A Thought About Christ’s Virgin Birth (December 24, 2006)

Did Mary bear for decades the secret of the virgin birth?

A speculative line of thought occurred to me the other day - mere speculation, that's all - but if true, it might explain a few things.

Pregnant Mary and Joseph took off from the town of Nazareth, traveled to Bethlehem where Jesus was born, then went to Egypt and stayed for maybe a year or so before returning to Nazareth with their toddler. By the time they got back to Nazareth, it is possible (if not likely) that one of Jesus' brothers or sisters had already been born or was on the way. Soon they would grow to a family of at least nine (Mary, Joseph, Jesus, his sisters and four brothers mentioned in Matthew 13:55-56).

When they first left for Bethlehem, only one Nazarene, Joseph, knew - along with Mary - that her pregnancy had occurred without sex. (And he only believed that because an angel visited him - Matthew 1:20). The rest of the townspeople certainly assumed that either Mary and Joseph had "jumped the gun" or that Mary had been unfaithful to him and somehow he had made his peace with that.

I used to think that "No one believed poor Mary's story" - but lately it occurred to me, "Did she even tell them anything about it?" She told her relative Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah (Luke 1:39ff), who had had their own miracle with a late-in-life conception of John the Baptist. But why would Mary bother telling anyone in Nazareth about the visitation of Gabriel, or the report from shepherds in Bethlehem about angels in the sky, or the visit some time later of Eastern wise men? Who would have believed it, any of it? Her neighbors thought she was a fornicator. If she were to start telling them these stories they would also have thought she was nuts.

I bet she kept it to herself. Did she tell Jesus' brothers and sisters about his extraordinary birth? Did she tell Jesus himself? Scripture speaks of Mary "treasuring these things in her heart" (Luke 1:19,51). Perhaps that is the only place she treasured them.The heart quietly guards what the mouth cannot speak.

In time her husband died (Joseph is never mentioned after Jesus turned 12), aging Zechariah and Elizabeth also died, shepherds in Bethlehem and wise men in Iraq passed on or were not heard from, and this young widowed mother of at least seven had to figure out some way to make a life for herself and her kids in run-down Nazareth.

I can easily imagine the story of Jesus' remarkable birth lying dormant in this one widow's heart until there emerged a group of people who would believe it - the apostles of Jesus, who had witnessed his resurrection. They, unlike the Nazarene mockers, would be equipped to accept her story as Elizabeth did more than 30 years earlier. Like (if you will excuse the reference) Lara Flynn Boyle in Men in Black, who believed Will Smith's report of an alien because she had just done an alien autopsy herself, or like Professor Kirk in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who believed Lucy because he himself had been to Narnia, so the apostles - who had seen Jesus walk on water and rise from the dead - would alone have been able to receive with reverent credibility the account from Mary about the birth of her Son.

Skeptics today make much of the fact that no account of the virgin birth occurs in the gospels of Mark or John, and that Paul never mentions it in any of his 13 epistles. I have never found any significance whatsoever in these supposed "omissions." But if an explanation is needed for them, might it be that the full story of Jesus' birth was not generally known until Luke and Matthew sat down with septuagenarian Mary around A.D. 60 and recorded her recollections? Luke's account transparently gives the events from Mary's perspective. I think he interviewed her. I don't know how much the other disciples knew, or when they found out. Jesus' death and resurrection mattered a lot more to them than his birth did. Who knows how long Mary kept quiet, and, when she spoke up, to whom? She may have been like Rose of the film Titanic, who waited 70 years to tell the story of Jack Dawson.

I may be wrong about this - as I said, it's all speculation - but if I am right, then I owe this insight to some very painful personal circumstances. I am a divorced man. Just writing those words, and continuing now, requires summoning more emotional energy than normally lies at my disposal, and stifling something like nausea and an urge to - what? - scream, cry, sleep, run away? It is like I want to do something but not this.

Old friends of mine, fellow missionaries and pastor colleagues still don't know that I'm divorced because I haven't told them. It hurts too much to talk about it. Not because I am ashamed or guilty - the fact is, I was a good and faithful husband to a wife who renounced Christ, coldly told me she was divorcing me and there was nothing I could do about it, and left me to pursue a godless lifestyle. But except for those close to me now, who know both me and her, I always think, "Who else is going to believe me when I tell them how it happened?" The first minister who was contacted about my "case" advised the church I was pastoring to discipline me, because obviously I must have done something wrong. My sister said that when she told friends that her preacher brother was getting divorced, they would respond, "Oh no! What did he DO??" She would set them straight ("He didn't do anything! It's his wife!"), but my heart still crumbles because I fear that their knee-jerk response is the one I'll hear the rest of my life. I hate it, I don't want to hear it, and I know that when the issue comes up I'll defend myself, which will just provoke the reaction, "Why is Paul being so defensive?"

So I do what I guess Mary did, and just keep my big fat mouth shut. The day will come when I tell old friends and they will ask "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" and I'll shrug and say, "It hurt too much. You have no idea. I am innocent, but I don't know how to get anyone to believe that."

God knows our secrets, the pain of keeping them, the perhaps greater pain of making them known. Among the thousand sorrows of the Blessed Mother of Jesus, I think she knew that pain too.