December of 2022 was, for some reason, a time of unusually frequent online discussion about the song “Mary, Did You Know?” This observation is strictly based on my own encounters, not on any verifiable web data. The song has been on my radar most Decembers since 2018, when I wrote a PrayTell blog post, “What Did Mary Know?”
I’d already observed the increased 2022 activity around the song (and the overly-expansive content many people presume to be in Luke’s Annunciation scene and Magnificat) when the pastor of the UCC church I serve as music director asked me if I’d mind him quoting my blog post as part of his sermon about the song.
Truth be told, I’m more often intrigued by the question “What did Jesus know?” Some of the Johannine scenes we encounter during the early Sundays of Ordinary Time tend to get that question in motion for me. When two of John the Baptist’s disciples leave him to follow Jesus, and when Jesus asks them “What are you looking for?” and they reply that they want to know where he’s staying, I sometimes wonder if Jesus didn’t get a little creeped out by these two guys who were somewhat out of the blue following after him, ready to track him down to his residence. “No, seriously—what, exactly, are you looking for? You know, my cousin’s a great guy; you could do worse than continuing to follow him.” Similarly, when his mother comes up to him at Cana with a problem that isn’t really his to deal with, you couldn’t honestly have blamed him if he’d asked her: “And this affects me, how?” (The whole crisis of a party without wine notwithstanding.)
For me, as for so many of my ancestors in faith, it all boils down to my mortal inability to readily grasp that Jesus was both human and divine: completely, fully, truly, and simultaneously both human and divine. It was from the inability to grasp this truth that the most popular heresies were (and continue to be) born. (Not to mention our larger inability to live as both/and, not either/or, people.)
I, for example, often struggle not to be a Closet Monophysite. Since I have a very, VERY firm grasp on what it means to be fully (and feebly) human, the best I can sometimes do is imagine the human side of Jesus being completely submerged, flailing around inside the divine nature, almost as if drowning. A friend of mine calls herself a Seasonal Nestorian. The “spiritual but not religious” folks I know are mostly Arians. What kind of heretic are you?
The Jesuit liturgical theologian Edward Kilmartin purportedly said that a good theologian is always one preposition away from heresy. (I’ve heard several of his students use this aphorism.) For those of us whose theological skill isn’t quite so finely honed, it’s not a surprise that we sometimes cross over that prepositional (or some other) boundary.
Yet, before we all hasten to gather up the tinder, kindling, and firewood, it’s important to recall that a true heresy is
1) Public (vs. in the interior/personal forum of conscience);
2) Intentional (it explicitly intends to contradict an officially-defined teaching, doctrine, or dogma;
3) Obstinate (once correction has been made, it is reiterated).
Disagreeing with or disliking someone’s theological (liturgical, spiritual …) point of view is not heresy.
Nevertheless, I find myself increasingly attracted to the possibility that maybe Jesus was clueless about why those two random guys started tailing him. Or maybe he was really mystified as to why his mother was going on and on about no wine. Or—and this one is seriously difficult for me—maybe he actually couldn’t work miracles when there was insufficient faith around him.
In earlier days, my tendency would have been to see the Jesus in my imagination serenely smiling as he asked a rhetorical question or pretended to be unable to work a miracle. I now try to give more credence to the scriptures’ accounts of the times his fully human nature was showing forth. It’s part of the larger endeavor to keep imagining God, as some have expressed it, as being more Jesus-like (vs. making Jesus more [Graeco-Roman] godlike).
Liturgically and—especially—sacramentally, a return to the Patristic era concept/understanding of sacraments as providing a theosis, a “divinizing” of us might be a good entry point into allowing a more-human Jesus into our spiritual lives. If we embrace the fact that a portion of the divine Christ was placed in us when we became members of the Body, and that the Spirit sealed that divinity in us, it may even assist our Lenten journey to return to and be renewed in baptismal grace. This may allow us to relate more deeply to the Jesus in the desert who was sunburned, near fainting (just like me, that one time I fell asleep at the beach!); who may have been as outright startled as his followers by the Transfiguration; who was humanly and understandably afraid as tensions grew more pronounced with the authorities (civil and religious); whose resolve may have bowed but never broke during the horrors of his final bodily days.
It feels like what I’m planning to give up for Lent this year is the heresy I so often live with. I may even try to have an indistinct, unsung version of “Jesus, Did You Know?” as my Lenten soundtrack.
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