For half of my life, I was in a protestant, fundamentalist Christian tradition that acknowledged Mary only once a year, at Christmastime, as Jesus’s mother, when we would read the Luke nativity story.  That is all I really understood about Mary.  But in the last decade and a half, I became more intentional to explore the wider Christian tradition and I also became more deeply contemplative in my spirituality.  Curiously, both these movements brought me closer to Mary, who has come to inspire me and teach me, but mostly, challenge me.

Luke writes that Mary pondered the words of the angel (1:29). I ponder Mary’s kenotic choice.  Mary has agency and so is free to decline to be impregnated by the Spirit with Jesus.  But, incredibly, she renounces her own will and power^[3] to be the mother of God-in-flesh. The emptying of her will results in her being filled with God.  Through Mary, it is shown that “barrenness is the condition of fruitfulness.”^[4]  The fruitfulness of Mary’s fiat is that she participates in God becoming flesh – “for in the union of God and humanity, it is Mary who imparts the humanity.”^[5]  Her consent opens up a way for the beginning of a new creation^[6] and “preserves the mystery of life, the power opposed to death.”^[7]  Mary participates in the redemptive mission of God.^[8]   She “becomes a sign of grace, the sign of what is truly salvific and healing: the ready openness that submits itself to God’s will.”^[9] I stand amazed.

Mary’s kenotic act offers me a window through which to see and understand part of the mystery of God.  It is imitative of her own son Jesus before he has even revealed it to the world.^[10]  Jesus, through both his teaching and how he lived his life, would reveal kenosis as God’s way of being.  He would teach in the Sermon on the Mount that, ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 5:3). Rather than be full of ourselves, we are to be emptied of egotism, void of willfulness to experience God’s reign.^[11] Jesus taught that true power and greatness is not in dominating and oppressing others but by serving all (Matthew 20:25-26).  He revealed that “equality with God is not through getting but through giving until he was empty.”^[12]

Jesus lived his life doing only what he saw his Father God doing, saying only what he heard his Father God speak (John 5:19, 12:49). He gave himself so completely to this way of being that he consented to suffering and being killed when, in the garden of Gethsemane, he surrendered to God’s will being done and not his own (Luke 22:42).  Kenosis is the framework that unifies the entire life of Christ.^[13]

In that framework, Jesus revealed that God’s will is done on the earth through the surrender of human will.  Kenosis is a revelation of God’s nature.^[14]  It is in this way that Mary participates in revealing part of the divine mystery.

If we widen the lens on kenosis in scripture, we also see God self-emptying at creation. That is, in creating humanity with the freedom to choose, God made space for humans to choose God’s will or reject it.^[15]  It is the “lamb slain at the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8).^[16] Kenosis is present at creation. This is what gives Mary her agency.

We see in God at creation, in Mary’s consent to God, and in Jesus’s full life, that the divine way of reigning is through self-emptying and self-giving.^[17] God’s victory is through humility.^[18]

From what we read about Mary in the gospels, she does not renounce her fiat. Mary continues to surrender to God’s will being done even when Joseph is about to divorce her, when she has to flee to Egypt to protect Jesus from a genocidal king, and when she fears Jesus lost though he is teaching in the temple.  Mary continues in this way as she watches her son live out a unique destiny that sees him misunderstood, rejected, betrayed, tortured, and condemned as a blasphemer and put to death.^[19]  She continues to self-empty, to live a life of ongoing surrender to God, and in this way, too, is like her son.

In Mary and in Jesus, we see that God has chosen human partners who can bridge heaven and earth. That is, when we renounce our human will so that God’s will is done, it opens up a way for God’s love and presence to be manifested in the world.^[20] Sarah Jane Boss describes it this way, “It is because one woman (Mary) did this thing once, decisively, that…Christians have confidence that human beings can mediate the divine presence to the rest of creation.”^[21]

Mary opens up a unique window into the divine mystery, helps us see God more clearly, and to understand how God is at work in the world. Francesca Murphy, writing on the Mariology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, captures it this way, “What it means to be Christian in relation to God is articulated in Mary.”^[22]  In Mary I see that when we renounce our will to do God’s will we are imaging God, we are being like God – for this is God’s nature as revealed at creation and in Jesus.^[23] This is no doormat posture! We renounce our own self-will and the power we have to make room for the all-powerful.  It is for me a humbling truth.

When I consider the landscape of the world at present and observe horror in the Middle East, rising hate, racism, and violence, a movement to autocratic government and militarism, climate crises, economic hardship, and relationships in need of reconciliation – I ache for God’s loving will to be done upon the earth. When I consider Mary’s life, I see that my consent to God opens up a way for that to happen. Mary shows me what is possible when a human being consents to God’s will and renounces their own will and power. She points me to the way to experience the fullness of God in the here and now.  Mary challenges me to do the same.