Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer explores the controversial Christmas song, “Mary Did You Know” and it’s theological accuracy
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’d like to welcome you into a very special Christmas Eve edition of Shamus Popery. And I want to talk about one of, if not the most controversial and divisive Christmas songs. Okay? Probably the most controversial Christmas song is Baby It’s Cold Outside, because it’s like, yeah, I probably don’t put anything in her drink to try to get her to stay. That’s pretty gross. But I mean an actually religious Christmas song, and I mean of course if I’m going to be totally honest, I completely see both Why people love and Hate this song. On the one hand, I actually like what it’s trying to do. Mark Lowry, the guy who wrote it, is a Baptist, and he explained that he wrote it for a Christmas program because he started thinking and wondering if Mary realized the power, authority and majesty that she cradled in her arms in that first Christmas.
And he wondered if she realized that those little hands were the same hands scooped out oceans and formed rivers. And so he wanted to put into words the unfathomable. In other words, he had the pious and I think correct impulse, that if you want to understand the Christmas story, it probably helps to look at it through Mary’s eyes. And this led him to start thinking of questions he’d ask if he had the chance to talk to Mary. And so he was wondering what he would do if he got to sit down and have coffee with her and ask her things like what was it like raising God? What did you know, what didn’t? So again, I think that’s all good at its best. The song succeeds as a reflection on Mary’s motherhood, on the mystery of Jesus Christ in the incarnation and maybe in some ways on the mysterious nature of motherhood itself.
For some reason, a lot of the fans of Mary Did, you know, are Moms. And it strikes me that part of that may be that there’s something mysterious about motherhood itself. Even if your child isn’t Jesus, you’re looking down at this little baby, this precious child, and you’ve got all these questions about what God’s plans are for their future. And I think that’s a good and even holy impulse to say, what did that look like in the Holy Family? And in a few moments here, we’re going to take a look at that biblically and say, what can we say in way of answer to those kind of questions? But before I get there, I want to also acknowledge why people hate the song, because people loathe this song. I think there’s largely three reasons. For one, it is frankly way too melodramatic. It does not feel like you’re having coffee with Mary.
It feels like you’re yelling questions outside of her window and demanding that she answer them. And it’s worth contrasting Mary’s own reaction to the mystery of the incarnation. The mystery of Christmas we’re told in Luke chapter two is Mary kept all these things pondering them in her heart, but this song isn’t quiet and ponderous this song is trying to stir up a big emotional experience and there’s nothing wrong with a big emotional experience, but it seems really disco concordant with what the season and the song are all about. This is not silent night. This is not this still calm, quiet place where God comes to speak and that’s still quiet voice. This is loud and over the top and emotional melodramatic. Now, in saying that I should caveat, I am not a musician. On the other hand, my baby brother Ben is he’s studying classical music composition in San Sebastian, Spain. And so he’s much better equipped to explain maybe that intuition you have, that something feels off about this song emotionally. And I should say, while a lot of the moms in my family, my own mom, one of my sisters love Mary, did you know my brother hates it as a musician. And so I asked him if he would share just a short little clip explaining what it is he hates so much about this song.
CLIP:
Mary Did You Know is unquestionably my least favorite Christmas song. It’s the only one I refuse to play when people request it. I sit at the piano, people ask for any Christmas song, and even Mariah carries only one for Christmas is you. I will play because the song is silly and the music is silly, and therefore it kind of matches and people like it. So whatever Mary did, you know I will never cross this line and play it. It’s so sentimental, so sappy and pretending to have an emotion that doesn’t have musically speaking, I mean, and there’s nothing happening, and I don’t know who wrote the music, but the impression I have is when you’re singing Happy Birthday and sometimes there’s somebody who’s singing just unnecessarily loud and with vibrato and it’s just uncomfortable. There’s no reason for this and it’s just not appropriate to the situation. It’s as though that person learned a couple chords at the piano, learned the 1 7, 6 5 pattern in minor and then wrote the music to Mary. Did You know, it’s atrocious,
Joe:
But it’s not just musically that people quibble with or loathe this song, it’s also the lyrics and kind of the tone of the lyrics. It’s regularly accused of being a theologically mansplaining sort of song because he just asked Mary, did you know over and over again about different facts and oh, sorry, ladies mansplaining is when a man condescendingly explains something, particularly something you already know the answer to or maybe no better than he does. In any case, I actually don’t think that that’s what this song is doing. I really take Lowery at his word. I think he is trying to parse through what Mary did and didn’t know. I think the problem is more that the way the song is structured with the repeated, did you know, you know, you know it echoes it kind of like, oh, you’ve got that band shirt name three songs of that band, but now you’re like, oh, I see you’re burying the Christ child name three theological facts about him.
So for better or for worse, people have the kind of negative association that the song is more like Hectoring Mary than it is trying to actually find out what she did and didn’t know. But I want to actually turn to the third area of controversy, which is not just the tone, not the musical structure, but the theological content. But I want to engage with this partly to critique it, but mostly actually probably to vindicate it and to say this is a good inquiry. He’s not making declarations, but he’s asking good questions. If we were going to sit down and have coffee with Mary, what answers would she give to these questions? So I thought it might be fun on this Christmas Eve to do that. So I’ve got my shameless popery mug and I’ve got some coffee. So I thought maybe you can join with me, pour in a little coffee and then we can go line by line through the song to figure out what Mary did and didn’t know on Christmas.
So with that, let’s go to the first line. Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water? There’s no direct answer to this given in scripture. I think it’s fair to say no or more precisely in chapter nine of the Book of Job Job is describing the majesty of God, and one of the things he says is that God is the one who commands the sun and it does not rise who seals up the stars, who alone stretch out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea and the Greek, you’re going to see a little bit of a recurring theme where we look at this sua gen and find is a little better. In the Greek it says, who alone has stretched out the heavens and walks on the sea as on firm ground? But notice there it’s not explicitly a Messianic prophecy at all.
So I don’t think someone reading that is like Aha. The Messiah is coming into the world and he’s going to walk on water. However, Saint John Chris system calls it a sort of prophecy by which I think he means this when the apostles in fact see Jesus walking on the sea as if it’s dry earth, their minds would once they kind of calm down, harken back to Jonah, excuse me, to job chapter nine and realize like, oh yeah, that is one of the things God alone does this looks like Jesus is showing us his divinity, but you’re not going to get there. So it’s kind of theological foreshadowing, but it’s not a prophecy where it says this is going to happen. It’s more like once you see it, you can say, aha, okay, I see this connection that I would never have made on my own.
Did Mary know that her baby boy would one day walk on water biblically? I think the answer to that is a pretty clear no. Okay, second question. Mary, did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters? Well, yeah, obvious. I mean the Messiah was coming into the world to be the Savior. What that looks like, plenty of people had questions about, but Mary knew this. In fact, seemingly everyone around Mary knew this as well. So for instance, St. Joseph, when he’s visited by an angel in the dream, the angel tells him that he’s going to name the child Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. And likewise zacharia after the birth of John the Baptist, which remember Mary is therefore zacharia, proclaims, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David.
That’s a prophecy about Jesus being made in the presence of his mother before his birth and she’s carrying the horn of salvation and Zacharia’s own baby. John is going to be the forerunner who gets to proclaim this to everybody. So yeah, Mary knows all this. And if that wasn’t enough, you have the particularly famous scene of what happens on Christmas when the angels announced the good news of Christmas to the shepherds. And I’m not going to tell you about it. You could read it for yourself in Matthew one 20 to 21, or we can listen to Linus from peanuts, recite it for us beautifully,
CLIP:
Any angel said unto them, if you’re not for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which will be to all people for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior which is Christ the Lord.
Joe:
So Jesus is very clearly a savior and it was prophesied he was going to be a savior. This is not new information if that weren’t enough, I’m cheating here slightly, but when they present Jesus in the temple at the presentation, Simeon holds him up and praises God saying, my eyes have seen the salvation which thou is prepared in the presence of all peoples. So yeah, Jesus is a savior. Did Mary know that Jesus was coming into the world to save our sons and daughters? Yes, absolutely, yes. Okay, third question. Mary, did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new? This child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you. This one is the most theologically controversial because Lowry as a Baptist seems to be assuming that Mary is just like an ordinary sinner like you and me. But that’s not the historic view of Mary and that’s not the view of Mary that any of the apostolic churches take of her Catholic Orthodox, Coptic.
We might have different ways of formulating it, but none of the historic churches believe Mary is just another sinner like everybody else. So many Catholics have reacted pretty strongly to this line. For instance, father Robert McTigue says that the lyrics here depend upon the dogma of the immaculate conception being false. If Mary needs a savior, then she cannot be the vessel of the incarnation. Now, I love Father mc Tegan, not just because he had me on his radio show once, but I part company here he is mistaken, he’s incorrect. Mary does need a savior. In fact, Mary tells us that she needed a savior in Luke chapter one in the famous is Magnifico, she says, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior. Okay, that verse is sometimes used to argue against Mary’s sinlessness. So how can we say Mary is both sinless and saved?
Because it’s important that you get both of those things right. Well, think about it this way. If you’re about to fall into a hole, somebody could save you one of two ways. Number one, they could wait until you fall into the hole and then they could help you get out of it because presumably for purposes of our analogy, you can’t get out of the hole yourself. Or number two, they could save you by stopping you from ever falling into the hole in the first place. Now, notice two things. Number one, both of those are forms of salvation. In both cases, this bystander has saved you. And number two, the second way is actually better meaning you’re not just saved, you’re saved in the better way to be saved. If you had the choice to choose, would it be better to wait until I fall all the way in the hole and then pull me out or to keep me from going in there in the first place?
You know which one is better, right? Well, look, you and I are saved in the first way. God allowed us to inherit original sin. He allows us to commit personal sin and then he rescues us. He provides us a way out of the pit that we’ve dug for ourselves. Mary, he saves, but he saves her in a more radical way because he helps to prevent her from falling into the pit of sin in the first place. Now you might say, oh, you’re just kind of making up that use of deliverance or salvation. But no, this is very much the twofold way. Scripture speaks about these themes that when you hear about salvation or deliverance, it sometimes means, God, you allowed me to fall into this, but then you brought me out of it other times. It means thank you God, you kept me from going into it in the first place.
I’ll give a few examples. In Psalm 56, king David praises God saying, thou has delivered my soul from death. Yay, my feet from falling. That’s very much the you kept me from falling into the pit, in this case the pit of Hades. Now obviously God didn’t have David die and then bring him back from the dead. He’s delivered from death by being spared dying In that moment, his life saved in the ordinary way. We talk about someone’s life being saved. When you hear about a life-saving treatment, you don’t mean somebody died and came back from the dead. We ordinarily mean they’re saved by not having to experience it in the first place. Likewise, Mary is saved from sin the way David is saved from death. Second example in Genesis 32, Jacob prays to be delivered from the hand of his brother Esau. But notice he hasn’t been captured by Esau at this point.
He is praying that he won’t ever be captured by Esau. So David is delivered from death. He is saved from death. Jacob is delivered from Esau, he’s saved from Esau, and Mary is delivered from sin. She is saved from sin. So she does need a deliverer. She does need salvation. She can with full confidence, declare God her savior and she’s not mistaken. If anything, he is her savior in a yet more radical way than the way he saved all of us. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean this line is perfect. The actual dispute in question is that Lowery assumes that Jesus will soon deliver you, whereas the Catholic view at the very least is that Mary already was delivered. So obviously that whole thing is a bigger question than we’ll probably resolve in just reading line by line through a Christmas song. But at the very least I think we can say this one, you can’t give a yes or no answer to a Mary did you know because it’s a leading question and it assumes a certain theological framework that it should be asking questions about rather than assuming.
Alright, the fourth question, Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man? He’s going to ask this twice, kind of the second time he kind of declares it. But yes, Mary did know that. In fact, this is one of the Messianic prophecies in Isaiah 35. It talks about how the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. We’re going to get back to this in a little bit when he gets back to this, but for now it’s sufficient to say yes. Mary did know one of the prophecies associated with the Messiah involved healing miracles and particularly healing physical deformities and disabilities and the like. Alright, fifth, Mary, did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand? This is very much like the very first question where it’s an aquatic related messianic activity that isn’t specifically prophesied in the Old Testament.
Here again, you have these lines like in Isaiah 35 when it’s talking about sailors at sea, it says how they cried to the Lord and their trouble and he delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed. But that’s not saying the Messiah is going to do that. That’s just talking about how we can see the power of God that he has control over the weather. So did Mary know that Jesus was going to exercise that divine power in that way? No, seemingly not. Alright next, Mary, did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trot. Now we’re moving away from aquatic miracles to I think the heart of the question that Lowery is wanting to know, which is how well did you realize that your infant was God? And I think we can see that the answer is she did know this, but it’s not immediately obvious.
And so it’s a totally valid question to ask and it’s worth kind of unpacking that. I’m going to focus on the angel’s part and get more into the divinity part as we get into the questions that ask that more directly. But it’s clearly considering Jesus’s preexistence that he doesn’t come into being in her womb. He’s already existing. He has walked where angels trod. So what would be some of the clues we have for that prior to the New Testament? What would be some of the clues we have for that at Christmas or before here? Modern Christians are at a disadvantage because we typically use the Hebrew versions of the Old Testament texts because there was a longstanding belief that these versions were older and more reliable basically based on the idea. While most of these writings are in Hebrew, so of course we trust the Hebrew over the translated ones in Greek, but in fact there are several prophecies that we don’t find in the Hebrew versions that have come down to us, but which were known to the New Testament authors and they quote mostly always from the Greek.
So I’m going to give a few of those. But don’t be surprised if there’s an Old Testament prophecy you don’t see because the Old Testament that we have doesn’t have these sig prophecies. Sept being the Greek translations in the Sept translation of Deuteronomy 32 43. There’s a clause in there that we don’t have. And that clause, well, the sentence goes like this, rejoice the heavens with him and let all the angels of God worship him. That’s the line we don’t have. Let all the angels of God worship him, rejoice the Gentiles with his people and let all the sons of God strengthen themselves in him. So it’s about kind of the nature of angelic worship and you might say, okay, why does that matter? Well, in Hebrews one verse six, the author of Hebrews applies this to the incarnation and says, and again, when he God brings the firstborn into the world, he says, let all God’s angels worship him.
Now, I mentioned all this subru thing. You might read Hebrews one, six and say, I don’t know what Old Testament prophecy that is. I don’t see that in my Old Testament and your right because we’re using a different translation of Deuteronomy 32. This is true of Catholics and Protestants typically, but maybe we should be using the subru because there are plenty of these prophecies that we see them and think, oh, okay, that’s clearly pointing to the incarnation, this being one of them, and it ties it to angelic worship. Similarly, the author of Hebrews is going to point to Psalm eight verse five, but here’s the problem. In the Hebrew version of Psalm eight, it is talking about man, both the limitation and the glory of man. And it says yet thou has made him little less than God and does crown him with glory and honor.
Okay, so it sounds like we’re just a little bit less than God, but the sig thus made him a little less than angels. So sometimes angels are referred to as Elohim, which is literally Gods, but it refers to spiritual beings. And so it makes sense how this would be translated as angels if contextually Elohim meant angels there. But Elohim can also be used as a name for God. So you can imagine the Hebrew could be read in either way, but made him little less than angels actually makes more sense there that we’re not just slightly below God, nowhere we’re actually beneath the angels. And in Hebrews two, that’s exactly what it says. It says that Jesus and the incarnation was made lower than the angels for a while. Notice there that it sort of presupposes the preexistence of Jesus with the angels. So did Mary know this?
I’m going to say yes, she did. And that’ll become clearer when we get into the other passages about Jesus’s divinity and what she knew about that. But for now, just we can see kind of from Hebrews that there were prophecies connected to the Messiah and God himself in the worship of angels. Alright, Mary did you know when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God. This is my favorite line in the whole song. I think it’s a very beautiful way of getting to the heart of that question that when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God. And it also by the way speaks to this deep rooted desire that we have this desire to see the face of God. And David talked about this in the Psalms. This is a recurring kind of theme. St Athanasius will argue this is one of the reasons for idolatry that we have this longing for this kind of face-to-face connection.
And so we struggled with the fact that God is invisible and so we’d created visible false gods for ourselves and rather than just penalize us for this, Jesus responds to this by coming into the world and taking on human flesh in the incarnation he meets us in our weakness. This is part of a much bigger conversation about why we view images and everything as okay now of God because he’s given us a visible depiction that we can depict, whereas before he hadn’t. And so we didn’t have the authority to do that much bigger conversation, but I for those reasons, love that He’s asking Mary, did you know that when you kissed your little baby you kissed the face of God? And the answer is yes, she seemingly did. Again, I’m going to give more as we go, but for now I want to point you to a couple of prophecies.
In Malachi chapter three, the prophet Malachi quotes, God is saying, behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. Now think about that, the sending of the messenger to prepare the way and then the Lord himself who will come to his temple. Now imagine that you are Mary listening to Zacharia proclaiming how John the Baptist is the forerunner, he’s the messenger and you know are carrying the Son of God. Now the fact that he’s the son of God means that he’s God. If you remember in John chapter five, one of the things people are upset about is Jesus declared God his father thereby making himself equal to God. So it’s already a divine sounding claim, but then you connect it with these Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah was seemingly to be the Lord himself in some mysterious way that God was going to send his messenger and he was going to send the Lord.
So was there probably a lot to sort out there? Absolutely. Was there a lot for Mary to ponder in her heart? Certainly. But there are plenty of strong indications given both in the Old Testament scriptures and in the way Jesus is introduced to Mary by the angel Gabriel to suggest that this isn’t just a prophet of God, but this is God’s own son, someone of divine origin. Similarly, another kind of Old Testament clue is in one of the famous Christmas passages, it’s regularly used at Christmas time. Isaiah chapter nine, verse six, for unto us a child is born to us, a child is given and the government will be upon his shoulder and his name will be called wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of peace. So that’s a pretty strong indication that the coming child, the Christ child to come will be the mighty God.
So I’m going to say yes, Mary does know that, that she’s aware of these Old Testament prophecies. She’s aware also of what it means to say that Jesus is the son of God, which is what she’s told. Because when you hear the phrase Son of man in his ordinary use son of man just means human. It means man because if you’re the son of a man, you’re a man. The offspring of a dog is a dog. That kind of idea. And so given that son of God is a divine claim, even if it’s not a way we would normally express that in English. So Mary isn’t just thinking she’s got a prophet in her womb, she believes she has God’s own son. Alright, Mary, did you know actually this part doesn’t begin with Mary, did you know this is the bridge and the bridge just says the blind will see, the deaf will hear and the dead will live again.
The lame will leap, the dumb will speak the praises of the lamb. There’s not a question there, but we’ll take that as a question. Does Mary know all that she does here? You have to look at Isaiah 35 again. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped then shall the lame man leap like a heart, like a deer and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy. Now if you’ve listened very carefully, you might say, wait a second one’s missing. What about the rising of the dead? Fair point in Isaiah 26 it says, thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise. A dwellers in the dust awake and sing for joy that is less obviously a messianic prophecy but is kind of adjacent. In fact, when John the Baptist is in prison, he sends two of his own disciples who go to Jesus and say, are you he who is to come or shall we look for another?
So he’s asking the disciples to ask, see are you the Messiah? Question basically flat out, and Jesus responds in Luke seven by saying, go and tell John what you have seen and heard. The blind received their sight, the lame walk. Leopards are cleansed and the deaf here, the dead are raised up. The poor have good news preached to them. Jesus is reminding John and his disciples of all of the messianic prophecies, these healing miracles aren’t just like fun things Jesus is doing. They’re not just good things. They’re not just proofs of his divine power. They’re also things that the Messiah we were foretold was going to do. So on all of those things, I think we can say yes, yes, yes, and yes, all the things Jesus is doing, there were things that scripture foretold that he would do. Alright, Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day rule the nations?
Yes she did. In fact, in Luke chapter one, we’re told he’ll be great and will be called the son of the most high and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, or let’s be clearer. We are not told that Mary is told that and she’s told by Gabriel that Jesus will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom. There will be no end. So absolutely it’s foretold that he’s going to be the king. Now you might say certainly king of the Jews, but what about king of the nations? I’m glad you asked. If you pray what are called the oon and Vespers every night from December 27th to December 23rd, there are seven prayers that are very ancient prayers. I think going back the eighth century, they may be older than that. I don’t know where you pray for the coming of God with different biblically based titles.
And if you’re familiar with the advent Hy oh Emmanuel, that is these seven oon set to music and put in a musical style. The second to last one, actually the one right before O come Emmanuel is re genium, which means O King of the Nations or King of the Gentiles. And it’s okay says the Latin anon, which is you might imagine from the name begins Oex Genium. A rough translation goes O King of the Nations Again, you could say King of the Gentiles and their desire of the cornerstone making both one, you save both what Jews and Gentiles making Jews and Gentiles, one people come and save the human race which you fashioned from clay. Now there’s actually plenty of prophecies about how the Jews will become one people somehow with the gentiles in the messianic age, but I’m going to focus on just a couple.
In Isaiah chapter two we’re told that he shall judge between the nations and shall decide for many peoples, they shall beat their swords into plow shares and their spheres into pruning hooks. So there’s this great eschatological and messianic foretelling of someone ruling over the nations, not just over Israel. And then in Psalm chapter two, I’m going to just take a couple lines from it, maybe even more clearly, we’re told, I will tell of the decree of the Lord, he said to me, you are my son today I have begotten you ask of me and I’ll make the nations your heritage and the ends of the earth your possession very clearly giving him dominion, not only over Israel but over the whole world. He goes on to say, now therefore our kings be wise, be warned, or rulers of the earth serve the Lord with fear, with trembling kiss his feet.
That is fulfilled in a beautiful way in the adoration of the magi in which you see these prominent gentiles, these magi coming before Jesus and offering divine adoration. In fact, many of the depictions show them even kissing his feet, which reflects his biblical kind of prophecy that he is the coming king not only of Israel but of the whole world. So did Mary know that? Yes she did. She’s told explicitly that he’s going to have the Davidic throne, but part of this prophecy was always that it wouldn’t just be for Israel but for all of the righteous from all of the nations. Alright, Mary, did you know that your baby boy’s heaven’s perfect lamb here There isn’t a very clear direct prophecy. So in the gospel of John, when Jesus dies on the cross, John talks about how this fulfills the prophecies that they won’t break one of the bumps and that isn’t an explicit messianic prophecy.
That is a description of how to treat the Passover lamb. So this is one of those things where if you just read the Passover prescription, you don’t say Aha, this is a foretelling of the coming Messiah. But when you see the Messiah and you see the way he’s being treated with his sip like the Passover lamb was, and they’re not breaking any of his bones like the Passover lamb’s bones couldn’t be broken, then you start to say, I see now what the Passover was about, but I couldn’t have seen it before because I didn’t have all the information I needed. Likewise, Isaiah 53 talks about Christ going to the cross like a lamb led to the slaughter. But again, from that alone, you’re not going to necessarily realize like, okay, this is definitely about the Messiah. Whether or not you even apply the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 to the Messiah was a controversial question.
You don’t really get an answer to that until Jesus. So maybe Mary knew that, but I think it’s probably fair to say no. She didn’t realize that she had heaven’s perfect lamb. She knew it was God, but the particular sacrificial role he was going to play seems to be something that is revealed more fully over time. You actually get hints of this in a few places. For instance, the coming of Gentiles with gold and frankincense was foretold, but when they come it’s like, oh wait, merh and merh is an embalming spice that you put on a sacrifice or on a dead person. So it points to the fact that he’s not just the king you give gold to or the God that you give frankincense to. He’s also the sacrificial offering. But that part God seems to have intentionally revealed more slowly. If you remember in Acts, one of the things, Paul, for instance is explaining in Thessalonica and Berea is that it was necessary for the Messiah to suffer.
This is what Jesus has to explain in Luke on the road to Emmaus. This part was much less obvious and is really only clear in hindsight in view of the cross. So what she thought was going to happen to Jesus, I don’t know that that’s entirely clear, but it’s not clear to me that she realizes immediately this is heaven’s perfect lamb. I would go no on this one. Alright, the last one, Mary, did you know this sleeping child you’re holding is the great I am great. This is the biggest and most important question. Does she realize that she is holding the same God who declares himself I am who am from the burning bush? She does and I think we can show that she does in a couple of different ways. One is in Luke chapter one in the visitation when she goes and Elizabeth greets her and says, how is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me now Lord, there is curios.
Well cure you in this because it’s of my Lord and the conjugation, but it’s the word there. The noun is curios and that means Lord. And that Greek word is used to translate a pair of different Old Testament words, Adonai, which is what literally means Lord. And Adonai could be used to describe God or human Lord and then also the unspeakable name of God, Yahweh sometimes called the Teragram anon that gets the four letter YHWH. That and all of the Old Testament copies that kind of come down to us, we never see that word used. There’s controversy over whether it was originally in Christian authors or Jewish ones were the ones who substituted. But when the Old Testament is quoted where the Old Testament passage says Yahweh, the Bible says in the New Testament, I should say, says Lord, it says curios, even though that’s not a literal translation, it seems to have been one of the protections around using the name of God too lightly.
This is what makes it kind of the unspeakable name of God. And so famously, when you have within the masoretic text in the Hebrew, the rabbis add subscripts and superscripts. So they make little notations to tell you what vowels go there because ancient Hebrew only had consonants. They add vowels on the name of God. They don’t add vowels, which suggests it was unspoken. You get some bad attempts to add vowels by Christian authors and this is what gives us Jehovah, which isn’t very close, but that’s what’s happening. It’s applying the vowels that you would have from Lord and putting them into this word that was not pronounced as Lord, but Lord was used as a replacement in modern Hebrew. You say Hashem the name. So it’s the unspoken name of God in the unspeakable name of God. So when Elizabeth says that Mary is the mother of my Lord, she could mean like the mother of my earthly king.
But in context she seems pretty clearly to be saying the mother of the name, the mother of God, the mother of Yahweh. And we’ll get back to that in a minute because there’s another way we can get there. But also in Luke one, when Mary asks how it will be that shall bear the son of God, Gabriel tells her the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. Now as I’ve already said, son of God is a divine claim. It’s a divine title. The overshadowing though is the other thing that points to this because this same Greek word used to overshadow is used in describing the cloud of glory overshadowing at the transfiguration. When Jesus is transfigured and you see his divine power, you hear the voice of the Father, you see Jesus and his divinity transformed and you have the Holy Spirit present in this overshadowing cloud.
It’s the cloud of glory that’s in Mark nine. It’s the same Greek word being used, but this is also the same Greek word being used in again, the Greek version of the Old Testament back in places like Exodus 40 about the cloud of glory that was over the tint of meeting when the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. So you have this cloud of glory associated with the arc in particular. So now go back to this line where Elizabeth says, the mother of my Lord should come to me. She’s in the hill country of Judah. And there’s this strong parallel between this passage and I’ve described this elsewhere, someone, I shortchange this slightly, but there’s a strong parallel between this passage and between two Samuel chapter six. In two Samuel six, David Arosen went into the hill country of Judah and he’s there for three months and he’s trying to move the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem.
Here Mary takes off from near Jerusalem and goes into the hill country of Judah and spends three months there and David dances before the Ark, John the Baptist and the woman of his mother dances before the Lord. There’s all of these and incredible and obvious once you see them kind of parallels that don’t seem to be just an accident. But the parallel between Elizabeth’s question is David’s question when he says, how can the arc of the Lord come to me? And significantly you have the arc which has the overshadowing, but you also have of the Lord there is explicitly of Yahweh. And if you’ve got a lot of Old Testaments will do this when they’re translating Yahweh, they won’t put, they’ll put Lord with small caps. So Lord written regularly, capital L, lowercase ORD, it means Adonai Lord with capital L, and then capital O means the name.
So you have David describing the arc of Hashem, and then you have Elizabeth seemingly describing Mary as the mother of Hashem of the name of Yahweh. So the great I am, yeah, she has plenty of reason to know that she is carrying him. Plus remember all the other passages we saw that gave us clues that the coming Messiah might in fact be God. Okay, final thing I want to focus on what Mary did you know gets right because I think it’s easy to dunk on this song. It is cheesy and schmancy and saccharin and some of the questions are kind of dumb. You’re like, yeah, she knew that. But other questions are really good and profound and I want to validate the inquiry there. I want to go one more time back to Lowry’s agenda. He wants to sit down and have coffee with Mary so he can look at the mysteries that what we call the joyful mysteries through Mary’s eyes.
And if you are someone who has that desire, you should at least know this is one of the reasons that the rosary exists. The rosary isn’t meant to take our eyes off of Jesus. The rosary is meant to help us understand Jesus through Mary’s eyes. And so you have things like the five joyful mysteries where you look at the annunciation and the visitation and the nativity and the presentation and the finding in the temple, but through the eyes of the woman who pondered these things in her heart. So a way of entering meditatively and quietly into the thing Mary did, you know is trying to get us into. So I want to validate, as I said, in all seriousness, this is really good that he’s asking this question. I think it points to a spiritual longing that many Christians feel where they on some level might realize at least when they get to Christmas, okay, you don’t have any Mary statues the rest of the year, but then you have this nativity scene and there’s a little statue of Mary.
And many people are so afraid of giving her too much honor, they don’t know what to do with her. And Lowy is at least willing to dare to say, what could we learn from Mary? And that’s a question I think all of us Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, whenever would do well to contemplate this Christmas Eve and this Christmas time. This is a season in which Mary is the one in the stance, she’s the closest eye witness and she’s a participant. And in many of these things she’s the one who’s seeing them. It’s very clear when you read Luke two that she is the eyewitness. Luke is reporting from that. Our understanding of the infancy narrative is coming from Mary, at least in the gospel of Luke. That is a good spiritual disposition to adopt that. We need to reclaim Mary’s role in the story of Christmas.
If you just have the child being born with no mother that is dystopian and incomplete, that you have to go round young virgin, right? You have to actually have mother and child. You can’t just have child. Alright, very last thing I want to do is just offer a few words of Christmas gratitude. First of all, thank you to you all for liking and commenting and engaging and watching and sharing this with other people. That is tremendously beneficial. Thank you to everyone over on Patreon who has supported financially the work that we’re doing here. I also wanted to thank though the people who are doing stuff behind the scenes and Thomas w does. He designed, I dunno if you saw the older episodes, but I just had very obviously just like a PowerPoint. He designed this cool looking kind of side graphic that I use now.
Vanessa makes the shorts and then she also engages in some of the comments that I don’t have time to engage in. I try to do my best on at least Tuesday and Thursday to jump in the comments. Sometimes I spend too much time there, but I pretend it’s for work. But Vanessa is really good at highlighting ones that maybe I’ve missed responding to people and sometimes bringing ones to my attention. And that is kind of a thankless job that she does a really good job for. And likewise with Thomas, he puts in a lot of work making sure that this looks and sounds like it’s supposed to. He was actually helping to redesign the Council of Trent Studio the last couple of weeks. So Metal Mike has been helping Mike, who likes metal in the name. He’s been tremendously helpful in really doing this stuff clutch.
And when I say I couldn’t do this without them, I mean I literally don’t know how to do the technical stuff. And so I wanted to just publicly once in a while acknowledge you’re only seeing me, but this wouldn’t happen if it was only me. So Merry Christmas to all of you. God bless you. There won’t be an episode on Thursday. I’m at least taking Thursday off. I may take one or both episodes off next week. We’ll see. I have some stuff I really want to do, but I also want to take a break and give other people a break. So I may do one episode next week on a pretty exciting finding in Germany of a Catholic that is super Catholic from the two hundreds. That’s your clue. Tune in. You’ll see it either next week or maybe the Tuesday after, but probably Thursday next week. Otherwise, be good to one another. Hope you have a merry Holy Christmas. God bless you.