Someday is Now!
Mary's Witness Against Complacency and Gradualism
[Artwork by Jen Norton]
Every holiday has its own songs. The 4th of July has its patriotic anthems, Christmas has its carols, Easter has its hymns, New Year’s has its Auld Lang Syne, Halloween has its Thriller, and Mother’s Day has its Hip Hop. I know that may sound strange, but of all the genres of music, Hip Hop has the most and the best songs for Mother’s Day. We’ve got Tupac’s “Dear Mama”, Kanye West’s “Hey Mama”, Kendrick Lamar’s “Momma Said,” Chance the Rapper’s “Hey Ma”, Eminem’s “Headlights”, Jay-Z’s “Smile”, Nas’s “Dance”, Drake’s “Look What You’ve Done”, Ghostface Killah’s “All That I Got is You”, and my personal favorites, LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out” and Poison Clan’s “Shake Whatcha Mama Gave Ya.”
Why does Hip Hop have the best Mother’s Day music? It is a highly respected tradition and rite of passage for Hip Hop artists to dedicate a song to their mother. Hip Hop originated in Black and Brown communities as the voice of marginalized and oppressed people, a form of cultural resistance against systemic injustice, economic inequality, and police brutality. It functioned as a weapon of speech and a platform for oppressed people to tell their stories, build collective identity, and challenge dominant power structures.
The music is built on sharing raw, emotional stories about life on the streets, which naturally includes honoring their mothers. Many hardcore Hip Hop artists were raised by single mothers who were the primary source of love, sacrifice, and strength in their lives, serving as a “backbone” against poverty and adversity. Mothers were the original, unshakeable support system who maintained the household and the neighborhood. Hundreds of Hip Hop artists have made tributes to the matriarchs who raised them, expressing gratitude for their resilience, apologies for the conflict they caused, and grief over the loss of their beloved mothers.
If Jesus had been born in NY, LA, Atlanta, New Orleans, Chicago, or Houston, he might have become a hip-hop artist, and we would have a tribute song about his mother, Mary. The region where Mary grew up was the first-century equivalent of a poor Black or Brown neighborhood in a segregated city. Galilee was economically depressed, socially abandoned, and overpoliced. It was known as “Galilee of the Gentiles,” but a better translation would be “Galilee under the Gentiles,” to describe their long history of occupation under the boot of different empires. By Mary’s day, Galilee had been occupied by five different foreign powers for seven hundred years, which is almost three times as long as America has been in existence.
First-century Galilee was deeply impacted by Roman imperial rule and King Herod's intense taxation that placed a tremendous economic burden on people dependent on subsistence farming, and it caused rampant poverty. The Roman occupation was so brutal in Galilee that it became the seedbed of revolutionary activity. A radical sect known as the Zealots was founded in Galilee by a man named Judas, who led a revolt against Governor Quirinius’ tax policy, six years before Jesus was born. Later, his sons, Jacob and Simon, helped found an extreme group of Zealots, known as the Sicarii or “dagger men,” who passionately fought for social revolution.
Herod knew the Galileans were always on the brink of insurrection, so he worked to make rebellion impossible. He built military garrisons and cavalry centers throughout the region to minimize the chances of Jewish revolutionaries taking matters into their own hands. In fact, Herod was so oppressive, scholar Richard Horsley claims, “he instituted what we today would call a police state complete with loyalty oaths, surveillance, informers, secret police, imprisonment, torture, and brutal retaliation against any kind of dissent he heard of anywhere in Galilee.”[i]
Everyone in the first century knew Galilee was a generationally oppressed community that was also the home and headquarters of the greatest revolutionaries in Jewish history. This is where Mary, the mother of Jesus, was born. Mary was a common name in the first century. There are so many Marys in the gospels it is hard to tell them apart: Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, Mary, sister of Lazarus and Martha, and the other Mary (whoever that is). But the reason there are so many women in the first century who were named Mary is that it is the Aramaic version of Miriam, the name of Moses’ sister, who is celebrated for her pivotal role in saving Moses from the Nile as well as for her music and leadership, which she used to help deliver people to freedom.
Names are extremely important in Jewish culture. To give a child a name was to give it a purpose, a calling, and a mission in life. Names were aspirational—they were hopes, and many women were named Mary in first-century Galilee because all of the Jewish mothers and fathers in that region were hoping their children would grow up to be like Maryam, a liberator who would help deliver their people from the new Egypt that was brutally oppressing them. Imagine if a whole host of people named their daughters Rosa, as in Rosa Luxemburg or Rosa Parks.
We usually reserve sermons about Mary for Christmas. It is rare to hear about Mary in the month of May. That’s because we often reduce Mary’s witness to a single chapter of her life. In most of our minds, she has no context or backstory. My timeline this week was bombarded with gifts for Mother’s Day, and one that caught my attention was a book being sold that gives mothers the opportunity to write down the story of what their lives were like before their children were born. Why would we need something like that if women were not reduced to childbearing?
Like so many mothers, Mary’s life has been reduced to childbearing. We imagine that Mary’s life began when she conceived Jesus and that pregnancy was her primary vocation in life. We treat her like a perpetual mother, a holy womb for God, or even an obedient and compliant little girl. For hundreds of years, the Catholic church has insisted that Mary was a perpetual virgin for the rest of her life, who never got married, had sex, or gave birth to any other children after Jesus was born, even though we know historically that’s not true!
But Mary does have a backstory. She was a daughter of Galilee, a child of dreamers, resisters, and revolutionaries who were tired of being poor, pressed down, put upon, and pushed up against the wall. She was a descendant of radical Galileans who were tired of living like slaves in an occupied land, tired of eking out a living in a sparse land, tired of surviving hand to mouth, tired of struggling to get by, tired of the anxiety of not knowing where her next meal was going to come from, tired of not having enough nourishment to sustain life.
That’s why Mary sang those famous lyrics in Luke 2, “God has scattered the arrogant in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.” Her words seem novel, but Jewish listeners would have recognized something incredibly familiar. Like a jazz musician, hip-hop artist, DJ, or producer, Mary was riffing, sampling, and remixing a song that had been sung by Hebrew women and prophetesses who came before her.
She remixed Miriam’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people out of bondage. She remixed Deborah’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people from the hand of the Canaanites. She remixed Judith’s song that burst forth when God delivered her people a victory over the Assyrians. She remixed the song of the woman in Psalm 113 who proclaimed, “God raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap, to make them sit with princes. God gives the barren woman a home, making her the joyous mother of children.” And above all, she remixed Hannah’s song, who said: “My heart rejoices in the Lord, I rejoice in your liberation.”
Long before Mary carried Jesus in her womb, Mary carried the song of her people in her heart and the dreams of her ancestors in her bones. And she gave voice to a wild new version of that ancient song. It’s probably not surprising that most Hebrew women prophetesses were artists and poets; dancing and playing tambourines, composing music, and singing songs. But what is surprising is the common theme that appears in all the songs Mary remixed: deliverance—God’s liberatory activity on behalf of the people. Liberation is the common thread in every song that Mary carried and remixed into her famous song.
And over the years, Mary’s song became possibly the most terrifying, most hated, most banned, and most revolutionary song in Western History. Throughout history, poor and oppressed peoples have found great hope and strength in Mary’s song, while those at the top rung of the social ladder—the powers that be- have often found Mary’s song troublesome, abrasive, and threatening. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Mary’s song was known to strike fear in the hearts of the Russian Czars of the Romanov Dynasty. During the British Empire’s occupation of India in the late 19th century, Mary’s song was prohibited from being sung in churches.
In the 1980s, poor Guatemalans were so emboldened by Mary’s song in their fight for better wages that the government banned her words. The infamous US-backed dictator, General Pinochet, outlawed Mary’s song because he was afraid it would incite a revolution. A group of Argentinian mothers who lost their children during the Dirty War began placing Mary’s song on posters throughout the capital, so the government forbade the display of her “dangerous” words in public. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement sang Mary’s song in Zuccotti Park, confronting the greed and enormous disparity between rich and poor in America.
Loise Malcolm, who grew up as the child of missionaries in the poor villages of the Philippines, says that she remembers the day her parents first read the words of Mary’s song to the Filipino people. They responded with such a boisterous celebration that her parents were stunned! They asked the Filipino people why Mary’s song elicited such exultation, and the people told the missionaries it was the first time they’d heard the good news that God cares about them, the poor and the oppressed.
Only when we acknowledge the context that Mary grew up in, the history of resistance in Galilee, and Mary’s role as the carrier of her people’s songs of liberation, can we understand what’s going on in John 2. Here we find Mary and Jesus together at the wedding of a friend in Cana, six miles North of Nazareth, when something terrible happens. The wine runs out, and Mary says to Jesus, “Woman, why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but I would never address my mother “Woman,” nor would I dismiss her so quickly and arrogantly. I would be afraid to talk to my mother like that. Can you imagine if your mother asks you to wash the dishes or take out the trash, and you said, “Woman, don’t bother me. My hour has not yet come.” You might end up in the trash can! Jesus is lucky Mary didn’t pop him in the mouth!
But Mary got the last word. She did not even acknowledge Jesus’ comments, and she would not be dismissed by Jesus’ words. She continued to involve her son even when he did not think it was his time. She rejected the idea that his time had not come, and she looked at the servers and said, “Do whatever he tells you.” Haven’t we all had our mothers do something exactly like this to us? This is one of a mother’s superpowers. They can ignore our protests and find a way to get us to do exactly what they wanted us to do in the first place!
But there’s so much more going on here than a family squabble. The crisis of running out of wine at a wedding was a social scandal in the first century. It meant that the family hosting the wedding was poor, and running out of wine at their child’s wedding would have been humiliating. It would have been the cause of great shame, embarrassment, and a loss of dignity for a poor family and the newly married couple. Mary recognized what was about to happen because she knew the pain and the shame of poverty first-hand. She grew up poor herself, which is why she was the first to see the crisis and immediately asked her son to address the situation.
The crisis in Cana was not that people drank too much; the crisis in Cana was poverty. Jesus saw six stone water jars standing nearby, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. He told them to fill the jars to the brim with water, and he turned 180 gallons of water into 180 gallons of the finest wine, and the host of the banquet was overjoyed. He turned poverty into plenty. He turned the ceremony into a celebration. He turned embarrassment into elevation. He turned humiliation into honor. He turned frustration into festivity. He turned scarcity into abundance. He turned shame into glory. He turned crisis into jubilee. He turned mourning into dancing. He turned sackcloth into joy. He turned not enough into more than enough. He turned the old water of empty ritual into the new wine of the kingdom of God.
And it was all because of Mary and her persistent intervention. When it came to social crisis, when it came to abject poverty, when it came to public shame, Mary would not take “no” for an answer, even if it came from her son. Mary faced a “no more” moment and a “no way” answer, and she responded, “Yes, there is!”, “Yes, we can!”, and “Yes, you will.” Jesus thought he wasn’t ready. Jesus thought this wasn’t the moment. Jesus thought that it wasn’t the right time. Jesus thought the hour had not come to intervene and begin his ministry, but his mama knew better.
This week, the Supreme Court of the United States gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited discriminatory voting practices like racial gerrymandering. In doing so, they destroyed the work of an entire generation of black and brown civil rights leaders fought and (in some cases) died for, disenfranchised millions of Americans, and dishonored the legacy of those (like John Lewis) who were brutally beaten on the Edmund Pettis Bridge, those who marched from Selma to Montgomery with King, and the ‘Mothers’ of the voting rights movement like Fannie Lou Hamer, Marie Foster, and Amelia Robinson. If that doesn’t signal to you that we are in the fight of our lives against whiteness and fascism, the time has come to get involved politically, what will?
Mary knew that whenever there is poverty, the time has come. Whenever there is scarcity, the time has come. Whenever there is shame, the time has come. Whenever there is humiliation, the time has come. Whenever there is a lack of resources, the time has come. Whenever people are hurting, the time has come. Whenever people are suffering, the time has come. Whenever people are oppressed, the time has come. Whenever people are being harassed, the time has come. Whenever people are being exploited, the time has come. Whenever people are being mistreated, the time has come. Whenever people are being injured, the time has come. Whenever there is inequality, the time has come. Whenever there is racist gerrymandering, the time has come. Whenever there is voter suppression, the time has come! Whenever there is disenfranchisement, the time has come.
And that’s true in our own lives as well. Maybe there’s something you’ve been waiting on and meaning to do. Maybe like Jesus, you’ve been saying to yourself, or your mama, or your spouse, or your friends that you need to do it, you’ve been called to it, you’ve been ordained for it, you’ve been baptized into it, you’ve been anointed for it, you’ve been equipped for it, but it’s not the time. Maybe you’ve been resisting the quiet promptings of your heart, softly trying to push you to take the next step in work, in life, in love, or in ministry, but you’ve been saying, “Now is not the hour.” Well, Mother Mary is ignoring all of our protestations. Mother Mary is hearing none of our hesitations. Because Mother Mary knows what God knows that the time has come!
A friend of mine called me the other day and told me a story that she’d been asked to be the chair of the board of an organization that was going through a time of crisis. The leaders had asked her if she would serve, and she didn’t want to do it. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t interested. So, she turned them down. Then one day she was driving her to a restaurant and a check her car with the valet who was a woman. The woman didn’t know her and had never met her. She looked at my friend and said, “I see a special anointing on you. Honey, let God use you.” And my friend knew that this was the Spirit speaking to her, and she decided to take the position.
Sometimes we object to God’s timing. We say, “Not now, God. This isn’t the time for that. I’ve got too much going on. I’ve got bills to pay, mouths to feed, children to raise, appointments to take, a job to do, people to see, a life to live. I don’t have enough time or enough resources right now, and I just can’t do it.” But Mary disagrees. Mary knows that scarcity is a lie. Mary knows that with God, there is always enough. Mary knows that with God, all things are possible. Sometimes we need a word from Jesus’ mother, or our own mother, or our grandmother, or another person’s mother, or somebody like Mary who knows what it’s like to live on nothing, who's been through the fire and the flood, and who still believes in the power of transformation to get us moving.
Sometimes we need a push from someone like Mordecai, who told Esther, “Perhaps you have come to this position for such a time as this.” “And even if I should perish,” she replied, “I will go to the king”, because I know now is the right time. Sometimes we need a push from someone like Dr. King, who said, “The time is always right to do what is right.” Sometimes we need a push from someone who rejects the “tranquilizing drug of gradualism” and calls us to embrace the “fierce urgency of now.”
Sometimes we need a push from someone who believes that now is the time. Now is the time for compassion. Now is the time for mercy. Now is the time for grace. Now is the time for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Now is the time for generosity and solidarity. Now is the time for marching, protesting, advocating, organizing, and action. Now is the time for justice. Now is the time for equality! Now is the time for liberation.
And if you ask me why, I’ll tell you, “It’s because mama said so!” Mama Mary said, “God has scattered the arrogant in the thoughts of their hearts. God has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; God has filled the hungry with good things. God has sent the rich away empty.” And just like she said to her son 2000 years ago, she says the same thing to us today, “Now your time has come to do the same!
[i] Richard Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People, Trinity Press; Valley Forge, 1975.
This Mother's Day should push us into action.