Theotokos

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Luke chapter one. And we'll start reading at verse 39. Once you found Luke 1:39, go ahead and stand with me for our gospel reading this morning.

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All right. Notice these words here as found in Luke 1. This is the word of God. In those days, Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the child leaped in her womb.

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And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord. Lord Jesus, thank you for this reading of your word.

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Help us now to see what it is you would like us to see. Give us ears to hear your voice to today and then respond accordingly. We pray in your name. Amen. You can be seated.

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A couple years ago, a few years ago, we say couple in a way. A few years ago, there was a little bit of a controversy, and maybe it still floats around. And you've heard of this around Christmas time. And it has to do with this song called Mary did, you'd know. Are you familiar with this song?

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Mary did you know that's your baby boy? I'm not going to try to sing it. You already hear me struggling. Okay, I know you like my singing, but I'm not going to do it today. Why are you laughing?

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So Mary did you know is this song that c. You know, is sort of sung from Mary's perspective, right? And some have said, you know, wow. No, no, no. When you're singing songs of worship, you worship God.

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Why are we singing about Mary? Why are we talking about Mary when we should be talking about God? But if one just cools their head for just a moment, it is God himself who directs our attention to Mary. He does so even in our text today, specifically. And it is this attention given to this woman, in fact, in our text today, two women, in fact, the barren Elizabeth and the virgin Mary.

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It is also incumbent upon us to remember that in the Apostles Creed, that is our confession of faith every single week out of our mouth, we confess that he that is Jesus, the son of the living God, was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. And so to sing from Mary's perspective to consider this is something appropriate and right for us. In fact, in fact, all of the. You say, well, how do you. How do we even do songs or whatever?

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Where should we get our theology of hymnody or songs and praise, worship? The Psalms, the Psalms and the Psalms remember all sorts of historical characters within the Bible. In other words, it lifts them up as examples at times and shows that they are overcome and sort of overtaken by the Son of God. In other words, David, Yeah, he was. He was, you know, the best king of Israel, but nothing like the king of Kings, you see.

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And so David is pointing to another, and so does Mary. So if I could, I just thought in the short sermonette that we have today, we would consider these two women that the scripture wants us to consider this morning and then specifically locate Mary and her place within salvation. Now, I've already mentioned there's these two women. And really, in the Gospel of Luke, as soon as you open up chapter one, you begin to see a parallel. If you've ever read Luke 1, which I hope you have, and hopefully you will do for the Christmas story even, and if you haven't, then join us Christmas Eve because we're going to read the whole Christmas story and you'll begin to see this a little bit.

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But there is a parallel between John the Baptist, isn't it, and Jesus. Both have prophecies that surround their birth, their coming into the world. Okay. And these two women represent this sort of thing. Of course, Zachariah has his own story.

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We don't have time to get into that, but it's a neat story of what happens. And finally, when he calls his name, John the Baptist, boom, his tongue is back. He can now speak again. And so now we have Mary. This instance where Mary goes into the Judean town in the hill country, okay.

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And we're given that specific location. And remember what I said with Luke, he's very interested in details. He's more of a detailed guy in among the Gospels, especially with geography and with who's who. Right. And we've seen that already as we've looked into, as we've been going through Advent.

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We've seen, for instance, you know, some of the other names that he's thrown around that were intended for us to say, oh, yeah, well, we can now locate this in time and space. In other words, it's not just some kind of mystical appearing of the Lord. He actually came into time and space, was conceived, gestated, born, lived and died, like all of us will do. And so we have Elizabeth, who's barren, which is in a long line, by the way, of barren. As soon as you know that, you're immediately starting to think of several barren women in the scriptures, right?

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Namely, the very beginning of salvation history, which is Genesis 12, where God decides to save the world through a barren geriatric couple. Now, just imagine that he goes to the nursing home and says, all right, I'm going to start there. That's where I'm going to start. And you're thinking, what in the world? What kind of story is this?

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You know, they've had their time and now they're at the end of their. I mean, you know, God is just getting started with them, okay? And through them, you remember Sarah now conceives and has a child, and then you have a line of barren women. We're not going to go through all of them, but you'll also remember Hannah, right? And so you get this long line of barrenness that turns into fruitfulness.

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And then we immediately have the spiritual direction we need, don't we? He likes to go to the desert to plant a garden. You see, where there's death, that's where he's moving in to bring new life. And so we have even the womb, symbolically as a tomb. In other words, where there should have been fruit, there was death, there was nothing.

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And this barrenness of Elizabeth, which represented a tomb, now gives way to life, which again, of course, presents us with resurrection, right? Where there's death to life. So all over this text, there's all kinds of motifs that are coming together as streams coming into a now roaring river, into the ocean. Of all that God's truth has to offer us, these little trickles, we must follow them during this Christmas season. Some people think, oh, yeah, it's just a kid's story.

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No, this is. No, this is. This takes every ounce of. Of the highest thinking that humankind could ever do to even begin to scrape at a little bit of the understanding we have of how God saves the world. And it's his design, not ours.

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We didn't make. No one would ever make up a story like this. It's ludicrous. Except that it's not because he touched the womb, the dead womb, and from it brought life. And so now Elizabeth is growing John the Baptist, right?

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And so Mary, after receiving this news and obeying the angel and the word that came from God through the angel, she now, by the Holy Spirit, has conceived Christ in her and is now growing Jesus. And so I love. It's one of My favorite stories, because there's really four people represented here. Even though we're, you know, in our minds, we're only seeing two of them, right? Two are hidden in the womb as they're growing.

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And so you have Elizabeth and Mary and John and Jesus, and they're all responding in some sort of way here in the text. Which is. Which is. Which is awesome. Even in utero, you remember.

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And so we have. We have Jesus who enters the room through Mary via Mary. And John leaps in the womb at this news. And immediately Mary, as the text says, is filled with the Holy Spirit. And so.

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So Elizabeth has her part. We don't have time to go, so I want to just now dial into Mary real quick. All right? And I want to just kind of call this part the essential Mary that we need to know. And of course, immediately when we start talking about Mary, many people drum up ideas from perhaps the Catholic Church or the Orthodox, and some of them may be wrong ideas.

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Okay? Because you say, well, Protestants, you know, we don't worship Mary, which the Catholic Church doesn't either, officially. Okay, now I understand. I've been to Mexico, okay? I've been to Ecuador.

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In both of those places, Mary worship is a real thing, and it's a real problem. However, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which I've read a couple times now, there is no worship of Mary. They would never do that because Mary is not God. And there's a clear demarcation of that, okay? However, in just like any group, there are heretical arms that.

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That grow and must be cut off. And this is one of them, okay? Nobody's worshiping Mary in orthodox Christianity. That's just the reality. All right?

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And so let's not overly critique the Catholic Church on this point, but also the Protestant response has been one to, let's just not deal with Mary at all, right? We just. As the pendulum does, often it swings too far. In other words, in Protestantism, Mary is largely forgotten. We rarely.

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We. Again, we drum up a controversy. Why are we seeing it from Mary's perspective? You know, it's like, because the scripture sees it from Mary's perspective. That's why.

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Like, how could you ever read the story of the birth of Jesus without a woman? Birth doesn't happen. But by women, if you don't know, which apparently is something our culture seems to want to forget, but is impossible to forget. It's built into nature. There's no way to get around it.

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And what's always cool to me is man was created first, but every other man comes from woman, including the son of man, Jesus Christ, to save us. And so. So here we have Mary. Who is she? What are some names that the Church has given that we, even as Protestants, can agree with our Catholic and Orthodox brothers and sisters and say, yes, this is Mary's place.

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Well, here's three that I just want to mention. First, she is the new Eve. She is the new Eve. Now you say, what are you talking about here? Well, where Eve disobeys, then tangles us up into sin.

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Mary obeys God and unties the knot of sin. And this is one of the ways that early on, I think it was perhaps Justin Martyr, who's writing in the second century, I mean, just a few years really, from the time of Christ, mentions how she unties what Eve tied us into. And this is. This is a great way to see even our sanctification is in untying us from sin. And this is what, of course, the Holy Spirit comes to do in making us holy.

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And so salvation is the work of God in cooperation with the human. New Eve. In other words, just as Eve freely chose to take the fruit, no one's forcing her hand. She can't blame the devil no more than we can blame the devil for our own culpability, right? Which there is no place for blaming the devil in this matter of culpable sin.

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If you're blaming the devil, you're not confessing your sins to be saved, okay? It's not the way it works. And so, whereas Eve ties us up freely, disobeying Mary unties the knot that will lead to our salvation, okay? By a free act of obedience. In other words, God does not force himself upon Mary.

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We must be clear of this. She says, let it be unto me according to your word. And what a prayer that is for all of us. Let it be to me according to your word. I don't know of a better prayer of obedience than that one.

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So God uses woman in this way, but also man. In other words, God uses both male and female in the salvific process. And it's beautiful because Christ is a man. He's not both. He's not both male and female.

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He comes as a man, and of course, he comes from woman. And so God in this way uses both. Just as we got ourselves in a pickle through man and woman. Remember, Paul is very clear. Eve, yes, she sinned first, but.

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But sin actually comes through man, which is why there must be a virginal birth, is why we. We. We demand Based off the scriptures that we have to have a virginal birth because man is bypassed and the Holy Spirit is who conceives within Mary the son of the living God, Jesus Christ, the Incarnation. And so in bypassing Adam's dead line, now there is a new humanity. Those notice not born of man.

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All of us are born of man, by the way, which is a deadline. We're under death under the penalty of death because of sin. That is passed down again through the line of Adam. Right? We're all.

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We can check that off. All of us are born of man, all of us are born of Adam, all of us are born under the curse. All of us are born under the penalty of death. But what does Jesus tell Nicodemus in John 3? What does he say, but you must be born again?

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What does he mean by this? What does he mean by this? He means there's a new humanity that we are to be born into. One of life and not of death. You see, one of blessing and not of cursing.

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So are you born of the Spirit?

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Because of Mary's free obedience to God's Word, the Holy Spirit conceives in her Christ. Isn't that exactly how salvation still comes? Out of a free act of trust in God and his Word? The Holy Spirit conceives in us Christ. We are born of Christ.

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And that line, that blessed line. So. So Mary is the new Eve. She is the better Eve in this regard and unties what we have become tied up into. Now the second one is this.

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Mary is the Ark of the Covenant. Now, this little detail here, she went to the hill country of Judea is important because if you remember your Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant was hidden there for quite some time. You remember this in the hill country of Judea, Obed Edom and his family actually guarded it. And then you remember that when David finally became king, they told him, hey, the Ark is over here. And you remember what he did?

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He went and got it. You remember this. And what does he do when he gets it and he's coming into the city of David? What does he do? He leaps for joy and dances.

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Right? You remember this? You see, all of this symbolism we call typology, a type is coming to fruition here in this story where now Mary is the Ark of the Covenant. What was the Ark of the Covenant? Do you remember what was in it?

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It represented the presence of God to the people. You remember where the Ark went? God went. You remember this? Until they disobeyed, of course.

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And then it was lost. And Contrary to Indiana Jones, it still is lost. Except now she shows up. And the Ark. You remember what was in the ark?

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This is a test question from Old Testament students. Remember, it was in our jar of manna. Right. Aaron's budding rod. And what else?

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The Word of God, the Ten Commandments. Now, who comes to Elizabeth carrying the word of God but Mary? She's the new ark. She's the new ark of the covenant. Because it's a new covenant, isn't it?

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You see, the old is passing. Remember the Hebrews reading we just had? The old is passing away, the new coming. Okay, there's much more we can say about the Ark of the coming. We got to move on.

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The last one here, and this is maybe for some the most controversial, is Theotokos. This is mother of God. So in other words, we call Mary the essential Mary. Here. Here's what we need to know.

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She's the new Eve. Yes. She's the Ark of the covenant. Yes. As she carries the word of God into the world, but that then makes her Theotokos, which is to say, God bearer, mother of God.

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Now, immediately people say, oh, God has no mother. And in a sense, that is true, because God is eternal, and God is not generated, okay, by the sexual process. So there is no mother involved. And in fact, God is not female in this regard, nor does he take upon himself female pronouns in the scripture. And because we believe that the scripture is the word of God, there is no changing that.

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In other words, it's done on purpose. It's done to teach us something. And so God has no mother. Yes, except that the Son of God does have a mother, because there's no way to become human without a mother. There's just no way.

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There's no way to be born into the world except through the womb. Now, he could have appeared just as a maybe fully developed adult male. That's not the way he chose to do it. We've already talked about that. He used both male and female to save the world.

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And so by doing this, notice what Elizabeth says. This is where this term comes from. She says, why has this happened to me? That the mother of my Lord comes to me.

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The mother of my Lord comes to me. How is it that God has come in you to my house again? Mary's not divine. Mary was created the Son of God uncreated. But when the Son of God takes upon himself human, the human nature, part of the human nature is having a body.

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Where does this body come from? But the Holy Spirit and Mary, a union that we call the hypostatic union of God and man. In other words, when God, the. The Son takes on humanity, human nature, human flesh, he's joining himself eternally to humans, marrying them in a way that is never going to be broken. Now that, as we used to say in seminary, you can put in your spiritual pipe and smoke on a little while.

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That's something to think about and to consider.

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And so Mary Elizabeth says, blessed are you among women, because she is. Why? Why? Because nobody in this room chose their mother. But you know who did?

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The one person in human history who chose his mother was God.

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I don't know about you, but if God chose a lady Mary, shouldn't we treat her maybe at the highest level of humanity? He's the one who chose her, and she is the one who obeyed.

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And so, yeah, she is the mother of God, because if she's not, the mother of God, who came from her is not God, and therefore we have no salvation. But in fact, blessed among women is Mary, which obviously elevates women to the highest level, which is why Christianity, beyond politics or any other social movement, human history has raised the sanctity of being a woman more than any other, period. That's just a fact, you say. I don't believe that. Okay, well, here's the point.

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Look at human history. It is Christianity, where Christianity spread the sanctity of women and also the sanctity of life, which go together, by the way. Surprise, surprise. Which is why here in today's text is one of the clearest examples of why abortion is murder and sin, and therefore sin. Had the living Son of God been aborted at this point because she was a virgin and nobody believed it and there was pressure, there would be no salvation, period.

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And that's a fact. No. John the Baptist is aware that Jesus enters the room and Jesus is called Lord, as in living Lord while in the womb. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand all this, but our culture has shrouded us in lies, untruths, and led women astray. And not just women, but therefore men.

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It's a great sin, but God wants to reverse that, and we ought to lift up the sanctity of life and of women today, like never before understood correctly and biblically, the Bible teaches us exactly how to treat one another. And so Jesus, a couple weeks ago when we were talking, mentioned that John was the greatest of the prophets born of women. He said, john's the greatest, and now we get the greatest woman, greatest man, John the Baptist, up until Jesus get it. And the greatest woman, Mary. What do they both have in common?

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They both have this attitude, which is the attitude we should have. I must decrease so that he might increase. In speaking about Mary, she immediately points us to Jesus. In speaking about John, he immediately points us to Jesus. And there's no proper, orthodox Christian way to see Christmas time than with John the Baptist and Mary.

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So this Christmas today, even as our kids come and tell us the Christmas story here in just a moment, our response is always this. Be it unto me according to your word. In the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, amen.

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