We are all the Virgin Mary now

This is the world is the world is the world is the world.

It has come as a surprise to me that, having lived all of my life without the Virgin Mary, I’m so often told that I am in need of her. It would not be true to say I objected to the presence of Mary in the Scriptures or her role in the redemption of all things. It was more that her presence was to me like all of the biblical figures; forebear, exemplar, model of piety. She did not loom large, as mediatrix; she was mother to me only in the way Eve or Esther or Ruth was.

Mary is Scripture’s second Genesis. In her womb God does what God is always doing; that is to say, making something from nothing. Of the sexual mechanics of the Virgin birth there has been much ink spilled, and most of it has indelibly marked our understanding of how God works in the world. A few corrections are in order.

First, the denial of a natural conception in Mary’s womb is a claim about divine action and not about sex. The virgin birth intends to say nothing about sex. Indeed, that is precisely what it does—it says nothing about sex. It should not be implied that sex itself is what needed to be excluded from the divine-human equation in order to render it more pristine. Sex is the created mechanism wherein humans generate life; it is other things, too, but minimally it is this. In the virgin birth we have an account of only God acting on matter. A miracle is a place where only God is working. Everywhere else God is also working, but in a form that cooperates with human action.

So in the Virgin birth the mode of conception was miraculous, but the form of it was not. How Mary became pregnant was novel, but her pregnancy need not have been.

Various accounts of the virgin birth make mischief with the absence of sex in her conception. The old feminist rallying cry was that Mary “didn’t need a man”, as if Mary’s conception was primarily a feminist act. It is easy enough to ignore such claims, as they are not more than slogans. The problem is that these slogans contain a misunderstanding that cuts right at the heart of the matter. The virgin birth can be seen as a place where God is acting, or a place that aligns with a strong view of women’s agency. It would seem that it cannot be both.

There is perhaps not a more central misunderstanding at the heart of the Christian faith than the misunderstanding of the divine and the human. The misunderstanding is indeed most common in the realm of agency, for God’s agency is invisible in the world. We can see a man lift his hand or persuade a woman to become his wife, but we cannot see whether or how God is present in either occasion. So, too, with the virgin birth- we can see a belly swell, breasts fill with milk, a tiny infant emerge from the womb. What we cannot see, what we can never see, is whether or how God is present here. In pregnancy, we cannot see the father.

And so it is increasingly easy to render God invisible from this process. Surely Mary’s pregnancy was Mary’s act and resulted from her “yes”; it was her agency that brought God into the world. Or, it is entirely God who brought forth this miraculous conception and birth, and only God who can be said to be active. Mary’s “let it be” by this account is a mere capitulation to a process that was already begun. She was a passive traveler on the path to God being made flesh. These two options- it was Mary, or it was God- relitigate the account of how God is with the world.

Women’s reproductive lives render this story difficult to tell. It would be easy to understand conception and pregnancy as both active and passive. A woman can become pregnant against her will, just as she can fail to conceive a desired child. A woman cannot will her body to conceive, nor can she will it not to. Similarly, though pregnancies are quite demanding on mothers, their path is also inevitable. Whether or not you consent to being pregnant, you are—whether or not you attend to your health or take drugs or rest or not, a baby will be born. Though it is offensive to think that pregnancy might be thought to be passive, it is not surprising. There is at least something inevitable about its progress, regardless of how you feel about it at the time.

As I’ve said above, that the Virgin Birth has “nothing to do with sex” has led the more wily feminists to claim Mary’s conception as a radical feminist act. But the virgin birth is in fact not about conception at all. Rather it is about how God acts on matter.

The Spirit of God who “hovers” over the waters (Genesis 1:1) is the same spirit who “hovers” over Mary in Luke (1:35).[1] What we see is God doing what God is always doing- overshadowing matter and making it his own.

The question of agency of the material world is consistent also in Genesis and in Mary’s conception. God speaks to the void and says “let there be”; light, land, and life proceed. When Mary answers to the Virgin with “Be it unto me”, she is echoing Genesis’ jussive.[2] Mary’s “let it be” is no more passive than God’s own voice at the origin of all things.

Technology has rendered many forms of life obsolete, but it has worked also on our imaginations. It has worked, too, on our theological instincts. Where once we saw God at the origin of darkness and light, we may now see chance, or fate, or accident. Without revisiting the perennial and pointless arguments between proponents of creation and evolution, we might simply say- for some God was there, and for others there was nothing. The jussive conditional- “let there be” rings hollow in a technological age. There is no “let be”; there is doing or preventing.

And is this not also the question of Mary? Technological man sees himself as active and potent, producing fruit and working to make the orchard more efficient in the meantime. The further we develop our technological imaginations, the more we see ourselves as in control. In control, and solitary! But was Mary alone, the sole guarantee of Christ’s destiny, or was she accompanied? And can we really imagine an accompanying will of God that does not impede our will? This is the heart of the matter, a heart that is becoming increasingly difficult to explain.

Pregnancy raises grave theological questions, but in our day our questions are merely technological ones. Whose sperm entered Mary’s womb? Where did the genetic material originate? We can think of no more basic, no more interesting question than this- was Mary alone? Did she create this baby of her own body, solo?

That sex is irrelevant to the virgin birth renders Mary a certain kind of solitary. She mothers Jesus alone, with Joseph’s aid as a kindly latecomer. She does not need him, save his role in freeing her from public gossip and shame. With God on her side, she doesn’t really need a man.

Mary’s virginal conception, baptized with our technological imaginary, has yielded results I couldn’t have predicted- virgin births are now not miraculous, but common. I am referring here to the numerous technologies that have rendered sex irrelevant to conception. Without giving an account of each, we might at least say that now we have women who, having not had sexual intercourse, possibly ever- might conceive children. In my demographic- white highly educated Christian women in their early 40’s- it is far more common than you’d think. Just like Mary didn’t need a man, these women don’t either. The conception that they are granted comes remotely from God, but largely from themselves, alone. You cannot see the father, nor will you ever. We are living in an age of pregnant virgins who give no account of God. Perhaps the Virgin has become redundant because we see her all around us. Is it any surprise we can make no sense of the world? In a technological age religious symbols inevitable bear unintended meanings.

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[1] Where my Septuagint folks at? Let me know if you find consistency in the Greek here.

[2] The jussive conditional, I am told, is too common to allow it to bear this much theological weight. Phooey on biblical scholars, I will allow it nevertheless, if not on linguistic grounds than on narrative ones.