Dec 03 | Resistance Lectionary Part 23: Mary, Queen of Resistance

Today’s Citation: Luke 1:46-56

The familiar tune echoed in my brain and bones as we stood outside the courtroom, enveloped in the smell of sage and the heartbeat of drums: the women’s warrior song.

A gift to the people from Martina Pierre of the Lil’wat nation, I’d heard it many times before I was invited to sing it with many others by Audrey Siegl of the Musqueam nation at an event to mourn victims of the opioid crisis at Christ Church Cathedral in May of 2017. I still remember the look of delight that crossed her face when I told her it was my first time singing it instead of just listening. “Oh!” she cried. “Let me hug you!”

Now, outside the Supreme Court at 800 Smithe Street in Vancouver, we sang it for two friends of mine who were about to be sentenced for their actions as land and water protectors on Burnaby Mountain.

Thousands of years ago, Mary sang with her cousin Elizabeth of a world where justice truly reigns, and righteousness embraces  peace.

Luke’s is the only Gospel that includes this song (and many others). While Matthew tells the story from Joseph’s perspective (and John and Mark remain conspicuously silent on birth narratives save the most abstract references to beginnings), Luke grounds the story of Jesus’ birth in the muddy honesty of unplanned pregnancy and oppression. But once grounded, Mary shoots up from the earth as a trumpet lily, telling her story of liberation and God’s overturning of the old order of slavery.

The story of Mary is also, in some ways, deeply queer. This was explored at length in Guest, Goss, and West’s fanciful Queer Bible Commentary. While not the most scholarly of sources in some ways, it does provide creative reframing of biblical stories in a way that challenges the heteronormativity and formality of past hermeneutics.

In the section on Luke, the story of Mary is one in which Mary is compelled to participate in the work of God through full and enthusiastic consent, and is thereby made pregnant by a force beyond gender and biology, a force in which there could therefore be none of the baggage of oppression and communicative breakdown that so easily exists in any sexual encounter, particularly one in which a child is the result.

Mary is singular, literally, a woman whose sexuality in this instance is fully her own. She welcomes the mystical encounter and its consequences, which are spoken only to her, and is then given complete control of the narrative that follows. Young, brown, living in occupied territory, truly the lowest of the low in her own society, Mary is treated with the utmost respect by God’s sacred agent, and is given complete control. Filled with the Holy Spirit, she becomes a prophet of a new era, an unknowable era in which women and indeed all of creation will be given the freedom to be themselves and offer themselves up as instruments for the continuation of that peace, however that might be made manifest.