is that God became human - fully human. God willingly became us to teach us how to be how we were created to be. Mary’s yes - God’s yes - and our response must be understood to be embodied- that involves all of our humanity- as the body of Christ. Icky sticky humanity: hands and feet, wombs and all.
