There’s Something About Mary

Madonna at the Finish Line

Ethiopian athlete Meseret Defar surprised the world when she won the gold medal in the 5,000 meter race in the 2012 London Summer Olympics, defeating her rival, fellow Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba, who was favorited to win.

After crossing the finish line, the sweating, teary-eyed runner pulled a linen copy of the icon of Madonna and child from her jersey, showed it to the cameras, and held it up to her face. The religiously oblivious sports commentator said, “There’s obviously a message in there somewhere, isn’t there?” And there certainly was!

For Orthodox Christians like Defar, the message was perfectly clear. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the icon is known as the Virgin of the Passion. In the Western or Roman Catholic tradition, it is know as Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It is one of the most widely recognized icons in global Christianity.

The original icon was painted on the wall of a chapel in Cyprus during the chaotic aftermath of the Third Crusade (1189–1192) which prepared the way for the fall of Constantinople (now Istanbul) and the collapse of the Byzantine empire.

Art historian and theologian, Matthew J. Milliner, describes the icon as “medicine for a suffering empire, and even for suffering souls … a cure for vainglory and for any addiction to political glory … proclaiming God’s eternal decision for and not against us.” The Virgin of the Passion testified “not to mere power but to the suffering love that power’s theatrics left in its wake … a Christian response to the Christian violence of the Crusades.” (Mother of the Lamb,p. 61,138, 5)

“Surprised by Mary”

We can’t celebrate Christmas without Mary, but there’s more to her story than the texts we read or the carols we sing.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with Mary. For the past three years I’ve been working on a book that will be released in the spring. “Surprised by Mary: How the Christ Who Was Born Through Mary Can Be Born Again Through You will invite readers to experience Mary as a living metaphor for our discipleship. Here’s a passage from the book.

There’s more to Mary’s story than the part we read at Christmas! The gospels invite us to experience Mary as:
• a typical Jewish girl who is engaged to be married.
• a feisty young woman who questions God’s word through Gabriel
• a new mother who is equally surprised by the adoration of shepherds and the warning she receives from Simeon.
• a frustrated parent who worries about her missing teenage son.
• an anxious mother who, along with Jesus’ siblings, intends to take Jesus home because he appears to be out of his mind.
• a grieving mother who watches her son die
• and a faithful disciple who waits with Jesus’ followers for the coming of the Spirit he promised.

Mary’s pregnancy is uniquely her own. None of us, regardless of gender or fertility, can literally know how Mary’s baby was “conceived by the Holy Spirit.”
None of us can give birth to the Son of God the way Jesus burst from Mary’s womb.
With the horrifying exception of the mothers of lynching victims in both the past and the present, we have not seen our sons or daughters nailed to a cross.
We cannot experience our child risen from the tomb.
But this does not exclude us from finding ourselves in the stories the gospel writers include about her. By living into Mary’s story, we can see our own story in a new and often surprising way. Her story becomes the door or through which we step into a deeper relationship with Christ.

By watching how the Holy Spirit “overshadowed” Mary’s life from Nazareth to the Upper Room, we can discover the way the Holy Spirit who enabled Christ to be born through Mary’s body can be at work to birth the presence of Christ through our bodies as well.

Even as an Olympic runner carried the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help near her heart, may the Christ who was born through Mary be born again in us as we sing Phillips Brooks’s Spirit-impregnating prayer:

O Holy Child of Bethlehem,
descend to us we pray;
cast out our sin, and enter in,
be born in us today.

Grace and peace,

Jim