More Like Mary

Two errors bracket Mary, Luke Metzger argues: some have made her an object of worship, and the rest of us have quietly forgotten her. Reading Luke 1, he follows a young woman from a nowhere town whose plans were interrupted — pregnant before marriage, a ninety-mile ride at nine months, a fugitive's first years, Simeon's warning about a sword — and calls that the blessed life anyway, because blessing is Christ being formed in you rather than favorable circumstances. God, he concludes, used a nobody in the middle of nowhere, and can use us the same way.