Surprised by Mary: How the Christ Who Was Born through Mary Can Be Born Again through You

By James A. Harnish and Donna Claycomb Sokol

There's more to Mary than the carols we sing and the stories we tell at Christmas. James A. Harnish draws on Scripture, tradition, and contemporary experience to explore the surprising claim that the same Christ who was born into the world through Mary can be born into the world again through us.  

This invites you to live into Mary's story right now! As you follow her from the day Gabriel invited her to bear the Son of God to the birth of the church on Pentecost, it will help you become a follower of Jesus who brings hope and healing to a broken world.

Through Mary's story, you will discover that Christian life is not only about how you can be "born again" but about how Christ can be "born again" through you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: May 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9781666774245

James A. Harnish

I retired after 42 years of pastoral ministry in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. Martha and I are enjoying our 51th year of marriage at home in Longwood, Florida. I keep engaged by writing for the United Methodist Publishing House (http://www.abingdonpress.com/james_a_harnish) and Upper Room Books (https://upperroombooks.com/author/james-a-harnish/). I also serve as a facilitator for the Institute of Preaching and a member of the Board of Visitors at Duke Divinity School. We have two fantastic daughters. Carrie Lynn is married to Andy. They live in Orlando with our grandchildren Julia, Alex and Luke. Deborah Jeanne is married to Dan. They live in Charleston, South Carolina, with our two granddaughters, Mattie, and Molly.

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Introduction

What’s So Surprising About Mary?

When was the last time you were surprised?

Sunday, December 7, 1941. Japanese fighter pilots took the nation by surprise when they attacked Pearl Harbor. When Bret Stephens looked back on the eightieth anniversary of that event, The New York Times columnist warned, We are losing the capacity for surprise.²

New Testament scholar C. Kavin Rowe offered a similar warning to people who identify themselves as followers of Christ. He observed the way we cut off the chance for surprise and renewal in our time with an assumption that we already know what the biblical God is or should be doing in the world.³ He concluded, If Christianity is anything at all like what the early sources claim it is, then woe to us if we forget its power, make it boring, and lose its surprise. Human life is just too hard to have a boring Christianity.⁴

I didn’t think Mary could surprise me. I heard about her in sermons, songs, and prayers my entire life, particularly around Christmas and on Good Friday. She was like a church member I thought I knew well. But when we were preparing for this church member’s memorial service, I was surprised to discover things about his life I had never known before. In the same way, as I listened more intently to the gospel stories about Mary, I discovered new ways in which her story can become a transformational metaphor through which the Son of God, who was born into the world through her, can be born again through us.

You may be a person for whom I wrote this book if you are:

•a long-time Christian who is open to new discoveries about something you thought you already knew;

•a curious young adult who questions whether the Christian faith makes any actual difference in our world today;

•a faithful woman who may be surprised to learn that your experience as a woman can be a way for others to experience the presence of Christ;

•a Roman Catholic, former Catholic, or never Catholic who wonders why a male, Protestant preacher would dare to write about Mary;

•a member of a small group of people who likes to ask hard questions and dig deeper into the stories the Gospels tell; or

•a follower of Christ who has not lost the capacity for surprise!

If any of those descriptions fit you, you are among the people whose faces I imagined on the other side of my computer screen as I wrote this book.

An Audacious Affirmation

I sometimes call myself a congenital Christian. I identify with Timothy, Paul’s protégé in the New Testament, who received the faith from his mother and grandmother (2 Tim 1:5). The Christian faith has been as much a part of my life as the twin brother who surprised the world by arriving four minutes after I did. I can’t remember a time before I believed what my parents believed and tried to live the way they and the church taught me to live. I’ve questioned it, pushed against it, probed it, stretched it, and followed it to places my forbears never expected, but it has always been a part of who I am.

Despite living with this faith for more than three-quarters of a century, I continue to be surprised by the astonishing claim that the same Christ who was born into the world through Mary can be born again into the world through ordinary folks like any of the readers of this book. I’m intrigued by Paul’s surprisingly visceral words, My dear children, I feel the pangs of childbirth all over again till Christ be formed within you (Gal 4:19, Phillips).

That’s audacious stuff! Brazen! Bold! Not restricted to prior assumptions or ideas. Extravagantly original, daringly courageous, and, sometimes, downright frightening! The New Testament and the historic creeds of the church make the staggering assertion that the infinite, perfectly loving God was born into the world through the finite and very human body of a young woman named Mary. The Word beyond words—the life-giving Word who spoke creation into existence—became flesh through Mary’s body and lived and died among us, so all of us can become the persons through whom the living Christ becomes flesh again.

If this affirmation has become so familiar that we’ve lost our capacity for surprise, it’s become far too familiar. Discovering it anew is like folks on Antiques Roadshow who suddenly learn that the old book, painting, or piece of furniture that has been unnoticed in their home for years is valued at some astronomical amount.

There’s nothing boring about the biblical story. The Old Testament is the surprising saga of the almighty God who engages in human history in unexpected, intrusive, and very physical ways. God works through the earthy, flesh-and-blood bodies of ordinary, imperfect people who become the extraordinary agents of God’s saving, transforming, life-giving purpose at specific times and in finite places. The New Testament recounts the even more astonishing story of the God who "spoke through the prophets to our ancestors in many times and many ways . . . spoke to us through a Son" (Heb 1:1–2).

Luke’s Gospel begins with two very ordinary women who, along with their gob-smacked husbands, are surprised by the unexpected promise that the infinite God would create new life through their very finite, human bodies. Matthew opens with the flabbergasting announcement that the child in Mary’s womb was conceived by the Holy Spirit and would be called Emmanuel, which means God with us (Matt 1:20–23). Christian faith affirms that, in ways that confound easy explanation, the baby in Mary’s womb was as much of God as could be squeezed into human flesh—dust to dust, birth to earth, womb to tomb. In Charles Wesley’s powerful words, Jesus of Nazareth was God contracted to a span, / Incomprehensibly made man.⁵

But wait! the TV hucksters shout in their infomercials. There’s more!

The folks in Galatia must have been surprised (and perhaps offended) when Paul compared himself to a woman in labor praying for Christ to be formed in them like a fetus being formed in a woman’s womb. Facing up to the fragility of their very human, dust-to-dust bodies, he told the Corinthians, We always carry Jesus’ death in our bodies so that Jesus’ life can also be seen in our bodies (2 Cor 4:10). He had the audacity to tell the Colossians that the mystery of God’s purpose for the whole creation is realized in the promise, Christ in you, the hope of glory (Col 1:26–27, NRSV). The real Christ, really born into this real world through real bodies like yours and mine.

I was wrestling with this big idea when I heard Leonard I. Sweet make the same shocking assertion.

The miracle of your calling is no less than the miracle of the birth of Jesus Christ through the virgin Mary. . . . Your calling is an impregnation of your life with the spirit of God and the Word of God becoming flesh in you. You have been called like Mary to give birth to the Christ child in your life. You are like Mary to bring Christ to this earth, to bring him alive in your life so that you can bring him to life in others.⁶

He echoed the words of Meister Eckhart, the thirteenth-century philosopher, theologian, and mystic: We are all meant to be mothers of God. He asked the intriguing question, What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture?⁷

But how does that happen? Not literally how in terms of the unrepeatable, gynecological event through which a young woman in Nazareth became pregnant, but how do our bodies become the bodies through which Christ is born by the power of the Holy Spirit in our world today? How does the Word that became flesh in Jesus become a living, breathing, bleeding, laughing, loving, world-transforming Word through our flesh? What would it look like if people who affirm the Christian faith became the real presence of Jesus in our politically polarized, spiritually confused, and biblically illiterate world today?

This study is grounded in the conviction that Christ becomes flesh in us not in a miraculous moment of spiritual conception, but as we live into the stories recorded in the gospels. It grows out of the long narrative of God’s relationship with the covenant people in the Hebrew Scriptures, as we apply the words of the Gospel to our experience by seeing the witness of faithful people who came this way before us. I invite you to join me in exploring some intriguing questions.

•What difference does it make to experience Jesus’ story through Mary’s story? How does Mary show us the way without becoming the central character in the story? The gospel is not about Mary, but about her Son.

•How can Mary’s story become a transformative metaphor for the way we become the answer to Paul’s impregnating prayer, I’m going through labor pains again until Christ is formed in you (Gal 4:19)?

•What if the Christian life is not only about how we can be born again but about how Jesus can be born again through us by the power of the Holy Spirit?

A Man Walking Carefully

First, a disclaimer. It’s a risky business for a man who has never experienced the mystery of conception, the weight of pregnancy, the labor of childbirth, or the lifelong joy and pain of motherhood, to write about Mary. I enter her story carefully, humbly, and treading lightly because of the inherent risk of falling into simplistic tropes or the culturally inherited assumption that everything that really matters flows in and through white, straight, male experience. We’ve had a couple millennia of that in the church!

On the Roman Catholic and Orthodox branches of the Christian family tree, veneration of Mary as the Queen of Heaven and Blessed Mother lifted her so far above our ordinary human experience that the same male priests who prayed to her have never allowed women like her to serve as priests who lead others in those same prayers. On the Protestant branch, we often see what Jason Byassee described to me as the sort of anti-Catholicism that gets nervous to even let Mary back into the building for fear she’ll take over.⁸ Fundamentalists who claim the inerrant inspiration of Scripture often ignore the role of women in the same Scripture. Some refuse to ordain women to proclaim the story. A pastoral colleague who read an early draft of this material pointed out, My anti-Roman Catholic New England Puritan ancestors have scared us away from considering Mary for about 400 years. She added, Our puritan fears and prejudices may have kept us from a fuller experience of the gospel.

I’m neither a Roman Catholic nor a fundamentalist. I’ve served for half a century as a pastor in The United Methodist Church. My denomination began ordaining women nearly a century ago. We still have a long way to go in fully affirming women, persons of color, and members of the LGBTQ community in ministry, but we keep stumbling in the right direction.

In approaching Mary’s story, I identify with the journalist Frye Gaillard. He was a 22-year-old reporter in Nashville when he asked the celebrated Native American author Vine Deloria Jr. if it was presumptuous for a white reporter to cover the Indian beat. Deloria responded with extraordinary kindness when he told him, No, it’s not presumptuous, as long as you listen.⁹

I’ve been listening to and learning from ruthlessly honest, spiritually thoughtful, personally courageous women throughout my life. Even as Mary was overshadowed by the Spirit, I’ve been overshadowed by Spirit-empowered women of faith who encouraged me in the past and energize my thinking in the present. For over fifty years I’ve been blessed by and accountable to my wife, Martha; our daughters, Carrie Lynn Ferenac and Deborah Jeanne LaRoche; and three of our five grandchildren who are all too rapidly becoming young women.

Jerusha Matsen Neal, professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, awakened me to the way Luke’s account of Mary’s Spirit-empowered pregnancy can become a living metaphor for how our bodies relate to the Spirit’s work and Christ’s embodied presence.¹⁰ She is among the women scholars and writers who have influenced this book. I will accomplish an ulterior purpose if I encourage you to discover the works of Ellen F. Davis, Rachel Held Evans, Kate Bowler, Diana Butler Bass, Amy Jill Lavine, and Lauren Winner. I’m grateful for the women who read and improved numerous drafts of this book including Andrea Batchelor, Deborah Galtere, Deborah (Harnish) LaRoche, Sandra Roughton, Deborah McLeod, Christine Parton Burkett, and Judith Harnish. Some of the men who helped sharpen my thinking include Magrey deVega, Irv Brendlinger, Nathan Kirkpatrick, John Harnish, Kavin Rowe, and my long-time friend, most honest critic, and faithful encourager, Dan G. Johnson.

Mary as Metaphor

A metaphor is a figure of speech that invites us to see an unfamiliar reality through a familiar one while never denying that they are not the same. Through metaphor, something we cannot literally experience becomes a reality as we participate in it. Metaphors work as we visualize them, smell them, taste them, feel the texture of them, and step into them. They are not self-proving like an experiment in a chemistry lab. They are self-authenticating when we connect who we are and what we experience with a