Mary’s Love
December 12, 2021
I’d like you to think about the video we saw, where we have
Mary, tucked up in a barn with her newborn. She talks and muses on the future,
anticipating that people will come and see Jesus.
Mary is floating in a delicious bubble of love, one we
sometimes call the newborn bubble but Mary’s is not just any newborn bubble….
The whole scene has come about not just because of a human
boy meets girl love story but because God loves us “For God so loved the world
that He gave his only son……”
And John goes on to talk further about Gods love “Beloved,
let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born
of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God
is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his
only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”
If we look at all the relationships of love in this scene we
see that God loves Mary as an individual, and He sent Jesus because of his love
for humanity. Mary loves Jesus because she’s His mum, she also loves Him
because she loves God and is loved by God.
We know that after Mary met the angel Gabriel and discovered
her pregnancy she must have felt a whole spectrum of emotion: fear, joy,
exhaustion, uncertainty but the umbrella over it all and indeed the base of it
all, was love. Maybe we can describe it as a love sandwich.
We know that Mary was bathed in love because she was soon
visited by this bunch of shepherds. They were craggy and smelly, the sheep came
with them, there were flies and dust and Mary wasn’t there saying don’t touch
my kid you dirty shepherd, wash your hands, don’t breathe on him. She was there,
listening to their stories about an angel, matching it up with her conversation
with an angel, recognising that this was really supernatural, taking it all in,
viewing it as treasure to store in her heart.
When we think of Mary storing treasures in her heart, we are
thinking of a mum who is overcome with love for her child, her love is here and
now but it also stretches into His future. While Mary was recovering from the
birth she welcomed the faithful who came with stories and gifts and praise for
this baby who is love in human form.
Considering all this from twenty-one centuries later, it is
as if Mary could have been nodding in agreement with the words that would be
written a thousand years later:
O come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant. O come ye, o
come ye to Bethlehem. Come and behold
Him, born the King of Angels!”
As a mum, Mary was cherishing these early days with her son
and celebrating her new family and I’m sure she was looking forward to the ceremonies
that were coming up. Even now in a secular society we look forward to a
christening or a dedication and if our faith is important to us, dedicating a
child can be an emotional occasion.
Mary would have been looking forward to welcoming Jesus into
the Jewish faith through his circumcision on his eighth day and then the ceremony
called The Redemption of the First Born or Pidyon ha’ben.
The ceremony of Pidyon Ha’ben is described in Numbers and
Luke talks about the day of Jesus’ ceremony. So if the ceremony is described in
Numbers, and every Jewish person knows what is involved, why does Luke talk
about Jesus’ ceremony?
Lets have a little look at the redemption of the first born:
It traces back to the time after the Jewish people fled Egypt and the Lord,
because of His great love for His people, used Moses to lead all the ancestors
of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, out of slavery and into freedom. And it is
explained in Numbers:
“The Lord said to Moses, “Consecrate to me all the
firstborn. you shall set apart to the
Lord the first born. And when your son asks you, ‘What does this mean?’ you
shall say to him, ‘By a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, from the
house of slavery. When Pharaoh refused
to let us go, the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the
firstborn of man and the firstborn of animals. I sacrifice to the Lord all the
males that first open the womb, but all the firstborn of my sons I redeem.’”
Since the days of Moses, the custom of The Redemption of the
First Born has been an important event in the Jewish lifecycle.
In biblical times the
father would take his infant son into the Temple and find a godly priest, and
As the father presented his son, the priest would ask him “What is your
preference – Will you give me your firstborn for service in the temple or will
you redeem him for five shekels?” The father would then state his intention,
either to give up his son for priestly service or to redeem him.
And now the father would pay the five shekels to buy the
baby back from the temple and as the money changed hands, the priest would
chant blessings over the boy and say
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe who
has sanctified us by his commandments and commanded us concerning the
redemption of the firstborn. Amen.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe who
has kept us in life, sustained us and brought us to this occasion. Amen.
And just like we do now, there would be a meal in
celebration of this child and in memory of the way God blessed the Jewish
people.
Let’s go back to the question of why Luke talked about the
day Mary and Joseph did this for Jesus.
Joseph and Mary
brought their newborn baby boy to the Temple to show their love for God and
their gratitude for His faithfulness. Mary would be made ceremonially clean and
Jesus would be bought back from the temple.
Lets listen to what happened when Jesus was taken to the
temple for his ceremony:
“There was in Jerusalem a man named Simeon. This man was a righteous
one, he was devout, he waited eagerly for God to comfort Israel, and the Holy
Spirit was upon him. It has been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would
not die before he had seen the Messiah. Prompted by the Spirit, he went into the
Temple courts; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him
what the Torah required, Simeon took him in his arms, made a blessing to God,
and said, ‘Now, Lord, according to your word, your servant is at peace as you
let him go; for I have seen with my own eyes your salvation which you prepared
in the presence of all peoples –a light that will bring revelation to the
Gentiles and glory to your people Israel.’
Mary and Joseph would have been wanting and expecting Jesus’
ceremony to be performed by a devout man but Simeon went above their
expectations, he had been looking for the Messiah and he had recognised that
this little baby was actually the Messiah.
How special was Simeon? When I see a baby I don’t even know
if they look like their mum or their dad, I can’t really tell if they are a boy
or a girl, I can’t see what their eye colour might be….. but Simeon looked at
Jesus and said “THIS is the person we’ve been waiting for”
So Joseph handed Jesus to Simeon, and Simeon asked Joseph
for the five shekels and said the blessing and then he said some more. The Holy
Spirit had been talking to Simeon so he started to talk to Mary and he said “This child will cause many in Israel to fall
and to rise, he will become a sign who people will speak against; moreover, a
sword will pierce your own heart too. All this will happen in order to reveal
many people’s inmost thoughts’”
There weren’t a lot of people there that day but just there,
the few of them, Simeon quietly made the announcement to Israel that this
little baby was the Saviour they had all been waiting for.
So Luke is telling us about the very first time Jesus was
presented to the Jewish people, at his pidyon ha’ben or Redemption of the First
Born Ceremony.
The last presentation of Jesus to the Jewish people also
happened in Jerusalem but this Simeons prophecy would come true. Jesus stood
before Pilate who said Jesus must be crucified and we know that the crucifixion
pierced Jesus body with nails and a sword. The piercing that Simeon told them
about thirty years earlier would happen and Mary would have her heart broken,
full of love and sorrow and sadness when her boy Jesus gave up His life because
he loves us.
That would be a day of mourning many days, months, and years
ahead for Mary. But on the first day in Jerusalem with Jesus and Joseph, it was
a magnificent day of celebration. Love was present on this day and it would be
present every day of her life with Him. Love had come right on time, just as
the angel had said. Now her heart and life never would be the same.
Do you wonder how our hearts might be changed if we receive
this great gift of love? If the holiness
and the revolution and redemption of Christmas was active in our lives?
The music team is going to come and we will be able to
consider our response to God’s love as we sing to “O come let Us Adore Him”
There are some alternative words on the screen and you might
like to choose the words that resonate with you:
O Come Let us adore Him
O let me glorify Him
Let me reflect my Saviour
For He alone is worthy
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