Advent is a season of anticipation. It’s a waiting, longing, reflecting kind of time. The first advent featured a young woman waiting, heavy with anticipation. Anyone who has carried another human being within them, knows this waiting feeling. When will I sleep comfortably again? When will my ankles return to a normal size?!
There’s a swelling, loaded nature to the wait: so much excitement and nervousness; so many hopes and fears.
The hopes and fears of Mary’s situation must have been amplified!
Once the baby was born, and after the weeks of waiting, Mary and Joseph went to the Temple to sacrifice, following the time of her purification.
In this normal compliance with the Temple stipulations laid out in Leviticus chapter 12, we glimpse an extraordinary truth. This baby is like no other, but the Levitical laws still apply to his mother. She must wait for her impurity after the birth to pass before she is able to appear at the Temple. But at the same time “the separation between impure humanity and holy God has been breached. . . God has not asked Mary to transgress the boundary line, but God the Son has done so himself.”
Various reasons and conditions kept the faithful out of the Temple at certain times, but here, all the time that Mary was not free to go into the presence of God, God himself was with her. “From that moment until he was grown, her hands held him; her arms enveloped him; her lap gave him a place to rest.”
The Son of God. The seed of the woman.
No wonder Luke tells us that Mary treasured and pondered in her heart the events surrounding the birth of her child.
“Instead of bringing her into the holy space, God has made her the holy space. In the incarnation God has deemed the female body - the impure bleeding female body – worthy to handle the most sacred of all things, the very body of God.”
The Son of God came to humanity, in human form, through a woman’s body. Lo he abhors not the Virgin’s womb.
Fall on your knees.
(All quotations are from Women and the Gender of God by Dr Amy Peeler, published by Eerdman’s, 2022.)
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