All Things Upside Down, or Men, Women and The Magnificat

At the moment, I should really be writing something more directly connected with the overwhelming number of final papers I need to hand in next week - but a man can only spend so much time checking the formatting of his footnotes before he needs a break.

I continue on my Auden kick, and I am reading through For the Time Being his extended poem written in the form of a Christmas oratorio. I figure it's good preparation for Christmas.
Reading that poem, together with this excellent post over at Without A Map, and some personal conversations with the wonderful author of that blog, has got me thinking again about the really extraordinary role of Mary in the history of Salvation.
One of the most striking passages so far is the "Temptation of St. Joseph."
The words of the 'Narrator' are a really amazing meditation on the relationship between Mary and Joseph, and the relationship between Men and Women generally.

The temptation of St. Joseph was the temptation to doubt Mary's fidelity when he discovered that she was pregnant, and to divorce her. In Eastern icons of the nativity, there is often an image of St. Joseph in the corner, conversing with an old man who represents the devil. Somehow, Joseph overcame his doubts, and did not send Mary away. I'm sure that God sending Gabriel (who probably got more work in this one six month period around 4 BC than he had since the book of Daniel) to drop him a line helped with this. Anyway, all of that is just by way of background. Here's what Mr. Auden has to say.

For the perpetual excuse
Of Adam for his fall - "My little Eve,
God bless her, did beguile me and I ate,"
For his insistence on a nurse,
All service breast and lap, for giving Fate
Feminine gender to make Girls believe
That they can save him, you must now atone,
Joseph in silence and alone
While she who loves you makes you shake with fright,
Your love for her must tuck you up and kiss goodnight.

For likening Love to war, for all
The pay-off lines of limericks in which
The weak resentful bar-fly shows his sting,
For talking of their spiritual
Beauty to chorus girls, for flattering
The features of old gorgons who are rich,
For the impudent grin and Irish charm
That hides a cold will to do harm,
Today the roles are altered; you must be The Weaker Sex whose passion is passivity.

Auden focuses in on something that is present in the gospel narratives, but which is, at least in my experience, rarely commented on. Mary is often presented as a meek and passive figure, the essence of some kind of idealized femininity. But this, it seems to me, is hardly biblical. Mary is passive in a certain sense - the incarnation was God's initiative, obviously, but Mary's willingness to participate in the whole plan was not a passive decision in the sense that she just sat there and watched things happen. She took it upon herself to endure outrageous difficulty, to be the bearer of the eternal word of God - to risk being the object of mockery and outcast. She even risked her life - Joseph could have had her stoned. Mary became the protagonist and hero of this small story within the wider gospel narrative.
And Mary seems to have known that God was working in her, and turning all things upside down. I say she seems to have known it, because the Magnificat, her own hymn, is full of this imagery.

My soul doth magnify the Lord,
and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.
For he hath regarded
the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold from henceforth
all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me,
and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him
throughout all generations.
He hath showed strength with his arm;
he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat,
and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel,
as he promised to our forefathers,
Abraham and his seed for ever.

The Magnificat is not the hymn of passive femininity - it is a battle hymn. The whole theme of it is that God has chosen the weak, the poor, the foolish things of this world as the instruments of his salvation. Ultimately, of course, we see this reversal in the cross, where the death of Christ, becomes his victory. In God's plan it is the weak and the poor who will be exalted, the slaves who will save the masters, and the woman who will save the man.
Mary herself is a remarkable instance of this kind of reversal. She describes her self as "a handmaiden" - a female slave. And in that society, there really wasn't a lower rank than a female slave. Mary was poor, obscure, and a woman, and after God made her the mother of his Son, a woman who was regarded as an adulteress.
She was the lowest of the low, but God made her, after her son, the most important player in the whole drama of salvation. Mary, the obscure Jewish girl, is in the words of the Eastern hymn, the "Champion Leader" of the Church. Joseph has a part to play in all this, of course, but it is not the role of leader. He is the passive one, the man who must stand by and be the servant to his wife and the child she carried.

So what does that mean? I don't know exactly. The gospel turns everything upside down - especially human power structures, and that includes gender roles. I don't think that men and women are interchangeable, and I think there are real differences between the sexes which go beyond the obvious and merely physical. For the sake of full disclosure, I should admit that I am even ambivalent about Women's ordination. Still, no anthropology can claim to be Christian if it privileges men over women, or ignores the fact that in the gospel there is an inherent critique of gender roles.

I am not going to attempt here to come up with an anthropology that does justice to the biblical picture of men and women. Plainly, it is a big topic, and it raises all sorts of issues in the life of the Church (Women's ordination being the most obvious), so for now, I am just going to be content to raise the issue, and welcome thoughts and comments.