It’s too good to be true. We hear people say this. The reason may be because we live in desperate times that we have acquired the natural suspicion that what is good may be too good to be true. Our conception of truth is “reality” and “reality” is measured by proximity, that is, the closer we are to whatever the phenomenon may be, the closer we are to truth. Could this be one of the reasons why people of this country love to stop and check out the goriness of a car accident? We subscribe to an unquestioned assumption about truth that may account for the growth and popularity of the genre, otherwise known as Reality TV. Truth is “Reality TV”. It follows that our conception of truth is basically what we can see.Unfortunately, what we have seen hasn’t been entirely edifying. We have seen two great wars and many more in the last 100 years. In the last 25 years of political and economic upheavals, what we have witnessed has made us fearful for our security be it what we eat, where we live and what we do. No doubt, the fear we have is fuelled by what we see as the breaking down of law and order in the country as we witness the impotence of the individual citizen. Pregnant women are not safe from snatch thieves. ATMs are blown out of their safe enclosures. Recently, we are told that luxury cars are stolen with “inside help”. People are scammed left and right by quick get-rich programmes. The brazenness with which people exploit even the dead paints a rather dismal and bleak picture of reality. There are more reasons to be pessimistic than optimistic. Thus, when something is good, it is often too good to be true.
This pessimistic world view does have an effect on how we want to understand the 4th Sunday of Advent and consequently what Christmas may truly represent. We dedicate this Sunday to Mary. The birth of Christ must necessarily involve the motherhood of Mary. Is she too good to be true? It would seem so. First of all, she’s so “unreal”. We want a “real” Mary but we want a “real” Mary who actually represents our human limitation. If you think about it, this “real” Mary may actually mask our pessimism’s desire to limit her capacity to respond to God. It is true that we feel more at home with a Mary who is pregnant out of wedlock. She has more affinity with us when we think of her as an “unwed teenage mother”. Furthermore, Mary seals her “being so much like us” when we conceive of her as not just the mother of Jesus but also the biological mother of the brothers of Jesus. Underlying our wanting Mary to be so much like us is our inability to deal with someone whose calling is directed beyond this world. [As an aside, is it not true that people are often mean to those who are “holy”?]
When we are unable to deal with Mary’s other directedness or we perceive her as being too good to be true, then we may be struggling with at least two fundamental beliefs. The first struggle is the difficulty in dealing with a good God. In the First Reading, David wanted to build God a house, a temple worthy of Him. In reality, it was the reverse for it was God who built David a dynasty, the House of David that will last forever. This is how good God is, for every attempt of ours to please Him will be met by His returning generosity. But, our human limitation often thinks of God as one whose measure is circumscribed by our generosity. For example, the more we pray, the more God ought to answer our prayers. That is often the way we calculate God’s generosity. For those who have experienced God’s benevolence, they know that God’s generosity is always beyond what they had expected. Thus, Mary’s yes to God is premised on believing that God would never be outdone by her generosity. Even in the face of the seeming defeat of her Son who died on the Cross, she dared to remain ever faithful to His Cross because she knew in faith this God who is generous. And this leads me to the second struggle.
This struggle betrays a crisis of belief in who we can really be and what we can really do. People, and Catholics included, have derided Mary’s perpetual virginity. On the one hand, are we dealing here with stuff or matter which belongs to the realm, at best, of theological construct or at worst, of legends and both having no connexion to reality? Or, on the other hand, what lies behind the rejection of Mary’s virginity is also a rejection of our capacity to live a life which is not self-centred. We do not believe that we can be God-centred.
Mary represents the best of who we can be. Thus, desiring her to be like us is to abdicate our calling to cooperate with God. Yes, it is true that all of us are affected by the division of Original Sin but when we look at Mary, we recognise the true capacity of the human spirit—its ability to be taken up by God like Mary was.
It is right that the 4th Sunday of Advent be given over to Mary. The Catholic belief in Mary’s greatness is not idolatrous. However, let me qualify that: some people’s behaviour may be idolatrous. But the belief in Mary’s greatness is not idolatrous because it is first and foremost a firm belief in God’s goodness and secondly she represents humanity’s capacity to respond totally to God.
