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Rev Graham Harrison           Sunday August 29th a.m. 1999

Mary - Luke 1
 

ëAnd in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. And when she saw him, she was troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said unto her, Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God. And, behold, thy cousin Elisabeth, she hath also conceived a son in her old age: and this is the sixth month with her, who was called barren. For with God nothing shall be impossible. And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from herí.[Luke 1:26-38].

You might think it is inappropriate to describe her as one of the lesser known characters of the New Testament, but I do not think that I would have much difficulty in establishing the truth of that as far as many of us are concerned. Of course if you were to go to some other people they might be able to give you lots and lots of what they think is information about Mary and you search in vain in the New Testament to discover the source of that alleged information because it does not come at all in the word of God. In fact apart from what we read here in this chapter of Lukeís Gospel and the next chapter of Lukeís Gospel, the first and the second chapters of Matthewís Gospel, two or three references in Matthew, Mark and Luke and then a few in the Gospel according to John, I think there is only one other reference in the New Testament to Mary and that is in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, and it really is a very incidental reference there. You remember after our Lord has ascended to heaven, the disciples return to: ëJerusalem from the mount called Olivet, which is from Jerusalem a sabbath day's journey. And when they were come in, they went up into an upper room, where abode both Peter, and James, and John, and Andrew, Philip, and Thomas, Bartholomew, and Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon Zelotes, and Judas the brother of James.í In other words the eleven remaining disciples: ëThese all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethrení [Acts 1:12-14]. That is the last thing that the New Testament has to tell us about Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ.

But you do not have to move very far on in the history of the church right down to the present day, before you find there are all manner of legends that have grown up about Mary and as far as the practical faith and devotion of many ordinary people are concerned, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Mary has a greater place even than the Lord Jesus Christ. And that of course is something that is exceedingly wrong.

Now I want to begin just by indicating to you, in outline, some of those errors. It is not something that I often do but I think it is necessary to begin in that way. I am going to begin from a book Teach yourself Roman Catholicism ó so you see I am not being partial and biased. Straight from the horseís mouth as it were! This has the imprimatur of the diocese of Westminster, so it is all straight and above board as far as the Roman Catholics are concerned.

The teaching of the Church is that Mary was truly the Mother of God, deriving thereby a plenitude of grace; that she was consequently free from Original Sin and therefore also from personal sin; that she was a virgin before, during and after the birth of Jesus; that she was assumed bodily into heaven; that she is the mediatrix through whom all graces are given to us by her son; that she is worthy of formal veneration.

I remember last year when my wife and I were privileged to go to Israel, well we went to many strange places, but one of the places that we were taken to in Jerusalem was called the Church of the Dormitian. Let me explain what the Dormitian is ó if you are not up in Roman Catholic theology, you will need a little explanation. Well the theory runs like this, that Mary eventually died but she was not buried. Rather two or three days after her death she was bodily assumed into heaven. She rose up to heaven and there her body was reunited with her soul ó the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary. So what she was doing, she was sleeping for those couple of days between her actual death and her ascension to glory. And if you turn that into Latin you have heard of dormitory, a place where you sleep ó well, the Church of the Dormitian it emphasises that.

Then earlier this year, as some of you know, my wife and I again were privileged to travel this time to Turkey. What was undoubtedly for most of the people who were in the same party that we were in, what was undoubtedly for them the high spot of the tour happened on the last day. We had been to Ephesus and then we were taken by c oach up to a hilltop overlooking Ephesus and there we were shown the very place where it is alleged Mary spent her life being cared for by the apostle John, to whom you remember she was entrusted by our Lord as He was hanging there on the cross ó the place in other words from which, bodily, she ascended to heaven. When we got there the others did something that we did not do, they had a Mass. They had to wait their turn for a Mass, because I think when we arrived there were already a group of either Chinese or Korean Roman Catholics and there they were singing their praises to the virgin Mary. Then after they had finished the other lot went in and they had what for them, I suppose, was a great spiritual experience. At least they would have described it in terms like that .I think my wife and I stuck out like sore thumbs sitting on a bench outside looking distinctly disinterested and they probably thought what a rotten couple of sinners they must be! But there we are ó unashamedly I am a Protestant Christian and I would not have gone to that place had it not been part of the tour to which we were committed.

But to me it brought home, perhaps in a new way, the myths that have surrounded Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. Some of you, I know, have had a Roman Catholic background, some of you were born into Roman Catholic families and have been brought up with that sort of influence, so in one sense some of the things that I will be saying to you this morning will not be new, you learnt them when you were children. I hope what I will be able to do with you this morning is to remove the last vestiges, if they still remain, of any belief in some of those myths and superstitions. You see what the Roman Catholic believes about the virgin Mary is this, and you had it there in summary in that opening paragraph from that book that I quoted to you. It is very simple, Mary had no original sin, and in order therefore that she had no original sin, she had to be immaculately conceived. So you go back another generation and to her mother and tradition says that her motherís name was Ann, when she conceived Mary, well Mary was immaculately conceived.

Now you might think that it was a strange thing but it was not until the year 1854 that finally the then pope promulgated that doctrine as infallibly true and therefore to be believed by all the faithful. Then in 1870, I think it was, at the first Vatican council that was ratified and it became a principal of faith for all Roman Catholics. As you come on during the next almost one hundred years you come to 1950, I think it was, and the then pope, Pope Pious, he promulgated the decree of the bodily assumption of the virgin Mary. It had not been an authentic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church until that point but from then on anybody that did not believe it was anathematised. So that is the current state of Roman Catholic theology. Those of you who were brought up as Roman Catholics, you will remember times perhaps weekly when you went to confession and you had to confess your sins to a priest and the priest then pronounced absolution for your sins provided that you did certain acts of penance. And some of the acts of penance might have involved saying so many ëHail Marysí. ëHail Mary, mother of Godí, and then it runs on and if you said that so many times, or if you counted the beads on the rosary and intoned that phraseology, your sins could be forgiven. And you were alright to the next Saturday night when you would have to do it all again and go through the same procedure. Of course there are many, many Roman Catholics today who believe that Mary is really there in heaven as the one to whom it is better to go rather than to the Lord Jesus Christ. The argument runs like this ó ëWell, Jesus can be rather severe. You remember for example in the gospels there was the time when He made a little whip of chords and actually drove people out of the Temple. But of course his mother, as all mothers are, she was a gentle loving person. Many sons of course can be twisted around their motherís little fingers and so if you really want to get somewhere with Jesus, do not approach Him directly, approach Him through His mother. Go to His mother, ask her to put a word in on your behalf as far as the Son is concerned, and she will do it.í

So they have elevated Mary and you had hints of it there in that reading ó and if I had read to you the rest of the chapter it would have been more fully developed. You had hints there that she is the co-redemptrix. Christ is the Redeemer, turn that into the feminine for the woman, she is the co-redemptrix. She is the one who redeems us along with the Lord Jesus Christ. The present Pope for example he is a great worshipper of Mary. He goes to wherever Mary is alleged to have made appearances down through the centuries, he has been to Lourdes, he has been to Portugal and to the shrine of Fatima, he has been to Spain and Compostella where again she is supposed to have appeared, he has been to Guadeloupe in Mexico where she is supposed to have appeared. He is obviously a great devotee of Mary and worships her unequivocally.

And of course the Roman Catholic Church says that she is a legitimate object of worship. They try to dress it up in different language; they say there is a certain Latin word that you use just for the worship of God, there is another Latin word that you can use for the worship of the saints and there is a higher Latin word that comes between the two and you use that for the worship of Mary. So they try to explain away their worship of somebody who is not God in a way like that. Then when you begin to question them about Mary they will always speak about the blessed virgin Mary. Now there is no doubt about it in the Gospels Mary was a virgin, betrothed to Joseph and she had no sexual relations with Joseph until after the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ. But that is not sufficient for the Roman Catholic Church, they say not only was she a virgin before Jesus was born but even the Ö difference to her physical virginity and she was perpetually a virgin afterwards ó the perpetual virginity of the virgin Mary.

Now in all of those things, I do not think in any way I have been unfair, or prejudiced, or sought to represent in a distorted way, what the Roman Catholic Church presents and teaches concerning Mary, the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. Sometimes of course you come across Christians, Protestant Christians, who react against all that and I would hope that there is a reaction in our spirits against it because all of those points that I have been making, they are without biblical foundation and they need to be repudiated. But sometimes, of course, Protestants go over the top and they can speak in a crude way and a vulgar way about the virgin Mary and somehow seek to put her down, which is something that the scriptures give us no countenance for doing. I want to avoid doing anything like that, this morning. So what I am proposing to do is briefly to take you through what it is the Bible teaches us about Mary; who she is, what we can say about her, the amazing miracle that God wrought through her. You picture this scene that is described for us. Perhaps some of you thought that I had got my calendar wrong when you looked at the hymns this morning and then the reading. You thought, well he is about three months ahead of his time, coming up to Christmas! But I knew what I was doing and I want us to think about Mary.

Put yourself in her situation. There you are you are probably a mid-teenager, maybe a bit less than that. You are betrothed to a man by the name of Joseph, that is probably a bit more than what we would understand by an engagement, but it was short of marriage; there was no physical relations between you and the person to whom you were betrothed. One day you are visited by an angel, now that is staggering enough, is it not! You can understand why it is the angel had to say to Mary, ëFear not!í I am sure if we were suddenly visited by an angel we would not take it calmly, we might very well be overawed, even panic stricken because an angelic visitation is a very special thing. The angel comes and he makes this staggering announcement to her, He tells her that she is going to conceive, that she is going to bare a son, that her son is going to have the name Jesus, that he is going to be great, called the Son of the Highest; he is going to be the inheritor of Davidís throne and reign over the house of Jacob for ever; his kingdom will never end.

You can imagine the poor girl, that is all that she was, being rocked back on her heels and just overwhelmed with all this. She cannot believe how on earth this can ever happen. ëHow shall this be, seeing I know not a man?í [Luke 1:34 ]. She knows that she has not been immoral and therefore it is a physical impossibility for this to happen to her. The angel Gabriel explains to her: ëThe Holy Ghost (the Holy Spirit) shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: Ö that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of Godí [Luke 1:35]. He mentioned her cousin Elisabeth, who was now an elderly woman but who now was six months pregnant. Then he said: ëWith God nothing shall be impossible.í Can you imagine the situation? It is staggering, is it not? It just blows your mind as you try to think about something like this. You can well understand why it is that we read that Mary ëwas troubled at his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation thisí was and how it could happen [Luke 1:29].

Then off she goes to visit her cousin Elisabeth; she stays with her about three months, we do not know if she was actually there for the birth of John the Baptist, or whether she had left just before that. It must have been about that time that she left Elisabeth and went back home again to Nazareth. When she visits Elisabeth, John the Baptist, the baby that Elisabeth is carrying in her womb, leaps in her womb; Elisabeth is filled with the Holy Ghost: and she says the most remarkable things: Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For, lo, as soon as the voice of thy salutation sounded in mine ears, the babe leaped in my womb for joy. And blessed is she that believed: for there shall be a performance of those things which were told her from the Lordí.

Then Mary inspired by the Holy Spirit, she speaks. She speaks in the words that we sometimes know as the Magnificat: ëMy soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name. And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation. He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away. He hath holpen his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy; As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for everí [Luke 1:46-55]. It is an ascription of praise and honour to God. And here is Mary, responsive, responding in faith and simple trust to what it is the angel has announced to her.

Now imagine the situation. What would Joseph think? If you turn across to the opening chapter of Matthewís Gospel, you realise that Joseph had a problem! Here is the young girl to whom he is betrothed. He knows that he has not violated her and she tells him that she is pregnant and she comes out with this story that an angel has appeared to her and told her that she is going to conceive and bear a son. Well you can imagine the natural reaction of Joseph to an announcement like that. He cannot believe it. Things like this just do not happen. It takes another visitation of the angel, this time to Joseph, and Josephís qualms are settled; ëFear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sinsí [Matthew 1:20,21]. And you see up until that point Joseph had a problem. How am I going to handle this? I love this woman, I do not want to humiliate her, she must have done something wrong but I do not want to publicly shame her. There he wanted to put her away quietly, ëprivilyí as the Authorised Version translates it. at that point the angel comes to him.

But then there they are up in Nazareth in the north of the country and they have to go down to Bethlehem, that is where the census requires them to go and so there is Mary, presumably in the last stages of pregnancy and she has this journey, probably eighty or so miles. Well, tradition has it that she travelled on a donkey ó I do not know how you women who have had babies would have liked to have travelled on a donkey, or even walked all that distance when you were in the final stages of pregnancy! I remember once with a travel insurance I had to look through it for all the exclusions ó Mary would not have got travel insurance! They would have said that she was too great a risk. But there they go from Nazareth down to Bethlehem and when they get there, there is no hotel with a spare room. No maternity hospital; she has not even got any of her female relatives with her to help her at this time. All that they can come up with is some sort of stable, possibly a cave or something like that where they kept the animals. There Mary had her first baby, Jesus! That is just part and parcel of the Gospel story ó this amazing thing that happened to Mary.

But it is not over. She has had the baby, the shepherds turn up and they tell her of that amazing appearance of the angelic host to them on the hills outside Nazareth. Then a bit later on the wise men come. Mary and Joseph take the baby Jesus up to Jerusalem and again this is one of the little insights that the scriptures give to us into the economics circumstances of the family. It was necessary that a sacrifice be offered in connection with a woman that has just had a baby and there were a couple of possible provisions. What they do is to take the cheapest option, they were poor. They just use the two pigeons, not the lamb, that would have been too expensive; they offer a sacrifice of two pigeons. Then there comes this man, Simeon, and he takes the baby Jesus from Mary, his mother. And he begins to make extraordinary pronouncements: ëBehold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealedí[Luke 2:34-35].

Earlier after the visit of the shepherds the Scripture tells us that: ëMary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heartí [Luke 2:19] Can you imagine what must have been turning over in her mind as this latest revelation: ëYea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul alsoí. What does Simeon mean? There Mary for the rest of the earthly life of the Lord Jesus Christ, she must have been wondering, ëHow is this going to work out? What is going to happen? All seems to be well up until the time when her son Jesus is thirty years of age. Presumably by this time Joseph has died. You never read of him during the adult life of the Lord Jesus Christ. The only other time that he is mention ed is when Jesus was twelve years. You remember they had gone up to the feast in Jerusalem and on the way back home they thought that Jesus was with them, whereas in reality He was still back in the Temple, discussing, arguing, with the doctors of the law. Joseph and Mary had to go back very distraught with anxiety and you can understand that, can you not, those of you who have had children. If one of them suddenly goes missing, well it is happening at the present time, is it not, up in the North of England. You can understand the distress and the trauma that anxious parents go through. They come back and eventually they find Jesus there in the temple, debating with the doctors of the law, And Mary speaks to Him quite severely: ëSon, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing.í But Jesus in effect rebukes her: ëHow is it that ye sought me? wist ye not (did you not know) that I must be about my Father's business? And they understood not the saying which he spake unto them. And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them: but his mother kept all these sayings in her heartí [Luke 2:48-51].

Well I say up until the time that Jesus was thirty years of age, it must have seemed a fairly tranquil existence. Presumably Jesus took over Josephís carpentry business when Joseph died and was conducting that business. But then suddenly Jesus leaves home, He goes down to the river Jordan where his cousin John the Baptist is baptising people and He is baptised. The obscurity is gone and for three years or so He is walking the streets of Palestine, preaching, teaching, healing, performing miracles and instead of obscurity he is in the very centre of attention. And you have it on more than one occasion that, well, His own family they do not understand. There is one occasion when his brothers said: ëHe is beside himselfí [Mark 3:21]. Indeed another time when Jesus was preaching His mother and His brethren they came outside and they could not get in because of the crowd and they sent a message saying, ëThe family is outside.í And Jesus more or less ignored them and said :ëMy mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do ití [Luke 8:21]. Again you might say a rebuke to His mother.

Or do you remember what John describes to us as the first miracle that Jesus performed, there in Cana of Galilee. Jesus and his disciples were called to a wedding and they ran out of wine. So His mother comes to Him and tells him, ëThey have no wineí. In effect she is saying, ëWhat are you going to do about it? Perform a miracle!í Again Jesus rebukes her: Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet comeí [John 2:4]. He says in effect: ëI am working to the agenda that my heavenly Father has set me; not yours! Do not tell me what to do!í It is a kind, a loving, but nevertheless it is a rebuke that the Lord Jesus administers to His own mother.

Then as you come along to the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus Christ, you see something of the tender love of Mary for Jesus and the even greater and even more tender love of Jesus for His mother, Mary. When others had forsaken Him, she had not. She is standing there at the cross. Can you imagine the emotional, mental, spiritual agony that she must have gone through? Perhaps some of you have watched a loved one die ó but you have never seen a son crucified, and that was what was happening. at last I suppose Mary understood what it was Simeon thirty three years before, in the Temple, had said. ëYea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also.í And Jesus looking down from the cross sees the apostle John and tells him that Mary is to be his mother and he is to be her son. He commits her to his care. Presumably because his own brothers and sisters were not believers at that time. You remember they had come in great scepticism and even said that He was mad, He was beside Himself. So He committed Mary to the care of the apostle John.

Incidentally that is one other point that perhaps needs to be made, the scriptures mention that Jesus had brothers, four brothers, and their names are given to us in the Scriptures and more than one sister. His sisters and the word all is used so it is probably more than two; you would not use the word all to describe two sisters, would you? I think it must be at least three, so it was quite a little family there in the home in Nazareth. Jesus was the eldest of those children so that obviously strikes a fatal blow at the doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. Virgin she was up until the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, but then in due course Joseph and Mary came together in conjugal relations and children were born as the result of that union. The half-brothers and sisters of the Lord Jesus Christ, as far as the flesh is concerned.

Then the last reference that I mentioned to you that first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles ó and do you notice where she comes? She is almost at the end of the list. You get all the apostles listed, then the women, ëand Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethrení [Acts 1:14]. Now if she occupied the place of centrality and importance that Roman Catholics ascribe to her, she should have surely been at the very top. And in the remainder of the New Testament there would be reference upon reference to Mary and what she said, what she did and what happened to her. But the New Testament is absolutely silent about things like that.

So you see, here is a woman, from the human point of view she becomes the mother of the Lord Jesus Christ. There was actually a Greek term that was used early in the fifth century ó there was a council held at Ephesus 431 AD and then twenty years later at Chalcedon there was another council, the council of Chalcedon, and they both used this term about Mary. It is translated usually into English as mother of God, Greek word theoticos, it means God-bearer. In other words what they were saying, and they were true in this, is that which was born of the virgin Mary, the person that was born, was none other than God the Son. So in that sense Mary was theoticos, the God-bearer. But of course when you turn that into the phrase mother of God well you see what it is doing. It is elevating Mary, it is making you think that, well, mothers take precedence over their sons, chronologically, so she must have been before God the Son. You can understand how it is all these superstitions built up when you have got that false pre-supposition about her.

But the child that was born to Mary, truly was God, the person was God ó God and man. The humanity it came from the womb of the virgin Mary but the divinity certainly did not! The divinity had always been in existence, the person of our Lord was eternal. the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. What happened in the miracle of the incarnation was this, that He who from all eternity had been God, took to Himself our human nature, joined it together with the divine nature in the unity of His person, so that henceforth He had the human and the divine nature. And He still has them in heaven. He has a body, the body that came form the womb of the virgin Mary.

So we are not to be disrespectful towards Mary but we are certainly not to worship her. We are to see in her a great example of faith. Staggering faith. The angel comes to her and makes this amazing announcement to her and Mary who just does not understand how it can happen, Mary yet says, ëI believe, because God has spoken this to me!í Therefore she is a wonderful example to us of faith. But you know she was a sinner. I have quoted to you from that time when she went to see her cousin Elisabeth and we saw Elisabethís reaction to her. But more significant are those words that Mary speaks in the Magnificat. ë And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviourí [Luke 1:46,47]. Now who needs a Saviour? Sinners; Mary was a sinner, she needed a Saviour. She was not immaculate, she was not sinless, she was a sinner like the rest of us. In those various verses that I have quoted to you subsequently from the Gospels, you will see where the sin comes in. where she comes and she rebukes her Son. She had no business to rebuke Him. When she obviously thinks that He is going about things the wrong way and she herself has to be rebuked by Jesus. She was a sinner, but a saved sinner, a sinner whose own Son was her Saviour.

She is a wonderful example to us, I say, of faith and obedience and we are to emulate her. We are, yes, to believe whatever it is that God has revealed here in His word, we are not to be doubting, we are not to say: ëAh, but that is impossible. things like that do not happen. With God nothing shall be impossible and the birth of Jesus from the virgin Mary you might say is the final proof of that. So we honour her, we do not worship her. We do not elevate her to those unbiblical heights that sadly so many  people in the world elevate her to. We recognise her as a sinner saved by grace and we thank God that He is able to come and save any other sinner who like her, believe in the promises of God and trust in the Son of God. That is the only way to go to heaven.

Amen
 
 

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