First New Testament Reading-Luke 1: 26-38
Second New Testament Reading-Luke 1: 46-55
Imagine if you will an alternate universe. It exists alongside this one in another dimension. In many ways, it is much like our own. To the casual observer, it might seem almost identical. The crucial difference, however, is that in this universe history takes a different path: the confederates win the civil war, Hitler conquers Europe and North America, and Mother Teresa runs a sweatshop. Everything that went right in our world appears to have gone wrong in this alternate universe. This was not always the case, however. This alternate universe for a long time had roughly the same amount of good and evil as ours until one key event: the annunciation.
It wasn’t that Gabriel never visited Mary and said she would conceive the Son of God. It was that this Mary had psychopathic tendencies. For this reason, the Jesus of this alternate universe was nothing like the Jesus many of us have come to know through the Bible. Instead, Jesus was a kind of Bizarro Jesus similar to the Bizarro Superman created by Lex Luther to be an evil duplicate of Superman. I am not sure how many of you out there watched the same superhero cartoons I watched growing up.
In the Bizarro Universe where history took a different path, Mary listens to the proclamation of Gabriel and realizes with glee that within her womb is the key to her own wealth and fame. Jesus, she realizes, is the ultimate superpower weapon. All she has to do is harness his divinity and she will become powerful beyond her wildest imagination. Soon after Gabriel leaves, Mary praises God for giving her a gift that will lift her out of poverty up to the heights of unfathomable riches. “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed,” she says, “for the Mighty One has done great things for me. Holy is God’s name.” Nine months later, Jesus is born in a five star hotel. Mary has already cashed in on her son by allowing strangers to touch her holy belly for two denari a rub. Later, the wise men hand over all their treasures to have a 30-second peak. (Joseph, by the way, was never in the picture. After Gabriel visited, Mary decided she didn’t need him anymore.)
During Jesus’s adolescent development, Mary’s parenting techniques are a bit bizarre as well. As a side note, her techniques are amazingly reminiscent of those taught by James Dobson and Focus on the Family. To control her strong-willed child, Mary believes that not only is spanking necessary but that Jesus should be disciplined with a switch. Jesus receives a number of lashings the day he foolishly runs away to the Temple in Jerusalem. To drive home the point, the switch is kept next to Jesus’s bed so that he sees it as a daily reminder of the price to be paid for disobeying his mother.
The end result of years of such childrearing is this: Jesus learns that in order to be loved, he has to do whatever it takes to please his mother and fulfill her wishes. For many years, however, Mary is quite disappointed with the results of her parenting. As a teenager, Jesus shows no signs of being able to work miracles. He’s clumsy and self-conscious. He strains for hours to turn water into wine at a wedding only to end up with vinegar. Mary tries to lash Jesus into producing miracles, but all he does is cry. Finally, when Jesus is a young adult, Mary becomes so fed up with his ineptness at miracles that she kicks him out of the house and leaves him stranded in the wilderness for forty days and nights. It is after this lengthy punishment that Jesus at long last produces his first miracles: he turns stones into bread, he throws himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple only to be caught by angels, he even gains the power to rule over all of the kingdoms of the world. Ultimately, Jesus replaces Tiberius Ceaser as emperor and expands the Holy Roman Empire to first Africa and then the Americas. All of this, of course, he does to please his mother and win her love. So goes the story of the Bizarro Jesus.
While none of us may want to live in Bizarro world, it does give us some insight as to what the actual relationship between the Mary and Jesus of our world must have been like. If the adult Jesus struggled with temptations, an adolescent Jesus must have surely been susceptible to the influences of his parents. Judging by the results, we can reasonably conjecture that Mary along with Joseph must have done a pretty good job raising Jesus. Consider for instance, some of the insights into child development that Erich Fromm gives in his book The Art of Loving. Fromm paints a compelling picture of how children learn to love. Upon coming into the world, children tend to be more focused on getting their own needs met and less focused on loving others. Their first experience of love is thus being the object of love. They learn that if they eat, mom smiles. If they cry, they get picked up and soothed. If they have a bowel movement, they get praised. All of these responses give infants the feeling that they are loved. Fromm captures the essence of the lesson learned as follows:
I am loved because I am mother’s child. I am loved because I am helpless. I am loved because I am beautiful…I am loved because mother needs me. To put it in a more general formula: I am loved for what I am, or perhaps more accurately, I am loved because I am…There is nothing I have to do in order to be loved-mother’s love is unconditional.[i]
I like to think that Jesus must have gotten some of this unconditional love and that he got it from both his mom and dad. Otherwise, Jesus would have been more like our Bizarro Jesus than the Jesus our universe came to know. I can just imagine Jesus soaking in all that love and experiencing the joy of being someone else’s object of love. As we know from Jesus’s future ministry, however, at some point, Jesus advanced from being the object of love to being the doer of love. I am sturck by how Fromm imagines this transition for children. At some point in a child’s development, Fromm asserts:
…a new factor enters into the picture: that of a new feeling of producing love by one’s own activity. For the first time, the child thinks of giving something to mother (or to father), of producing something-a poem, a drawing, or whatever it may be. For the first time in the child’s life the idea of love is transformed from being loved into loving; into creating love.[ii]
The idea that learning how to give a gift can be part of our budding into loving human beings really excited me when I stumbled upon it a few weeks ago. Pardon me if I digress here briefly into a personal testimony. The reason Fromm’s conception of child development excited me was that I realized our church’s Advent festival was a great opportunity for me to participate in teaching kids about love. Fortuitously, I had volunteered to help staff the table where the kids were making heart-shaped Christmas tree ornaments that they would then give as a gift to someone else.
I was so thrilled by this that I wanted to do more, so I called up my sister, and we decided that I would help teach the same lesson of giving to my six-year old niece Anne this Advent. So it was that this past week, Anne received a letter from Big Head Bob explaining how he learned to experience the joy of giving on Christmas. In the past, he had hoarded nuts and berries for a giant Christmas feast that he ate all by himself, but now he happily gives his nuts and berries to others. To join in the fun, Bob tells Anne that she will receive a new and different heart-shaped Christmas tree ornament everyday until Christmas and that she is to give the ornament to someone else as a gift. The activity is a simple one to be sure, but for me it seemed to transform my own feelings about giving gifts this Christmas. The giving of gifts no longer seemed like such a commercial, consumeristic enterprise. It had been redeemed by the spirit of love.
The gospel story doesn’t tell us when and how Jesus learned to give and be loving, but it does tell us something else. When Gabriel appeared before Mary, he said, “Greetings, favored one!” He goes on to announce that Mary should not be afraid because she has “found favor with God.” The word “favor” might be more accurately translated as “grace” and “grace” can be defined as the unmerited gift of God’s love. Perhaps, the real reason we never had a Bizarro Jesus is because God’s unconditional love of Mary started a chain-reaction of giving and loving that we are still experiencing up to today.
This Advent season let’s recognize that we are all children of God. Let’s bask in the smile and the warmth of God. Let’s soak in God’s love, and then let us allow that love to inspire us to give and share with unconditional, heartfelt abandon. Amen.
[i] Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 36-37.
[ii] Ibid., 37.
