Christmas Songs About Mary: Protestant Problems, File №1
Indulge me in a thought experiment.
Your oldest cousin — write down their age. Then jot down the age of your youngest cousin. (Text/ping who you must for this information, no judgment, or give it your best guess — exactitude is not imperative.) If you yourself are the oldest/youngest of your cousin clan, then write your own age down. Subtract the latter from the former and make a note of it.
Here’s my breakdown: oldest cousin is named Ryan, last I heard he’s still living in Corpus Christi, and while I can’t say 100% that he’s 51 years old, I’m pretty confident he’s not much younger than that. My youngest cousin is named Hannah, she lives south of Denver, and I am 100% sure that she’s 30 years old.
That’s a 21-year age gap, so… pretty significant. Ryan’s dad is my mom’s oldest brother, who happens to be 14 years older than my mom, and 16 years older than Hannah’s mom, the youngest of their sibling bunch. Another meaningful sibling age gap there, though it’s not at all unheard of. My grandmother had her two boys (my uncles) in her early 20s, got divorced, remarried, and had my mom and her sister when she was in her late 30s.
If my age guesses are correct (apologies to the family if they’re not), then my uncle had Ryan when he was about 24 years old — pretty average for the 1970s. My aunt had Hannah when she was 28, so right in the middle of the baby years too.
Twenty-one years between the oldest cousin and the youngest. My bet is your number is somewhere close to that, although it could, of course, be much smaller or much larger.
Let’s examine the possibilities in the latter category.
Imagine my uncle had Ryan when he was 20 years old, instead of 24, and let’s say my aunt had Hannah at 38 years old, instead of 28. That would add a cool 14 years to the difference, bringing the cousin age spread to 35 years apart.
What’s any of this got to do with Christmas songs?
Well.
The gospel of Luke opens with a miraculous pregnancy bestowed on a woman named Elisabeth. It’s a wonderful passage, yes you should read the whole of it, but the pertinent bit for this discussion is Luke 1:7: “And they had no child, because that Elisabeth was barren, and they both were now well stricken in years.”
“Well stricken in years” means Elisabeth had passed the child-bearing age. I’m in the mood to be conservative here, so, hypothetically, Elisabeth is 50 years old. Please note, she could be much older—55, 60, 70, even 80?? Who knows. The “well stricken” seems deliberately emphatic, but I’ll concede Elisabeth may have been as young as about 50.
Elisabeth, the gospel of Luke tells us, was Mary’s cousin. Mary has her own miraculous pregnancy, of course, being the virgin mother of Jesus Christ. She goes to visit her cousin Elisabeth while they are both pregnant, and both Elisabeth and her in-utero son, John, sense and react to the divinity of the baby Mary is carrying. The scene is wild, frankly. They all must have felt they’d transcended to another dimension of life on earth, which is, of course, the point.
But I’ve long wondered about the logistics of this cousin situation. If Elisabeth was indeed “well stricken” in years, how is it that her cousin, Mary, is 13 or 14 years old? Because, if you’re not aware, that’s the Protestant narrative on the mother of our Lord — she’s barely a teenager, almost a child.
If Elisabeth were the youngest she could be to fit the “well stricken” in years category, and Mary was 14 when she went to visit cousin Elisabeth, that puts the age gap between the two at 36 years. Or, one extra year beyond the age gap between my oldest and youngest cousin, after I’ve added a hypothetical 14 years to that actual difference.
It is possible, I guess. It’s possible Elisabeth was the oldest member of their cousin bunch, and it’s possible Mary was also, just so happens!, the absolute youngest. It’s possible Elisabeth was 50 years old, and not 60 or 70, when she conceived John…
But when the angel Gabriel delivers the news of Jesus’ miraculous conception to Mary, he says it like this: “Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (Luke 1:28)
“Women.” Mary is blessed among women.
Since we don’t know her age, and since it seems statistically unlikely to this writer that Mary and Elisabeth were so precisely positioned at extreme opposite ends in the family lineup, and— most importantly—since the Bible describes Mary as a woman, I think we’d better err on the side of Scripture and go ahead and think of her that way.
Woman. Adult. Adult woman. Yes.
But I’ve noticed, increasingly as I’ve grown up more myself, that the Protestant church seems discomfited by the very prospect of an adult Mary. The reflex is to infantilize Mary, to turn her into an innocent kid, someone who didn’t understand what was happening in her body.
I suspect this can be traced back to the Reformation riff with the Catholic church, a desire for a clean break with the “idolatrous” iconography of a church imperial that had, admittedly, become all too comfy with corruption and dubious theology. Mary holds a central place in Catholic art and all the great cathedrals; I dare you to find any reference at all to Mary in your average Protestant church, some old-school Anglican stained glass installations excepted.
I suspect it also has at least something to do with an American church steeped and formed from a mid-century culture of patriarchy, and one that thus couldn’t afford to admit a woman as central in any way to the story of Almighty God Himself.
But a teenage girl? A little ol’ 13-year-old? That’s an easier lift.
And so, this Christmas, should you tune into a Christian radio station, you’ll no doubt encounter one of the season’s standards, “Mary, Did You Know?”
Americans’ general biblical illiteracy is second only to their art history oblivion, and these two ignorant strains collide spectacularly in “Mary, Did You Know?” Because if we were on reading terms with the gospel of Luke, or if we had even a passing familiarity with centuries of European art, we’d be confident Mary did most definitely “know” all about her baby boy.
Gabriel’s visit with Mary, aka “The Annunciation,” is one of the most common subjects for your big-name European painters. Here’s a sketch by Michelangelo:
And an altarpiece from Donatello:
Quite a famous work here from Raphael:
And we’ve got a real beauty from Leonardo Da Vinci:
You’ll notice, I hope, that in all these painting from the TMNT namesakes, Mary appears as a young woman, not a teenager. In Michelangelo’s characteristic style, she’s practically a man. From an anthropological standpoint, I’d suggest artists of the 1300s-1700s (at least) were not operating in cultures that demanded an adolescent Mary.
But leaving that aside, the very first person in the entire world to “know” that Jesus was the Messiah was a person named Mary, his mother. To speculate otherwise is absurd, unbiblical, and we might be wise to admit, insulting to the mother of God.
However, let us imagine that, despite Gabriel making emphatically clear to Mary that she would bear the Son of God, somehow she remained unsure of her situation. Just a few verses later, Mary speaks prophetically of the Messiah, referencing Old Testament scripture like a real boss. (Check out the parallels to 1 Samuel 2) Some biblical commentary suggests (naturally!) that Mary may not have known what she was saying. Possible, sure.
But I like to think Mary did know. I like to think the woman God Himself chose amongst all women of the earth, throughout history, to bring His Son into the world, knew His Old Testament word. I’ll quote in full The Magnificat, what Mary says to her cousin Elisabeth when the elder woman acknowledges the Messiah her younger relation bears:
And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever.
These are not the words of a know-nothing teenager, my friends.
Which brings us to the next Christmas song about Mary, a real doozy of nonsense that manages the significant feat of surpassing “Mary, Did You Know?” in sheer theological malarkey. Here’s the bit from “Just A Girl,” released less than ten years ago in 2013, that gets repeated throughout the song, and that is just so, so, so very wrong:
Just a girl
Does she even know that she just changed the world
Does she even know that He will save the world
Does Mary know that He will save the world
She’s just a girl
Just a girl
Just a girl
“Does she even know.”
Here’s what I want to know: How do Christian songwriters get this kind of lyric past a whole team of editors, distributors, radio deejays, and on to the whole congregation of believers listening to KLOVE? That is the real mystery to me.
I am not a Catholic. I do not believe in a need for priests, and I do not believe the communion bread and wine become Jesus Christ’s literal body and blood. I find no persuasive scriptural basis for priests remaining celibate, and am amongst the many who wonder if the monstrous sexual abuse of children perpetrated and abetted by an appalling number of Catholic leaders is not somehow related to this awful directive of loneliness.
All that being said, I am dear friends with many Catholic believers, I am awed and convicted by the extraordinary mission work nuns do around the world, I see and respect and long for the community outreach many Catholic churches provide for their local neighborhoods. God works a great deal of love through this body of believers, I have no doubt of that. And one thing I think the Catholic church rightfully understands must be dealt with head-on is the centrality of Mary to the story of Jesus, and the exceptional quality she must have had amongst human beings past, present, and future to receive the singular blessing she received.
In a sometimes confused and conflicted and admittedly not always ideal way, the Catholic church’s respect for Mary has elevated motherhood for everyone. It brought a woman into the main cast of God’s work on Earth, a lineup that had heretofore included only men. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and so on, and so on. The Messiah would enter Earth through the human body of a woman, and for those of use who have given birth, this reads differently.
But Mary does not give birth and disappear. It is at her request that Jesus performs his first miracle, changing water into wine so a wedding party can keep the good times rolling. She is there when Jesus teaches as a teenager in the temple, and Mary is at the crucifixion. Dying on the cross, Jesus tells his brother John to take care of his mother, an extraordinary act of love within and despite excruciating pain.
These two were close. That matters.
So let me riff on an unrelated Christmas song that also inspires its own camps of seasonal angst and ire:
All I Want For Christmas Is No More Claptrap Songs About Mary.
