I Should Give You This Today Too

At the same time. Mary's characterization of herself as the "slave" of the Lord is the text most responsible for the impression of her as a passive character, the antithesis of a liberated woman. In this Luke's way of setting her up as the model for submissive feminine behavior and of articulating the acceptance of patriarchal belief in female inferiority, dependence, and helplessness? Slaves held the lowest position within the Israelite, Jewish and Christian communities and were without rights at law, unable to won property, or have a family or a genealogy in the proper sense. The term "slave" has a shock value that can be felt by those today who are aware of their heritage of slavery and who are anguished by the slavery that exists in our world. Luke, however surely intends the term to have a positive value here. It must be seen in connection with the Jewish use of the honrary title "slave of God," applied to a few outstanding men of Israelite history [Moses, Joshua, Abraham, David Isaac, the prophets, Jacob] and to one woman [Hannah].* The word associates Mary also with Jesus, portrayed as among the disciples "as one who serves" (22:27) though not called "slave," and with the female slaves on whom God's spirit would be poured out "in the last days" making them prophets (Acts 2:17-18, citing Joel 2:29-32).

Jane Schaberg

 

It is one of the most obvious things about the history of Christianity since it first gained official status in the Roman Empire that the words that Jesus said about the last being first, that those wanting to be the greatest of his followers had to make themselves the lowest, serving all, becoming the servant of all, perhaps a "slave" to all masters was not the model of leadership followed either among those who professed their secular power was either at the will of God or in the service of Christianity or, in fact, in most of the history of Popes, bishops, priests, ministers, even in many cases monks and women religious, though I will say that the lower down in the ranks you get the more often they did try to live that longest or metaphorical crucifixions were taken up and lived out. I don't know but that the farther down you get the more often service to the poorest among us got the women religious, monks, priests, even bishops the crucifixion of martyrdom. That has certainly been the case in our time.

That that was certainly not how those texts were read and still are read by those who practice earthly power is true, it is as true that there have been Christians, certainly from the time we have women of education leaving us writing, as many monks and friars and brothers have, even some of the earliest theologians and saints, they have seen things at least generally along those lines. If they understood anything about what Luke says about Mary in that context, I don't know. 

 

* Certainly Luke had that in mind because the text of Mary's song where that is said parallels Hannah's song in a similar context in 1 Samuel 2:1-10. These are things that are, of course, lost on most casual readers of hearers of Luke most of whom probably aren't aware of Hannah's song (If Mary did say what Luke has her saying, she certainly knew that verse). I don't think the oppressive use to which the Magnificat has been put to by sexists in churches (none of them much more so that the Catholic Church) can be excused by ignorance. The men who used it that way could certainly have been expected to know all of those verses, the ones about the last being first, the least among them being the representation of God, the "slavery" accepted by Mary not being like slaves would be treated like people, women treated universally by men. Their convenient, self-serving, preferred and willful misreading of them has universally dominated the position of women in Christianity right up and well into the modern period.