A Big Surprise

By Jonathan Storment

Right now I am reading one of the most recent books to crack the Best Seller list “So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed” It is a witty look at the way that public shaming is having a renaissance in todays world.

Today we don’t lock people up in stocks or tar and feather them, we don’t need to…we have Twitter and Facebook, and we have shame, lots of shame.

When I was in high school, I knew a girl who got pregnant, and she played the “Mary card”, the full on, “How can this be when I’ve never been with a man?-Mary card.”  It was the Immaculate Deception.

I grew up in a small town that didn’t have a lot of Catholic influence, and no one sent word to the Vatican for a confirmation. My friend and her Joseph-esque boyfriend quietly married and the scandal of it all, at least from my perspective, eventually died down.

I still think about her from time to time.  Specifically I think about her when I read those scenes in the Gospel where Jesus is teaching and people bring up his mom. Remember those moments, “Isn’t this the Carpenter, Joseph’s son?”  When Jesus seems to get up on His high horse and starts acting like He knows the best way to live, those are the moments that people passive-aggressively bring it up.  Jesus isn’t like everyone else, he is an outsider.

John Ortberg has pointed out that Jesus entered the world with no dignity:  “He would have been known as a mamzer, a child whose parents were not married.  All languages have a word for mamzer, and all of them are ugly.”

In the Hebrew language, the word mamzer is the word for a child that comes out of a forbidden relationship.  The word is flexible, it can mean anything from a child born from incest to a child who was born from another mamzer. And a he-mamzer could only marry a she-mamzer.

But almost every single time the word is used it refers to a child born from parents who weren’t married.  And Jesus was known as a mamzer.  This is not just an incidental detail of Jesus’ life.  It is something that comes up often in the Gospels.

Jesus entered the world in shame, and he died in shame, naked condemned, and alone.

Well, almost alone.

Because the same mom who bore the shame of having a baby when she wasn’t married, and having a son whom she thought had a really strong Messiah complex, was still a mom when it came time for Jesus to die.  She had put diapers on Jesus and so if someone must bear witness to this humiliation, she would be the one.

It is heartbreaking really, if you picture her standing at the Cross, watching her hopes dashed and her humiliations rekindled.  I’ll bet Mary is a woman on the edge of snapping, after all she has been through, after all she has suffered and hoped (and sometimes hope was how she suffered) it comes to this.  Her son, her mamzer son, is killed by the Romans and some religious leaders.

But…

The Russian Orthodox have a unorthodox way of celebrating Easter.  I am not sure if it is an official part of their liturgy, but it is widely practiced anyway.  They begin their Easter services by telling jokes.  They do this because they want to revive what the original Easter would have actually felt like:  The humor of a woman being the first apostle, of bringing flowers to a dead man’s grave only to find out that the Gardener wasn’t the Gardener and the tomb didn’t need decorating.

I think the Russian Orthodox Christians are on to something.  There is something about Easter morning that no words can do justice.  This was true from the very first Easter.

Something perfectly new in the history of the Universe had happened [in the resurrection].  Christ had defeated death.  The door which had always been locked had for the very first time been forced open.—C. S. Lewis

I love that line, “The door that had always been locked had been forced open…” There are no words for experiences like this that have no precedent, but here is one that gets close:  Surprise!

It is interesting that the Gospel of Luke uses similar language to describe Mary’s pregnancy and Jesus’ resurrection.  Both scenes depict the same kinds of emotion, people are troubled but filled with joy (and in one case a baby).  I think the Gospel is doing something here.  It is connecting these two stories on purpose.  I like the way A.J. Swoboda says this:

if there was one person who desperately needed Jesus to be resurrected, it was Mary.  The whole thing about Mary’s story – getting pregnant while being a virgin and all – was probably never really believed.  She had held in this whole time even when people called her a liar and whore.  When we think hard about it, the only time that Mary’s story would have actually been believed by others was after Jesus has been resurrected.  Only then was her story legitimized.

People call the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of the Great Reversal, and in so many ways that is exactly right.  Only in Luke, does Jesus say things like “don’t take the best seats at the banquet, take the worst ones, because the Master of the Banquet might rearrange the seating order.”  Only in Luke does Jesus connect the human quest for honor and shame to the “Resurrection of the Righteous.”

It is only in Luke that Mary opens up singing about how all generations will call her blessed, maybe it was intentional that the other gospels left it out, because all generations didn’t call her blessed…at least not her generation.

Mary wasn’t called “blessed” until after the Resurrection, before that she was called something that sounded much less holy.  But after God raised Jesus from the dead, everything changed.  And I would have loved to have been in the rooms where the men who had publically shamed this teenage girl slowly had it dawn on them that the one they had all assumed had been sexually promiscuous and dishonest was in all actuality the Mother of God.

And the mamzer was no longer a mamzer, he was, in fact, the Messiah.

Surprise!