Mary

Luke introduces her as engaged to Joseph and gives no other detail. The angel arrives with a greeting that, the text says, troubles her, and announces a son. She asks one question — how, since she knows no man — and when she gets her answer she steps off the predictable script: she asks for no guarantee. She says, «behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word». In her world a pregnancy like that could cost her the marriage and her name.

What she sings afterwards, in her cousin Elisabeth's house, is the most political thing she says: the Magnificat, a hymn in which God pulls the mighty down from their seats and sends the rich away empty. Then come the census, the journey to Bethlehem, the manger, the shepherds and the flight into Egypt. Luke repeats the same note about her twice: she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart. It is almost all we are told about her inner life, and the evangelist underlines it.

Once Jesus begins to preach she appears rarely, and mostly from the side. At Cana she sets off the first miracle with a practical remark and an instruction to the servants: «whatsoever he saith unto you, do it». In Mark 3 she goes with the family to take him home, because they think he is out of his mind. The Gospels do not paint her as a woman who understands everything from the start, and that honesty makes her more believable, not less.

At the end she is where almost nobody is: standing by the cross. There Jesus entrusts her to the beloved disciple in two sentences, and the disciple takes her home. The last time she is named she is in the upper room in Jerusalem, praying with the eleven and with other women before Pentecost. After that, silence.

Mary teaches what an answer looks like when nothing is explained to you. She is given no plan, no timetable and no protection from what the village will say. She is given an announcement and a name. Her «be it unto me» is not resignation: it is a decision taken on all the information available, which was very little.

And she teaches a way of being that the rest of the New Testament hardly describes: keeping and pondering. Luke insists on it twice because it is the opposite of what the other characters do, who question, argue or run. She keeps quiet and waits thirty years.