From Stone to Living Word by Debbie Blue

Author:Debbie Blue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2008-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

The Mother of God

In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”

Luke 1:39–46

The story of the church for two thousand years has been that God was born from a woman’s womb. However creedal the virgin birth has become, it’s actually enough to make you whirl or stagger or fall down or jump up; more supercalifragilisticexpialidocious than the tepid routine of Christmas pageants might lead one to believe. It’s an audacious claim: God was formed in the womb of a woman, and even more, without the help of a man. Though set in a male-dominated culture, the story of Christ’s birth involves no male seed. At all. God grew bones and flesh from Mary’s cells and blood. It is in his mother’s womb that God becomes human. It’s not by the “will of man” that God is conceived, which, as The New Interpreter’s Bible points out, means that sperm has no role.1

Patriarchy, strictly defined, is a system of social organization that traces everything—lineage, ancestry, inheritance— through the male line. Passing on the male seed is crucial. Through it you get your honor, your status, your proper place in the hierarchy, your power. The Christmas story (the story of the virgin birth) may not be really overt about subverting patriarchy, but subversion is embedded in the story because there is no male seed. It’s weird that Matthew and Luke trace Jesus’ genealogy through Joseph, but I wonder if that was like a hidden joke, or a vast oversight, or if they were just trying to make some concession to convention, because you can’t really trace the trail of the male seed when there is no male seed involved. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has no male blood lineage. That seems to throw a bit of a kink into the whole patriarchy thing. Not to denigrate the male seed, but you have to admit it takes some of the limelight off the phallus as the embodiment of generative power.

For some reason, what the church has most often emphasized about the virgin birth is that it doesn’t involve the physical act of sex. But the story of God coming into the world is really astoundingly physical. The incarnation involves a fetus in a uterus passing through a cervix in a process (if you can really even quite call it a process) that involves sweating and blood and amniotic fluid and a placenta.

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