Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary
September 8, 2024

O God, mercifully hear the supplication of thy servants, that we who are assembled together on the Nativity of the Virgin Mother of God may at her intercession be delivered by thee from the dangers which beset us; through Jesus Christ our Lord who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth for ever and ever. Amen.

Proverbs 8:22-35
Matthew 1:1-16

Today we are celebrating the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which, in the West, has traditionally been commemorated on the eighth of September. It is not, however, a feast that has found its way into the calendar of the Episcopal Church. Exceedingly popular for over a thousand years, it was dropped, along with that of Mary’s Conception and almost all the other Marian feasts, in the sixteenth-century calendar reforms that accompanied the publication of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549. Only two remained: the Purification of Mary (Candlemas) and the Annunciation, the former being the sole feast to retain Mary’s name. It isn’t that the Church of England completely ceased its devotion to Mary. Many of the great cathedrals and minster churches retained their Lady Chapels and Mary’s great hymn, the Magnificat, became enshrined at the heart of that most Anglican of all liturgies, Evensong.

However, the celebration of her great feasts, punctuating the medieval liturgical year and the daily lives of millions, were swept away. The reformers were focussed more on the person of Jesus than on Mary, devotion to whom many believed to be misguided superstitions, detrimental to the true worship of Jesus Christ. The Annunciation remained because it celebrated Jesus’ conception, and the Purification was kept because it was also Christ’s Presentation in the Temple. At a time when many extra-Biblical texts were rejected, these two stories were attested in the canonical scriptures. And here, I think, we come to the crux of the matter.

A consensus of a canon of four Gospels seems to have emerged very quickly, perhaps as early as a hundred years after Jesus’ passion and resurrection. It has always seemed remarkable to me that these four very different stories that disagree on so many points and come from such diverse perspectives were quickly reckoned as a whole to contain the Good News of Jesus Christ. Together they tell his story in a complete and three dimensional way and gave people a way to comprehend the special unity of Jesus’ humanity and divinity – how God’s will was so manifested in Jesus that their natures must be one.

At the same time, however, people naturally wanted to know more about Jesus, about his origin and identity. I think this is especially true as the earliest stories about Jesus began not with his birth, but with his baptism as an adult. This is why fairly soon we also get the nativity stories of Matthew and Luke. These, however, with their inconsistences and divergent perspectives only gave rise to further speculation and questions. Who was this Mary, his mother and where did she come from? Could Jesus really be of the line of David if it was only through his adoptive father, Joseph, as we heard in today’s Gospel? If Mary remained always a virgin, how did Jesus have the brothers mentioned in Matthew? What was Jesus’ childhood like beyond that one account of Jesus being left behind at Jerusalem by his parents?

It is not surprising, therefore, that during the first half of the second century stories addressing these questions began to appear. Some were sensational and outlandish, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and its vision of a magical child Jesus naughtily wielding his power, and these were quickly rejected by the larger church. Other, however, gained more traction and were read alongside the emerging canon of scriptural texts. One of these was the Protoevangelium of James, in which we find almost all of the stories about Mary that have come down to us.(1) Specifically, it sought to make clear that Mary herself was descended from David, that her conception was miraculous like that of Isaac in Genesis, that Joseph came into this marriage already a widower with children, and that midwives attested that Mary physically remained a virgin even after Jesus’ birth. It tied up a lot of loose ends and packaged it in an excellent story that fit with the Biblical narrative. Indeed, as early as 150, or so, Justin Martyr knew the text and used it as evidence for Jesus’ true Davidic lineage, and a little later Clement of Alexandria (d. 215) and Origen (d. ca. 253) also demonstrate knowledge of the source.(2) Although expressly excluded from an important sixth-century canon list,(3) by the eighth century most of the Protoevangelium’s central narrative was incorporated into a text we call the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the translation of which into Latin was spuriously attributed to Jerome.(4) From this text sprung the widely circulated Book of the Virgin Mary, which in turn was used for the bulk of the stories about Mary that were included in the very popular, thirteenth-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voraigne.(5) Episodes from the life of Mary as recorded in these books formed the subject of numerous pictorial cycles wrought in manuscripts, stained glass, and most visible today in mural paintings, including those by Giotto in the Arena Chapel in Padua and Ghirlandaio in Santa Maria Novella in Florence. Few texts exercised a more pervasive influence over popular piety over such a long period.

It is not a text, however, that really captured people’s imagination. It was Mary. of the Gospels, especially as told by Luke, was a teenager who received the extraordinary news that God had chosen her to bring Jesus Christ into the world, the Word Incarnate, God’s very self in a unity of humanity and divinity. She embraced this mission that turned her life upside down and saw that God was doing extraordinary things in and through this work, that God had magnified her in an event that has “put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek.” Mary of the extended literature, was additionally a young woman of the line of David – giving Jesus his prophesied connection with that mighty king – conceived herself like so many heroes of the Hebrew Bible by parents who thought themselves barren, but who received a child late in life as a gift from God. Celebrating Mary’s Nativity reminds us of the weight of almost two thousand years of devotion to Mary, the details of whose life fascinated and inspired generations of Christians. Mary’s exaltation and prominence, the many feasts celebrated in her name, provided the faithful with a model of an heroic woman in a faith whose founding stories were dominated by men. And while I could have spent some of this sermon deconstructing traditional devotion to Mary – as I have in the past and likely will again – today I want to hold up the history of her story as a central element of our faith, the three hundred year absence of which impoverished Anglicanism, and the rediscovery of which by the Anglo-Catholic movements since the early nineteenth century has made us richer and better enabled us to see the full glory of God.

Andrew Charles Blume ✠
New York City
Feria, 7 September 2024

© 2024 Andrew Charles Blume