We’re back and talking about Mary more! Last week we looked at God’s incredible and thoughtful care of Mary during her pregnancy, but this week I want to take a look at what we can learn from Mary’s character.
Live Nativity scenes often depict Mary as a wise mature woman and mother. She’s calm and serene, holding swaddled baby Jesus or standing over him with glowing love as he sleeps in the manger. Cattle keep on lowing, nothing’s breaking this mother’s calm serenity. She’s got it all together. Yes, she may be dressed in ancient clothing, but this is a woman you could see getting the kids to all their sporting events and never forgetting the orange slices.
The historical reality is vastly different. Mary was no twenty-something suburban wife and mother. Most estimates for the day combined with practices at the time place her somewhere around fourteen years old.
Fourteen!
I think I’ve always been good with kids, but I can’t say that I would have made a good or even capable or safe mother at fourteen years old. Yes, life was very different back then and you would have been trained to run your own household for a long time before marriage, but still… But there’s something more about Mary’s age that makes her obedience to God incredible to me.
I don’t know what you were like when you were fourteen, but I can’t think of a time in my life when I cared more about what everyone thought of me. I needed people’s approval so, so much. I wanted people to like me. I wanted people to see me as cool and capable. I wanted people to want to be friends with me. Even if you weren’t as insecure in your teenage years as I was, I’m sure you experienced that need to be liked to some degree.
We want to be liked. We want to fit in. We want to belong with those we’re doing life with.
But that wasn’t meant to be for Mary. One day, an angel tells her she’ll be pregnant with the Son of God even though she’s engaged and a virgin. Pregnancy out of wedlock in that day and age wasn’t just a scandal, it was criminal. Mary could have been ostracized from her community or even stoned when people found out. She had far more at stake than people simply disapproving of her. And I imagine she thought of all of that as the angle laid out the plan to her. I wager she saw some hopes and dreams of her own evaporate at the impossibility of what was going to happen. She probably thought out all the things people would say or believe about her. Maybe she’d heard them said before about someone else and could imagine them hurled at her. But what was Mary’s response to the angel?
“Mary responded, ‘I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.’” (Luke 1:38)
Mary rejects all worldly approval in favor of submitting to God’s will. Here she is, in her keenest years for wanting the approval of those around her, and she’s holding fast to a plan that not only has her wildly standing out as different, but shamefully so in the eyes of the people around her who had no idea what God was doing.
Mary is the ultimate example of not being thrown by life going differently and not caring what other people think when it does. She knows she’s being asked to do something very set apart from how the world works and she doesn’t hesitate to take that on in its entirety.
As soon as Mary was visibly pregnant I can only imagine how lonely she was made to feel in her community. Even with Joseph believing her and choosing to stand by her, she still would have been surrounded by people who believed she’d sinned and shunned her for it. And still Mary stood by what God was asking her to do.
Mary got then what Jesus would grow up to someday preach. “If the world hates you, remember that it hated me first. 19 The world would love you as one of its own if you belonged to it, but you are no longer part of the world. I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you.” (John 15:18-19)
Because the truth of the matter is that if you’re truly following Jesus and submitting to his will for your life, there are going to be times when you’re asked to do things differently too, often to the scorn, or at least confusion, of those around us. None of us are going to be asked to do something as huge as carry God’s son, but somehow or another, you will have times where your need for the approval of others violently collides with what God wants you to do. What you choose in that moment will say everything about what you put first in your life.
If you want to follow God and lead a different life, you’re going to simply have to do things differently than everyone around you. There’s just no way around it. You don’t get to do things the worldy way and get heavenly results. It doesn’t work like that. Godly results require submission to God’s plan.
And it will come with sacrifices. I won’t lie to you on that. We’re not told explicitly what Mary lost on the worldly side of things to follow the Godly plan, but I am sure she did. She made that sacrifice and reaped the rewards of her obedience.
I don’t know what it will be for you, but it will be there. Maybe it means you will work terrible, just paying the bills jobs so that you’re available where God needs you in your personal life. And maybe people will brand you as lacking ambition for it because they don’t understand what God is doing with you. Maybe you don’t get to buy a house because right now God needs you to build into your family. And maybe people will judge you for not providing for your family better. Maybe God calls you to live in a mor dangerous situation to bring the gospel to people who need it. And maybe people will criticize you for putting your family in danger. There’s a thousand ways you might be asked to reject the world, and a thousand ways the world might tear you down for it. At the end of the day, we all have to decide whose opinion matters more: the world’s or God’s.
We all know who Mary picked and the everlasting good that came from it. May we have the courage to choose the same.
It will not be easy. Sometimes it might be downright painful. But choosing God over the world will always be the right choice. So as we head into this next week and celebrate the coming of our savior into the world, let’s also remember the courage of a teenage girl who had the courage to leave behind her own worldly expectations to follow the plan God had for her. Turns out, it was the way better plan, anyway.
May we have the resolve of Mary.
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 