God in the Gravy

Mary - for Protestants

I’m a Protestant so I don’t spend much time thinking about Mary. Christmas and Easter pretty much cover it. However, that’s changed recently, mainly because I recently gave birth to a little baby girl, Beth. So why has this made me think so differently about Mary - apart form the obvious?

I’ve been thinking about her for 2 reasons – firstly, towards the end of my pregnancy I was finding it increasingly difficult to get around and secondly until recently we didn’t have a house lined up to live in at the time of the birth. Don’t worry I’m not saying we were going to be on the street, just that we were still living in my parents’ spare room and house sitting for them with 2 months to go. All our stuff was in boxes and we had been redirecting mail for about a year. We thought it would be ok as we would buy a house before the baby as born, but that fell through. I wasn't able to sort out a room for the baby, all the stuff for her was in bags or odd places round the house, while my friends were decorating pretty rooms in pastel colours and coordinating ranges. We have a house to rent now – we moved in 7 days before I was due! But it’s left me incredibly unsettled. It’s not like me to let something like this really unsettle me, but this isn’t rational, it’s instinctive. I needed to get things sorted.

Now imagine desperately wanting to arrange everything for your first child but actually having to travel 80 miles away, not even knowing if there will be a room at the end of it. That was the situation that faced Mary at the end of her pregnancy, when she had to travel, heavily pregnant, to Bethlehem in order to register with Joseph for the census.

I found that rather humbling, in the face of my rather less complicated situation.

Then we come to the first issue I mentioned. Being heavily pregnant really slows you down! Everything is an effort, moving at any kind of speed for very long makes you exhausted, not to mention that there are all kinds of other aches and pains going on in your legs, your back etc (note – do get up for pregnant women on public transport, they’re not just lazy, they’re probably in some kind of pain!). Now I transpose my slow uncomfortable wanderings down Tottenham Court Road to sitting on a donkey travelling along a rough road for 80 miles, a journey which would have taken 2 days to a week.

It doesn't really compare. And it all brought home to me how much Mary had to endure from the very beginning of her involvement with God's plan for Jesus and for her.

Mary get’s put on a pedestal, held up as an example of womanhood or unbelievable acceptance of God’s will. We aren’t encouraged to think about her humanity much, or anyone in the Bible’s humanity much. But pregnancy iand the reality of child bearing is all too much in your face, too physical to be idolised.

This pregnancy has helped me to see Mary more human and honestly, more relevant way. And that's helped me to think about Jesus differently too. My pregnancy was a privellege in more than one way.

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