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Not a Silent Night

Mary Looks Back to Bethlehem

Abingdon Press

Beginning with the End

Christmas comes on December 25, but for many Americans it starts before that: on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The newspaper announces glad tidings of great joy with five pounds of advertisements. Big-screen TVs for several hundred dollars—can you believe it? Blu-ray players for next to nothing. The entire stock of men's clothing at 50 percent off. Unbelievable deals. And the stores open their doors at three, four, five o'clock in the morning. I mean, that's good news!

Several years ago the good news turned to tragedy for a Walmart employee on Long Island, New York. You may remember the story. Jdimytai Damour was a part-time seasonal worker at Walmart who had just started working there. His job was to stock the shelves in the morning. He arrived early that Friday and was assigned to stand by the door at 4:55 a.m. There were two thousand people standing outside in the cold, eager to get a great buy on a TV or a jacket or some other sale item.

The door looked like it was going to open, then it closed again. The people were frustrated and agitated. They were cold and ready to go inside. Some of them pounded on the glass doors. Others pushed on the doors, and as they did they noticed there was some give in them. The crowd surged forward. They pressed into the glass, the glass shattered, and the frame landed on top of Jdimytai Damour. The people rushed in to get their bargains, like a herd of cattle. They saw Jdimytai lying there. Some stepped over him, and some stepped on him. Even knowing he was hurt, people went on with their shopping, buying Christmas presents, making sure they got what they had waited for.

Before the morning was over, in spite of attempts to administer CPR, Jdimytai Damour was pronounced dead. It's a story of Christmas run amok, and it's symbolic of something bigger—a kind of amnesia, illustrating how ordinary people forget the real meaning of Christmas.

Advent is the church's response to this amnesia. Advent is a four-week period when Christians pause and say, "Let's remember what this is all about. Let's remember who the child is, born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Let's remember the hope and promise that come from him. Let's remember who he called us to be and what he called us to do. Let's remember the mission he gave us as we seek to live as Christ-followers." Advent is a time when we prepare ourselves spiritually to celebrate the birth of the Savior. The word advent comes from a Latin word that means "coming." During that four-week period we not only prepare to commemorate Christ's first advent, his birth in Bethlehem; we also prepare for the day when Christ will return, in glory, to usher in a new heaven and earth.

It is customary during Advent for churches to focus on the prophets, or John the Baptist, or the stories surrounding Jesus' birth. In this book we'll take a different approach. We'll explore Advent and the meaning of Christmas by focusing on Mary's perspective of her son. No one was closer to Jesus than Mary. No one shaped his life more than she did. No one knew him better, nor loved him more. And no other human being paid a greater price than she did for his birth, life, and death. Mary's own life was not blissful, peaceful, and blessed. It was challenging, painful, and at times filled with sorrow. Yet despite this, Mary "magnifies the Lord" and "rejoices in God," as she tells us in her joyful song, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55).

But it is not just exploring the meaning of Christ's birth through the eyes of Mary that makes this little book unique. Others have done the same, looking at the events in Mary's life leading up to the birth of Jesus. Rather, in this book we'll start not before the birth of Jesus but decades after. We'll begin at the end of Mary's life, years after Jesus' death and resurrection. Each week we'll journey back in time to key events in the life of Jesus as seen through Mary's eyes, until finally we arrive at the night he was born.

Mary's Final Years

Let's begin at the end of Mary's life, with what we know about Mary's final years and her death. It's a challenge to discuss Mary's last years, because there's not much known about them. Here the Bible is virtually silent. There's only one verse that mentions Mary by name after the resurrection of Christ. We're told in Acts 1:14 that, following Jesus' ascension and before the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, the disciples and "certain women, including Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers" constantly devoted themselves to prayer.

With little information about the rest of Mary's life found in Scripture, our only sources of information are the traditions that developed in the church during the centuries following her death. Some details are undoubtedly legendary; others may point us toward facts. In Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, these stories are an important part of the church's liturgical year, while Protestants are not likely to be as familiar with them.

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians commemorate Mary's death on August 15 each year. Roman Catholics celebrate this as the Feast of the Assumption and Orthodox Christians as the Feast of the Dormition. The two different names point to similar ideas held by Catholic and Orthodox Christians concerning what happened at Mary's death.

Roman Catholics believe that Mary was taken up bodily to heaven shortly after her burial (though some suggest she did not actually die, the consensus is that she died) as a special way in which Mary was honored by God as God had done with Enoch and Elijah in the Old Testament. Enoch and Elijah were righteous people who were "taken up" or assumed into heaven without experiencing death. In Genesis 5:24 we read, "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him." In Second Kings we read that Elijah was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire (2:11).

Orthodox Christians believe that Mary died—the euphemism they use is that she "fell asleep"—and on the third day after dying, her body was taken up to heaven. The Latin word for "sleep" is dormitio, thus the Feast of the Dormition recalls Mary's death and subsequent bodily assumption to heaven.

While we have no scriptural evidence for Mary's assumption, throughout most of church history starting at least in the fifth century, if not before, Christians believed Mary was taken up to heaven shortly after her death.

One version of the story tells that three days before her death, Mary was visited by the angel Gabriel, the same angel who came to her when she was a girl of thirteen or fourteen to announce that she would give birth to the Christ. At this second appearance Gabriel looked no older than before, but Mary would have been, by some accounts in the early church, around sixty (some accounts in the early church suggest fifty- nine years of age, and other accounts suggest she was sixty-four years old). Gabriel announced to Mary that in three days she would die, and, hearing this, Mary asked to see the apostles one last time. The apostles were scattered around the world preaching the gospel, but the story has it that the Holy Spirit supernaturally gathered all of them, including Paul, around Mary's bedside. Only Thomas was unable to be present.

Mary was then laid to rest in a tomb. Thomas arrived three days later, according to the story, and when he arrived he asked to see Mary's body. When the crypt was opened, the disciples found, much to their surprise, that Mary's body was gone and only her burial shroud remained!

In addition to the debate over how Mary died and whether she was taken to heaven before death, there is the debate over where Mary was buried. Many Christians believe that Mary died in Jerusalem and was buried in a cave adjacent to the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. You can visit this cave and see the supposed tomb of Mary.

Some Christians say that the place where Mary died was Ephesus in western Turkey. The Apostle John lived out his days there, and since Jesus had entrusted his mother to John it is thought that Mary lived out her days with John in Ephesus. If you visit Ephesus you'll be taken to a chapel called the House of the Virgin, near which some believe Mary was buried. Inside the chapel is an altar table dedicated to the memory of the Virgin Mary. It's a peaceful place, and outside there's a wall where you can put your prayer concerns.

Protestants are more cautious than Catholics and Orthodox Christians about traditions such as these, which are not rooted in Scripture. But whether you believe the stories or not, they focus our attention on one thing that Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox agree upon: the resurrection of the dead. How Mary's death happened is not as important to me as the fact that as she approached death she undoubtedly believed that when she died, she would see her son once again.

The Hope of Resurrection

At the Church of the Resurrection each year in December, we hold a special worship service for everyone who lost a loved one that year. We recognize that Christmas itself can intensify the feelings of loss and grief. At that service we remember that Christmas is inextricably linked to Easter. The child whose birth we celebrate would one day conquer death. Among the greatest gifts God has given us at Christmas is the hope that "death has been swallowed up in victory" (1 Corinthians 15:54). The infant Jesus would grow up to say, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die" (John 11:25-26).

Pope John Paul II suggested that at Jesus' resurrection, before he appeared to Mary Magdalene or anyone else, he first appeared to his mother. The pope suggested that this was why, when Mary Magdalene first arrived at the tomb, Jesus was not there. Of course, we cannot know whether the pope's supposition is true, but it seems to me Jesus would most certainly have appeared to his mother after his resurrection. The Scripture passage from Acts 1 mentioned previously seems to imply that Mary was present at the ascension of Jesus, and so, at the very least, she would have seen him then.

Mary witnessed the terrible and tragic death of her son. Then she had the joy of seeing Christ resurrected from the dead. But then, forty days later, she witnessed him leaving once more in the Ascension. If Mary died around age sixty, as one tradition suggests, it meant that she lived roughly fifteen years after Jesus' death on the cross, his resurrection, and his ascension to heaven.

I have been with many parents who have lost children. They have told me that the pain changes over time but the sense of loss is carried with them the rest of their lives. They survive. Over time they discover joy again. But there is always that sense of loss that parents feel for their children.

One woman whose son died in a tragic accident told me that she feels a connection to Mary, who also experienced the death of her son:

When you lose a child, you lose part of yourself as a woman. He was inside you. He was your flesh and blood. I just feel her pain, watching what he went through. It is absolutely catastrophic devastation at first. You eventually come to peace with it. You know he's in a better place. You know you're going to see him again. You view heaven in totally different ways than other people do. You deal with grief in different ways. Mine was in coming closer to the Lord.

The appearance of Jesus to Mary after his death would have changed everything for her. She still would have carried the grief of his suffering with her. She would have carried the sense of separation and loss that any of us would feel after the death of someone so close to us. But the Resurrection, we can be sure, changed how Mary experienced her grief: it gave her hope.

The Apostle Paul wrote the following words to the church at Thessalonica after several key members of the church, beloved family of people who were part of the congregation, had died:

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.... For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words. (1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, 16-18)

Paul calls us to encourage one another with the hope that this life is not all there is. Encourage one another with the fact that you'll see your loved ones again. Encourage one another with the prospect that the world will not always be as it is now. This is part of the promise and hope of Christmas—that the One who was born in Bethlehem will set all things right one day.

Paul devotes the entire fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians to this view of the Resurrection. He concludes with these powerful words: "When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: 'Death has been swallowed up in victory'" (1 Corinthians 15:54).

My grandfather died over twenty years ago on his ninetieth birthday. In the morning we had taken balloons to him for his birthday. In the evening the nurses called and said, "Your grandfather is not going to make it through the night." So I went to sit with him as he was dying. I took water from the tap and sprinkled it on his head, reminding him that in his baptism, which had occurred almost ninety years before, God had claimed him and had promised to wash him clean and give him life. My grandfather began to breathe in a more labored way, and I whispered in his ear as I held his hand, "Grandpa, it's okay. It's okay. You don't have to fight. You can just let go. Just trust God. He's got you in his hands. Let go, Grandpa. It's all right." Then I said this: "Grandpa, I will see you again someday. I will see you again." I can imagine Jesus saying this to Mary the last time he spoke to her. I imagine he would have looked at her and said, "Mother, I will see you again someday."

This is the hope we find in Christmas. Our first Christmas after the death of a loved one may be particularly hard. But such grief may be borne when we remember that the Christ whose birth we celebrate conquered the grave and gives us hope we will see our loved ones again.

Mary's Mission and Ours

There is one final question I invite you to consider in this chapter. What do you think Mary was doing from the time Jesus ascended to heaven until her own death?

Mary seems to have been present at Jesus' ascension. It was there that he said to his disciples, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you." And then he promised, "And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:19-20).

In the Book of Acts, Luke tells the story slightly differently, saying that Jesus instructed the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for the Holy Spirit: "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (Acts 1:8). With different words, both Matthew and Luke record the mission Jesus gave his disciples, a misson we call the Great Commission. They were to devote the rest of their lives to being his witnesses and continuing the work he had begun.

It's clear as we read the rest of Acts 1 that Jesus' followers did not simply pray; they also prepared for their work in taking Jesus' message to the world. Within a week, while they were praying together, the Holy Spirit fell upon them and they launched the church, preaching the gospel, inviting people to faith, baptizing, teaching, meeting together in homes, worshiping in the Temple courts, and sharing with any who had need. Where would Mary have been? I believe she saw Christ's commission as her continuing mission and that she devoted the rest of her life to this mission that God had given her.

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Excerpted from Not a Silent Night by Adam Hamilton. Copyright © 2014 Abingdon Press. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
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