Fourth Sunday of Advent
December 22, 2204
Apparently, some people are worried about “the feminization” of the Church. I came across this phrase just the other day. Apparently, there are Catholics in this country who want the Church to be more “manly”—who want it to be “hard,” not “soft.”
I guess this is a thing, and I think it’s crazy. It’s wrong. It’s completely contrary to the gospels and certainly contrary to Luke, who frames his account of the life of Jesus with the stories of Mary–today, of Mary and Elizabeth, in this beautiful scene we call the Visitation. Luke wants us to see Jesus through the eyes of women.
For one thing, Mary hastens to the hill country, hurries up and down the rocky hills, and that requires a strength, a “hardness,” of muscle and of will. Elizabeth lives in those hills, and every day they both do the backbreaking work all women did in that time before electricity and running water, and still do in many places—not to mention the fact that they are both pregnant, and will both endure the pain of childbirth, one of the most painful things a human being can endure.
And what of their spiritual hardness, their spiritual strength, to believe in the face of the disapproval of all those around them, to trust when there is only hardship, only the desert?
But let’s accept the stereotypes for a moment: that women are weak and men are strong. That women are soft and men are hard.
Who could be more womanly, then, than Jesus himself, who did not deem equality with God something to be grasped but rather emptied himself? Who said blessed are the meek? Who never once in all the gospels clenched his fist or raised his hand? Who died, and let himself die, and called us to die, too?
Who could be softer than Paul, who boasted of his weakness?
Or like Sarah Coakley in The New Asceticism: Sexuality, Gender, and the Quest for God, let’s accept for a moment the biological difference between male and female and use that as the metaphor: that the male givesand the female receives.
In the story of the Visitation there’s all kinds of giving and receiving, and the women are doing both. They keep exchanging roles. Mary has received the Spirit and become the mother of the Lord, just as Elizabeth has received from her husband and become the mother of John the Baptist. But isn’t giving birth a giving, too, a producing? And Mary gives Elizabeth a greeting, and Elizabeth receives it—and then Elizabeth gives Mary a greeting in return, “Hail Mary, full of Grace,” and Mary receives it—and then Mary responds again, with the great poem of the Magnificat, and we all receive it: “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.” It’s a festival of giving and receiving. A cycle. An ecology.
Here’s Blessed Isaac of Stella, from the 12th century:
Every Christian is also believed to be a bride of God’s Word, a mother of Christ, his daughter and sister, at once virginal and fruitful. These words are used in a universal sense of the Church, in a special sense of Mary, in a particular sense of the individual Christian. They are used by God’s Wisdom in person, the Word of the Father.
The Church has always thought of Mary as the icon of the Church. The metaphor has always been of the wedding, with Christ as the groom and the Church as the bride. And we are all like Mary, we are all the Church, “every Christian,” the ordained and the lay, all “virginal and fruitful.” Both. At the same time.
God is beyond all sexuality and gender, as the Catechism makes clear–there are images in the scriptures and the tradition of God as mother, too–but an image has some meaning, it points to something, and the dominant image in the tradition is of God as father, and that image suggests something very important, however partial, something that shouldn’t be erased or explained away: that salvation is a gift. We receive it. It’s given.
Without God we are lost.
The solution to the problem of exclusive language isn’t to make everything so general that it doesn’t mean anything. Jesus was a man, he was our brother, and we would never want to do away with his blessed masculinity, his dear manliness, exactly because it’s the opposite of the kind of masculinity we see all the time in popular culture.
It’s true that there are many images in the psalms and the prophets of God as powerful king and warrior, images that are sometimes used in the New Testament to describe Jesus, and these images are important, too, because they assure us again and again of God’s power, however things seem, that the darkness will not overwhelm the light.
We don’t want just one image of who Jesus is. We want all the images we can get.
But Jesus is the only man we are called to imitate, all of us, whatever our gender, and always in his gentleness, his compassion.
And always and again: God is beyond all gender, God is beyond all metaphor, and the worst thing we can do is take any one image and freeze it, think of it as fixed, exhaustive.
Think of the Trinity: the Father gives to the Son and the Son gives to the Spirit—and both the Son and the Spirit give to the Father—the masculine roles and the feminine roles are continually shifting, joyously.
Think of the image of the “persons” in the Trinity, as Tomas Halik does in I Want You to Be. It’s terribly important. It suggests that whatever we sense when we pray isn’t just an impersonal force but a love, a tenderness. Somehow, Someone.
But at the same time “persons” is only an image. It only suggests, and it only suggests that God is like this, which is to say, also unlike this. God is always beyond. Always other.
The Greek word for “person,” in fact, is persona–literally, mask.
All language is mask.
As Coakley points out, this is exactly like the dynamism and fluidity of the role of the priest in the mass, who in the Eucharistic Prayer first receives the action of the Holy Spirit (and so is feminine) which then, through him, makes holy the bread and the wine (and so is productive, is masculine).
But then it shifts again. The priest, after all, receives the Eucharist, too.
And then we all receive the sacrament, as a woman receives, and then we all go out to love and serve the Lord, which is to say, we create. We give. It’s wonderfully blurry and circular: in the Eucharist, as St. Augustine says in fifth century, “we receive who we are.”
What is it that Elizabeth proclaims in the Magnificat? That all the binaries are reversed, turned upside down: the mighty are cast down from their thrones and the lowly lifted up; the hungry are filled with good things and the rich sent away empty.
This is how the Lord speaks to us every day. He greets us—softly, quietly, in everything that happens, in the things we see, in a memory, in a song we hear, a child we love, in the rain, the trees—and sometimes, if we’re paying attention, if we’re listening, our hearts leap up. We feel this quiet joy. Our breath catches. And then we ring out our praise, as Mary does. We sing our song. We proclaim our faith.
Zechariah, Elizabeth’s husband, is taking his turn serving as a priest in the temple, and the angel comes to him, too, and says these wonderful things are going to happen, and unlike Mary when the angel comes to her, Zechariah questions the angel, he wants proof–hard proof, nothing soft or fuzzy or touchy-feely–he wants to nail things down once and for all, and the angel does what angels do in these situations: he strikes the man dumb.
It’s only later, when his son John the Baptist is born, that Zechariah is able to open his mouth again, and what he proclaims is the Benedictus, is praise: Blessed be the Lord.
This is what Zechariah finally understands. This is what we all need to understand this Advent and Christmas–particularly this Advent and Christmas.
Jesus doesn’t come into the world as a soldier or an athlete or a hero or a president or a king. He comes as a little boy, rocked in his mother’s arms.