Tour de Farce
Luke 1:39-55
Christmas is the season of movies. No other holiday sparks Hollywood’s creativity quite like Christmas. There are countless versions of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol to choose from and argue over (I’m partial to the 1970 musical version with Albert Finney). It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart is another much-loved classic.
Then there are lighter takes on the holiday like A Christmas Story, which airs on repeat for 24 hours on one of the cable channels, as well as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Love Actually, which I’ve never actually seen, is regarded by many as a modern Christmas classic. And, of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without Bruce Willis battling German terrorists in a Los Angeles office building in Die Hard. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, the fact that Die Hard is set on Christmas Eve has inspired debate as to whether it should be considered a Christmas movie.
Now, this next movie I’m about to mention certainly inspired debate as well. It’s not exactly a Christmas movie, and yet it concerns a messiah-like figure. I’m referring to Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Released in 1979 by the English comedy troupe Monty Python, and produced by George Harrison of The Beatles, who said he funded the film because he wanted to watch it, Life of Brian is a parody of Hollywood biblical epics from the 1950s and 1960s. It does not, as many thought at the time, mock belief in Jesus Christ or Christ himself. Indeed, for a farcical movie, the character of Christ, who appears very briefly, is treated with great reverence.
For the uninitiated, the Brian at the center of Life of Brian is a contemporary of Jesus who, through circumstances largely beyond his control, is mistaken for the Messiah. The more he tries to persuade his followers that he is not the Messiah, the more convinced they become that he is. The movie is a complete and utter farce with all sorts of absurdities, like men playing most of the female roles, with the notable exception of the character Judith Iscariot, a Pontius Pilate with a speech impediment, an alien spaceship that appears out of nowhere as if from a different movie, and a closing scene of mass crucifixion set to a jaunty musical number titled “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
Two marginalized, pregnant women—one young and unwed, the other beyond the age to conceive—these are the people God chooses to put God’s plan of salvation into action.
What does any of this have to do with today’s reading in which a pregnant Mary visits her pregnant relative Elizabeth? Let me begin to answer that question by saying that recently I have come to recognize that there is understated and overlooked humor in the Gospels. I don’t mean humor like standup comedy or knock-knock jokes but something much more subtle.
I think it’s best to show what I mean by way of example. When the tour groups come to view the Tiffany windows, I tell them about the biblical story depicted in the Emmaus window to your right. As told in the Gospel of Luke, the scene takes place shortly after the resurrection. While walking toward the village of Emmaus, located just a few miles from Jerusalem, two disciples encounter the risen Jesus, but they don’t recognize him. Jesus asks them what they were talking about as they were walking down the road. They are incredulous that he seems to be the only person in Jerusalem who hasn’t heard of all the things that happened regarding Jesus of Nazareth.
“What things?” he asks.
The disciples then proceed to explain to Jesus all the things that happened to Jesus. You see what I mean? Subtle humor.
The humor that we find here in Luke 1 is of a different order. It’s the kind of humor that the Apostle Paul refers to as the “foolishness” of the gospel, a foolishness that subverts the status quo and that turns upside down both conventional wisdom and the established social order. Conventional wisdom of the day held that God favored the wealthy and the powerful. Indeed! Their very wealth and power was a sign of God’s favor! It was self-evident!
But here in Luke, Mary breaks into a song of praise to God because God has looked with favor on her lowly condition.
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowly state of his servant.
This is not false humility on Mary’s part. As a Jew, a woman, and a peasant, she was near the bottom rung of the social ladder in the Roman world of the first century. Yet God chose her to be the bearer of the good news…literally. She bears within her body the savior who will liberate the human race from its captivity to sin and death.
And who is Mary’s costar in this epochal drama? It is another female Jewish peasant, her relative Elizabeth, who herself is also pregnant, even though she is too old to conceive. But as the angel Gabriel told her husband Zechariah, who had his doubts, with God, anything is possible. Elizabeth now carries within her John the Baptist, the voice who will cry in the wilderness, “Prepare the way of the Lord.” As though eager to begin his prophetic ministry, John makes his first prophecy while still in the womb, leaping at the sound of Mary’s voice.
Two marginalized, pregnant women—one young and unwed, the other beyond the age to conceive—these are the people God chooses to put God’s plan of salvation into action. Not the emperor, not an esteemed senator, nor an accomplished general. Not a high priest nor a scholar. Not a wealthy landowner and not even someone from Rome, the most important city in the Empire, but rather two marginalized women from a Judean town in the hill country somewhere between nowhere and who cares.
The whole thing is absurd! It’s a tour de force of divine comedy. Or a tour de farce! Yes, it’s farcical! What writer would dream up something so ridiculous ? And yet it’s entirely in keeping with God’s character. In the Book of Deuteronomy, written long before the Gospel of Luke, God explains to the people of Israel why, out of all the nations on Earth, God chose them to be his people:
It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt (Deut. 7:7-8).
There are two things to note here. First, “It was because the Lord loved you.” Love. That is what God’s election of Israel boils down to. God chooses Israel because God loves Israel. It’s not about what Israel can do for God. This is not a transactional relationship. God does not say, “I will do something for you, if you do something for me.” Israel can do nothing for God. They’re not wealthy. They’re not powerful. They’re a nation of slaves! If God valued wealth and power, God could have chosen to work through an empire like Egypt that checked all the boxes: great wealth, military power, and plenty of human resources, including slaves. But God didn’t choose Egypt; God chose Egypt’s slaves. If you think about it, it’s laughable!
The second thing is that God chooses Israel for the sake of love and in order to keep the promise that God made to their ancestors, namely, to Abraham. Back to Deuteronomy: “It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand.” In other words, God keeps God’s promises. Mary says the same in her song of praise:
He has come to the aid of his child Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”
God had promised Abraham that through him all the nations of the Earth would be blessed, and in Mary’s son Jesus, that promise has been fulfilled. For while Jesus is the son of Mary, he is also the Son of God, and he comes to Earth to fulfill God’s eternal purpose of salvation for the world, a salvation that reconciles sinners to God and to one another and establishes God’s just reign. And yet for such a lofty mission the savior comes not with a show of power or self-importance but in the meekness of a child. He comes not as one born into a royal family but as the child of an unmarried peasant girl.
I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but God seems to be a big fan of irony. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul from 1 Corinthians, God chooses what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chooses what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chooses what is low and despised in the world to abolish things that are.
As for the things that are, God seems very interested in shaking those things up. Mary’s song praises God for scattering the proud, for bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly, and for filling the hungry with good things while sending the rich away empty. Mary’s voice is prophetic in that she speaks of these things as already accomplished, even though they clearly are not. Perhaps Mary recognizes that God’s promised future can already be glimpsed in his choosing her—an unwed peasant girl—to be the bearer of the Messiah.
As for what that means for you, it means that if God can work through Mary (and Elizabeth, for that matter), God can and does and will work through you…no matter how young or old you may be, no matter how overlooked or unseen you may feel. God sent his Son Jesus Christ into the world for you, for me, and for each one of us, for God has looked with favor on our lowly state.