Take a good look at this painting. It’s called “The Rest on the Flight into Egypt,” and it’s by Gerard David, a painter from the Netherlands, around the year 1510.
What might you expect this Mary to be like? What do you notice about her? And if you’re on Zoom, put a few words in the chat.
[For example: she looks calm, loving with Baby Jesus
Very pale white—doesn’t look indigenous to Middle East, more northern European
Clothes look reasonably clean and very nice
No halos
Educated?
Might be gentle, soft-spoken, meek, mild, quiet]
Does she look like the kind of woman to utter the exultant Magnificat that we read this morning, about bringing down the powerful, feeding the poor and sending the rich away hungry? Does she look like a radical justice – preaching truth teller?
She doesn’t to me. But the Magnificat has that kind of feeling to it, especially in these lines:
God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
That sounds like regime change!
God has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty. [Luke 1:51b-53.]
That sounds like she’s some kind of socialist. It’s downright vengeful! There’s a tinge of “take that!” energy in those words.
The Mary in this painting looks like a good girl, the perpetual virgin wearing blue for purity and divinity. She looks respectable, not like a teenager who found herself pregnant outside of marriage. She appears to be from the dominant class, not a peasant with no place to stay when it’s time to give birth. She does not look like a rabble rouser.
And yet those are the words we heard today: speaking truth to power, seeking a radical shift in the power structure so that the poor have what they need instead of being oppressed and starved and pushed off their land, taxed and censused and generally treated as disposable.
I suspect the real Mary had more spine, knew how to get by with very little, was dark-skinned and scrappy and tough. I’m guessing she knew, as a woman in a patriarchal society, and as a poor person with no political power, when to keep her mouth shut. But I’m also guessing she taught her baby Jesus a thing or two about justice, love, and compassion. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say.
As a woman with no social standing or political power, Mary may have felt that she had no place. Certainly she moves around a lot in the story. Shortly after she is visited by the angel Gabriel, she heads for the hills and stays for three months with her relative Elizabeth. And when Joseph and Mary show up in Jerusalem, there’s no room at the inn. She’s pregnant but not married, so she’s between her parents’ home of her childhood and the home she will make with Joseph as a married woman. And then in the story from Matthew’s Gospel, the Holy Family has to flee to Egypt—refugee immigrants with no place of their own. Lots of moving around. Mary has no place that she can call her own.
But what she asserts in the Magnificat reading is that now she will have a place in God’s plan.
“My soul magnifies the Creator,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
who has looked with favor on the lowliness of this servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is God’s name. [Luke 1:47-49.]
If we imagine Mary as being the one who taught Jesus a lot about justice for the oppressed and that God includes everyone in God’s realm and God’s love, then maybe she looked something like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who was born in the year 1900 in what is now Nigeria. She had the good fortune to receive an education, including a few years in England. She came back to Nigeria and taught in the school where she had studied.
At first, she was teaching students how to be proper British colonial subjects. She wore British-looking clothes and was very “correct.” She started a women’s group that consisted primarily of Western-educated Christian women. But over time, the women who sold goods at the market started coming to her. They were being taxed unfairly and were subject to price controls that restricted their ability to support their families. They needed a strategy to fight back. She taught them to read, and she began working with them on these social justice issues. A whole women’s resistance movement arose, and she was at the head of it.
At a certain point, in the late 1940s, when the local leader, Sir Ladapo Ademola II, was refusing to hear their complaints, troops massed just outside of town, and there was concern that these women protestors would be killed. This had happened 20 years earlier. What the women did instead, though, was to stand outside Sir Ademola’s house and take off their clothes. In Nigerian culture, a naked older woman has a spiritual power and authority that you don’t want to mess with. So all of a sudden the soldiers and Sir Ademola felt incapacitated. All these naked older women—where do you look? The soldiers spirited Sir Ademola out of the country in the middle of the night—he abdicated—and no one was killed. [Sources: Jad Abumrad, “Mother Knows Best,” on “This American Life,” broadcast on KUOW December 6, 2025; also Britannica, “Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti.”]
This feels like the kind of energy we’re hearing from Mary in the Magnificat. Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti has compassion for poor, illiterate women who are struggling to support their families; and a dedication to teaching them, empowering them, and strategizing creatively with them using their female bodies not as a weakness but as a strength. Being older women becomes their superpower.
This is the power of Mary when she knows herself to be God’s lowly servant and yet uniquely capable of bearing God’s son. As a poor and no doubt illiterate young peasant woman, Mary might be saying, “Who am I to do this thing?” and at the same time, “Who am I to say no to this amazing thing? Why not me?” She says yes—yes to this most dangerous situation of being unwed and pregnant, yes to becoming the mother of the Christ Child and teaching him about God’s justice, yes to being part of the ministry of God’s inclusive love for the poor, the sick, and the oppressed.
Are you looking for the Marys in our day? Look to the margins. Look to the unwed mothers at Mary’s Place, where we will deliver baby shower gifts. Look to the people in low-paying jobs struggling to keep their businesses going and support their families in the face of tariffs and the high costs of housing and healthcare and childcare. Look to the people oppressed by racism, sexism, anti-LGBT laws, random cessation of SNAP benefits and healthcare subsidies, anti-immigrant ICE deportation sweeps. Mary is there. She needs us, and we need her.
Or perhaps we are her. Perhaps God is asking us to do a special thing, to serve in some special way, not in spite of our frailties, but using them as our superpowers.
If the angel Gabriel came to you and said, “God has chosen you for this special mission,” perhaps there would be a temptation to say, “But I’m too old, or too tired, or too . . .” fill in the blank. Mary does say, “Me?? How is this going to work, since I’m a virgin?” And then she says yes. Okay.
What would it take for you to say yes?
In this season of Advent, we are all Mary, waiting for the birth of the Christ Child in each of us. We may not look like the northern European Mary of the paintings, and we may not sound like the on-fire Mary of the Magnificat, but we can still be bearers of Christ in our own superpower way. Jan Richardson’s prayer calls us to open up to that possibility. So I close today by reading that prayer again.
You hollow us out, God,
so that we may carry you,
and you endlessly fill us
only to be emptied again.
Make smooth our inward spaces
and sturdy,
that we may hold you
with less resistance
and bear you
with deeper grace. Amen.
[The prayer by Jan Richardson is used by permission of United Church Press from Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas. Copyright © 1998 by Jan L. Richardson.]