Many of our Christmas cards might make birth in the first century seem a holy, simple and painless event. But, as we know, birth then – and birth in the Holy Land now – is far from safe or certain. Mary had a lot to think about.  

According to Matthew, Joseph wanted to dismiss her quietly; for her own good. I wonder how often down the ages, and still today, men have discarded their responsibilities, telling themselves: ‘it’s for her own good’.  

By contrast, in the Gospel reading we have just heard from Luke, Mary is portrayed as a confident young woman, travelling in haste to visit her also-pregnant cousin, Elizabeth.  

It is a meeting of great joy and affirmation when, in Elizabeth’s womb, John the Baptist leaps at the sound of Mary’s greeting. Theologically it’s as though John’s work has begun already, enlivened by the approach of Jesus – stirred into action in the presence of the one whose way he is destined to prepare.  

Of course, it is not uncommon in the later stages of pregnancy to feel the movement of a baby. For a mother it is a deep and somehow unexpected experience. A reminder of human life hidden within a human life. Almost 30 years ago, when I was pregnant, I would sometimes feel my child move while standing at the altar. I was aware of the life within in me, while I held in my hands the spiritual life Christ offers to each of us. 

We mustn’t think of Mary’s pregnancy as some sanitised and celestial form of an Air B&B for the Divine. It’s fine that the Orthodox churches often talk about Mary as ‘God-bearer’.  But if it is a Christian doctrine that the conception of Jesus was highly unusual, nothing suggests that Mary’s pregnancy was strange or unexpected. Consequently, I believe that Jesus wasn’t some divine spark sheltered in Mary’s womb. The incarnation includes the physical development of Jesus through all the usual stages of human change and growth. To put it more plainly – it means that Jesus was being co-created. 

It is this which brings God closer to us than we are to ourselves. Not an external, exterior, distant God – but God in Christ who has relinquished power in order to serve and to save.  

For that reason we must never forget the physicality of our faith at this season as the theologian John Bolland writes: “the Word becomes flesh so that the Word might be more easily – and literally – grasped: skin on skin, warm to the touch, pulsing with life”.   

Jesus is born as one of us. This is the starting point for the whole of the Christian faith. 

The saviour who passes through the broken waters and the blood of birth to bring new life to the world. It is painful and messy and traumatic – as many births are – but the Word made flesh is the spiritual life for all who put their faith in him.  

Our Gospel this morning ends just before Mary offers her magnificent, moving and revolutionary hymn of praise to God: the Magnificat. It is a song of reversed fortunes, where the proud are defeated in the imagination of their hearts, and the powerful are pulled from their thrones. But more than that, it is a triumphant declaration of a woman doing, and being, and speaking her own work of theology. Because of the outrageous hope that God has spoken into the life of Mary, Mary is liberated to praise a God who chooses what the world considers weak, in order to shame the strong. In recent weeks I have been moved by several examples of courageous women who have refused to be silent. Not least by the extraordinary, astonishing, and impressive Gisèle Pelicot. 

As we approach Christmas, we might be tempted to look upon Mary as the vessel of God’s salvation. The one chosen to carry Christ to birth. But Mary is so much more than that.  

She is the first theologian of the Incarnation. The first to perceive and understand the revolutionary change which God is bringing to the world. The first to worship and adore the child whose greatest desire is to lift up the lowly; to scatter the proud; and to empower the silenced to speak.