Unholy Sh+t: Happy Birthday, Jesus, but your dragon-slaying mother is the real MVP today

Growing up in a Pentecostal church, we rarely ever talked about Mary. When the pastor did mention her, it was almost always in the context of condemning the Catholics as heretics. It didn’t happen often, but he got really fired up about it whenever it did. He clearly had a lot of feelings about Catholics and how much they liked Mary.

I once asked a question about Mary during Sunday school, and the teacher told me, “Mary was just a vessel. She isn’t important or mystical. She isn’t like Jesus, just his mother. Any woman during that time could have been his mother.”

Well, my Sunday school teacher was very wrong about this. Which shouldn’t be a surprise; they were wrong about most things. It turns out that it couldn’t just have been anyone who gave birth to Jesus; it had to be Mary: the New Eve.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Christmas

Today’s Reading: Matthew 1:1-25

Christmas time, or as I like to call it, “the time of year that Protestants suddenly forget that they think statues are idolatry and join the Catholics in remembering that Mary exists.” That’s right, for not quite a month, whether you are Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or even select Pentecostals, you too can dust Mary off for the holidays! But don’t worry, kids; the other denominations will be ignoring Mary’s existence by the new year and will be back to calling Catholics and high church Episcopalians idolaters soon enough. To be fair, they would also be calling Orthodox Christians idolaters too if they knew they existed. So why, this time of year, does everyone put their swords down and venerate the Virgin Mary in unison? Because it's peace on earth! No, it’s just because you can’t really have the birth of Jesus without someone to birth the Christ Child. It seems the Blessed Mother is only as important as a vessel. Which, to be fair, kind of tracks with the majority of the Evangelical opinion of *looks at notes* all womb bearers.

We celebrate the birthday of Jesus, but, no offense to Jesus, he didn’t really do anything. He was just born; that’s not very impressive; people are born all of the time. The real hero of this story is not the baby Jesus but the Theotokos, The God-Bearer. The problem with the story of Mary is that it deals with a lot of topics that the contemporary church doesn’t want to talk about: the power of women and the absolute sh+t attitude of men.

Now, I don’t know how many of y’all have ever read the genealogies in the Bible, but (spoiler alert) they are pretty f+cking boring and mostly sexist. It’s all “so and so begat so and so” for a gazillion years. I mean, I guess in a world before porn, this was about as steamy as it gets. The genealogies are boring and are almost exclusively about which man was the father of some other man who did something or another. The women actually birthing all these babies are rarely mentioned. Well, then along comes Matthew. At the very beginning of his gospel, he tries to establish the pedigree of Jesus, linking him back to Abraham and King David. This is super important for him to fulfill the prophecy or whatever blah blah blah, but something wild happens in how Matthew decides to diverge from the typical genealogy. Matty throws in the WILDEST little truth bomb. The genealogy is moving along all normal, “Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob was Judah’s daddy…” and so on and so forth until we get to Boaz. This is when he tosses in a wild card and says, “Salmon was the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab.” Woah, Matt, way to get all woke! What exactly are you doing here? Well, I’ll tell you, he is bringing women into the narrative, and it's not an accident. During the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew mentions multiple women of the Old Testament as being part of the lineage that leads us straight into the story of the birth of Jesus.

How exactly does Matthew do this? Well, by absolutely dogging on Joseph. He begins the story by letting everyone know that when Joseph finds out that Mary is pregnant, he absolutely does not believe her and plans to abandon her. That’s right, folks; Joseph was planning to ditch Mary and little Baby Jesus to run for the hills. Maybe that is why his statue is used to help sell homes because he was planning to be a total deadbeat. Now, in all fairness, that would be a difficult pill to swallow, but he is still the asshole in this story if you ask me.

Matthew is really gassing up the women at the start of the Nativity Story, and it shows. Rahab was a heroic prostitute who basically saved the entire Hebrew Nation and is an all-around badass. However, she is still a hooker, and people don’t much appreciate that. The gospel writer is coming along to say, “Listen, without the prostitute, we don’t have the Messiah, and without the virgin, we don’t have the Messiah. It took both of these women to get us here.” I can not express how radical this is. Actually, I can, because it’s so f+cking radical that I bet not a single one of you learned this from the pulpit or in Sunday school. It is still as offensive today as it was then.

Hold onto your butts because things are about to go really fast, but there are also dragons.

Mary is one of the most fascinating and essential figures in the entire narrative of Jesus, and it’s not just because she is his mom. Her role in the story of redemption is not limited to just being an incubator. Let's take a brief trip over to the Gospel of Luke, where we will find another boring genealogy that is, sadly, devoid of mentioning any of the women. It’s a pretty dull genealogy until the very end; it links Jesus all the way back to Adam, and it expressly states, “…Seth the son of Adam, Adam the Son of God.” Hold up, that’s a twist. Adam was the original Son of God, the first human creation. Well, we all know that story. The serpent temps Eve, then she offers the temptation to Adam, and humanity falls into destruction and despair, separated from God, and now we have bugs and periods. If we roll on over to the writings of Paul, he makes a unique assertion concerning Jesus, “Just as the disobedience of one man caused death, the obedience of one man brought righteousness for all.” (Romans 5:19). Now, this means a lot of things! First, Paul is placing the responsibility of disobedience on Adam, not Eve. That is interestingly not misogynistic sounding for the likes of Paul… or is it? It actually seems like Paul is giving all the credit to Adam and removing it from Eve. Conversely, it seems he is giving all the credit to Jesus and removing it from Mary. Well, not exactly.

Remarkably, consent is pivotal to the story. When Mary is visited by the angel Gabriel and told that she will conceive a child her response is, “Let everything you have said happen to me.” Mary is reversing the curse of Eden at this moment. She is undoing what has been done because she is doing the opposite of what Eve did, thus paving the way for Jesus to become the New Adam. This is why Jesus is ultimately placed on a tree, and it is why Jesus says, “If you eat my flesh, you will live forever.” The entirety of the gospel narrative is a reversal of the Garden of Eden, and it begins with Mary, not Jesus. The redemption of humankind begins with Mary. Which now, suddenly, gives a remarkable new understanding to the phrase that Elizabeth said to Mary when she said, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42-43) Mary gives birth to Jesus, who is the New Adam, and he becomes the fruit of the Tree of Life by which all might be redeemed through their obedience.

This is why one of the many titles of Mary has historically been Co-Redemptrix because it is through her that redemption entered into the world.

For those of you who grew up Protestant, like me, you are probably feeling those little prickles on the back of your neck and the flames of Hell tickling your feet just reading this. “You are overly asserting the importance of Mary!” you might be screaming in your head. Oh, am I? Let’s look at a few things from the scriptures.

Jesus would not have performed his first miracle without Mary urging him to (John 2:1-11). What is interesting to me is that this verse is often used to show that Jesus doesn’t actually respect his mother because he calls her “woman.” This isn’t the only time in the scriptures that Jesus refers to his mother as Woman instead of Mommy, but why? Because he is acknowledging her as the New Eve, the first woman of the new creation. In the Apocalypse of Saint John, he tells a metaphorical story about Mary and the birth of Jesus. He describes Mary as being a queen crowned with the moon and stars. This queen is being pursued by a dragon, also called a serpent (because, remember, before the fall, the serpent had legs.) As she is chased by the serpent, the earth protects the woman. John later says that all creation are her children (Revelation 12:17). Why is this significant? Only three people chose to stay with Jesus at his crucifixion: Mary the Mother, Mary the Magdalene, and John. Before his death, Jesus looked at John and his mother, saying, “Woman, behold your son,” and then continued to John, saying, “Son, behold your mother.” So when John says that we are all the sons of the woman in the Apocalypse, he gives us an answer as to the significance of Mary: she is the Mother of All and Queen of the Universe because she’s defeated the serpent.

John tells us in his gospel that Mary went to live with him after the crucifixion (John 19:27), and the Book of Acts tells us that Mary remained with the church her entire life (Acts 1:14). She was revered as sacred from the very beginning and she should remain so. Christ shed his blood for the redemption of the world first at the cutting of the umbilical cord, and the Blessed Mother held the body and blood of Jesus in her womb, the first chalice, the first tabernacle, and the first priest to lift up the Body of Christ to declare him the Messiah before the shepherds.

Today, I wish Jesus a happy birthday, but I give all honor to Mary, the Mother of God, for delivering us all.