Joe Heschmeyer explores the controversial Christmas song, “Mary Did You Know” and it’s theological accuracy

Transcription:

Joe:

Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer and I’d like to welcome you into a very special Christmas Eve edition of Shamus Popery. And I want to talk about one of, if not the most controversial and divisive Christmas songs. Okay? Probably the most controversial Christmas song is Baby It’s Cold Outside, because it’s like, yeah, I probably don’t put anything in her drink to try to get her to stay. That’s pretty gross. But I mean an actually religious Christmas song, and I mean of course if I’m going to be totally honest, I completely see both Why people love and Hate this song. On the one hand, I actually like what it’s trying to do. Mark Lowry, the guy who wrote it, is a Baptist, and he explained that he wrote it for a Christmas program because he started thinking and wondering if Mary realized the power, authority and majesty that she cradled in her arms in that first Christmas.

And he wondered if she realized that those little hands were the same hands scooped out oceans and formed rivers. And so he wanted to put into words the unfathomable. In other words, he had the pious and I think correct impulse, that if you want to understand the Christmas story, it probably helps to look at it through Mary’s eyes. And this led him to start thinking of questions he’d ask if he had the chance to talk to Mary. And so he was wondering what he would do if he got to sit down and have coffee with her and ask her things like what was it like raising God? What did you know, what didn’t? So again, I think that’s all good at its best. The song succeeds as a reflection on Mary’s motherhood, on the mystery of Jesus Christ in the incarnation and maybe in some ways on the mysterious nature of motherhood itself.

For some reason, a lot of the fans of Mary Did, you know, are Moms. And it strikes me that part of that may be that there’s something mysterious about motherhood itself. Even if your child isn’t Jesus, you’re looking down at this little baby, this precious child, and you’ve got all these questions about what God’s plans are for their future. And I think that’s a good and even holy impulse to say, what did that look like in the Holy Family? And in a few moments here, we’re going to take a look at that biblically and say, what can we say in way of answer to those kind of questions? But before I get there, I want to also acknowledge why people hate the song, because people loathe this song. I think there’s largely three reasons. For one, it is frankly way too melodramatic. It does not feel like you’re having coffee with Mary.

It feels like you’re yelling questions outside of her window and demanding that she answer them. And it’s worth contrasting Mary’s own reaction to the mystery of the incarnation. The mystery of Christmas we’re told in Luke chapter two is Mary kept all these things pondering them in her heart, but this song isn’t quiet and ponderous this song is trying to stir up a big emotional experience and there’s nothing wrong with a big emotional experience, but it seems really disco concordant with what the season and the song are all about. This is not silent night. This is not this still calm, quiet place where God comes to speak and that’s still quiet voice. This is loud and over the top and emotional melodramatic. Now, in saying that I should caveat, I am not a musician. On the other hand, my baby brother Ben is he’s studying classical music composition in San Sebastian, Spain. And so he’s much better equipped to explain maybe that intuition you have, that something feels off about this song emotionally. And I should say, while a lot of the moms in my family, my own mom, one of my sisters love Mary, did you know my brother hates it as a musician. And so I asked him if he would share just a short little clip explaining what it is he hates so much about this song.

CLIP:

Mary Did You Know is unquestionably my least favorite Christmas song. It’s the only one I refuse to play when people request it. I sit at the piano, people ask for any Christmas song, and even Mariah carries only one for Christmas is you. I will play because the song is silly and the music is silly, and therefore it kind of matches and people like it. So whatever Mary did, you know I will never cross this line and play it. It’s so sentimental, so sappy and pretending to have an emotion that doesn’t have musically speaking, I mean, and there’s nothing happening, and I don’t know who wrote the music, but the impression I have is when you’re singing Happy Birthday and sometimes there’s somebody who’s singing just unnecessarily loud and with vibrato and it’s just uncomfortable. There’s no reason for this and it’s just not appropriate to the situation. It’s as though that person learned a couple chords at the piano, learned the 1 7, 6 5 pattern in minor and then wrote the music to Mary. Did You know, it’s atrocious,

Joe:

But it’s not just musically that people quibble with or loathe this song, it’s also the lyrics and kind of the tone of the lyrics. It’s regularly accused of being a theologically mansplaining sort of song because he just asked Mary, did you know over and over again about different facts and oh, sorry, ladies mansplaining is when a man condescendingly explains something, particularly something you already know the answer to or maybe no better than he does. In any case, I actually don’t think that that’s what this song is doing. I really take Lowery at his word. I think he is trying to parse through what Mary did and didn’t know. I think the problem is more that the way the song is structured with the repeated, did you know, you know, you know it echoes it kind of like, oh, you’ve got that band shirt name three songs of that band, but now you’re like, oh, I see you’re burying the Christ child name three theological facts about him.

So for better or for worse, people have the kind of negative association that the song is more like Hectoring Mary than it is trying to actually find out what she did and didn’t know. But I want to actually turn to the third area of controversy, which is not just the tone, not the musical structure, but the theological content. But I want to engage with this partly to critique it, but mostly actually probably to vindicate it and to say this is a good inquiry. He’s not making declarations, but he’s asking good questions. If we were going to sit down and have coffee with Mary, what answers would she give to these questions? So I thought it might be fun on this Christmas Eve to do that. So I’ve got my shameless popery mug and I’ve got some coffee. So I thought maybe you can join with me, pour in a little coffee and then we can go line by line through the song to figure out what Mary did and didn’t know on Christmas.

So with that, let’s go to the first line. Mary, did you know that your baby boy will one day walk on water? There’s no direct answer to this given in scripture. I think it’s fair to say no or more precisely in chapter nine of the Book of Job Job is describing the majesty of God, and one of the things he says is that God is the one who commands the sun and it does not rise who seals up the stars, who alone stretch out the heavens and trampled the waves of the sea and the Greek, you’re going to see a little bit of a recurring theme where we look at this sua gen and find is a little better. In the Greek it says, who alone has stretched out the heavens and walks on the sea as on firm ground? But notice there it’s not explicitly a Messianic prophecy at all.

So I don’t think someone reading that is like Aha. The Messiah is coming into the world and he’s going to walk on water. However, Saint John Chris system calls it a sort of prophecy by which I think he means this when the apostles in fact see Jesus walking on the sea as if it’s dry earth, their minds would once they kind of calm down, harken back to Jonah, excuse me, to job chapter nine and realize like, oh yeah, that is one of the things God alone does this looks like Jesus is showing us his divinity, but you’re not going to get there. So it’s kind of theological foreshadowing, but it’s not a prophecy where it says this is going to happen. It’s more like once you see it, you can say, aha, okay, I see this connection that I would never have made on my own.

Did Mary know that her baby boy would one day walk on water biblically? I think the answer to that is a pretty clear no. Okay, second question. Mary, did you know that your baby boy will save our sons and daughters? Well, yeah, obvious. I mean the Messiah was coming into the world to be the Savior. What that looks like, plenty of people had questions about, but Mary knew this. In fact, seemingly everyone around Mary knew this as well. So for instance, St. Joseph, when he’s visited by an angel in the dream, the angel tells him that he’s going to name the child Jesus for he will save his people from their sins. And likewise zacharia after the birth of John the Baptist, which remember Mary is therefore zacharia, proclaims, blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has visited and redeemed his people and has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David.

That’s a prophecy about Jesus being made in the presence of his mother before his birth and she’s carrying the horn of salvation and Zacharia’s own baby. John is going to be the forerunner who gets to proclaim this to everybody. So yeah, Mary knows all this. And if that wasn’t enough, you have the particularly famous scene of what happens on Christmas when the angels announced the good news of Christmas to the shepherds. And I’m not going to tell you about it. You could read it for yourself in Matthew one 20 to 21, or we can listen to Linus from peanuts, recite it for us beautifully,

CLIP:

Any angel said unto them, if you’re not for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy, which will be to all people for unto you is born this day in the city of David, a savior which is Christ the Lord.

Joe:

So Jesus is very clearly a savior and it was prophesied he was going to be a savior. This is not new information if that weren’t enough, I’m cheating here slightly, but when they present Jesus in the temple at the presentation, Simeon holds him up and praises God saying, my eyes have seen the salvation which thou is prepared in the presence of all peoples. So yeah, Jesus is a savior. Did Mary know that Jesus was coming into the world to save our sons and daughters? Yes, absolutely, yes. Okay, third question. Mary, did you know that your baby boy has come to make you new? This child that you’ve delivered will soon deliver you. This one is the most theologically controversial because Lowry as a Baptist seems to be assuming that Mary is just like an ordinary sinner like you and me. But that’s not the historic view of Mary and that’s not the view of Mary that any of the apostolic churches take of her Catholic Orthodox, Coptic.

We might have different ways of formulating it, but none of the historic churches believe Mary is just another sinner like everybody else. So many Catholics have reacted pretty strongly to this line. For instance, father Robert McTigue says that the lyrics here depend upon the dogma of the immaculate conception being false. If Mary needs a savior, then she cannot be the vessel of the incarnation. Now, I love Father mc Tegan, not just because he had me on his radio show once, but I part company here he is mistaken, he’s incorrect. Mary does need a savior. In fact, Mary tells us that she needed a savior in Luke chapter one in the famous is Magnifico, she says, my soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my savior. Okay, that verse is sometimes used to argue against Mary’s sinlessness. So how can we say Mary is both sinless and saved?

Because it’s important that you get both of those things right. Well, think about it this way. If you’re about to fall into a hole, somebody could save you one of two ways. Number one, they could wait until you fall into the hole and then they could help you get out of it because presumably for purposes of our analogy, you can’t get out of the hole yourself. Or number two, they could save you by stopping you from ever falling into the hole in the first place. Now, notice two things. Number one, both of those are forms of salvation. In both cases, this bystander has saved you. And number two, the second way is actually better meaning you’re not just saved, you’re saved in the better way to be saved. If you had the choice to choose, would it be better to wait until I fall all the way in the hole and then pull me out or to keep me from going in there in the first place?

You know which one is better, right? Well, look, you and I are saved in the first way. God allowed us to inherit original sin. He allows us to commit personal sin and then he rescues us. He provides us a way out of the pit that we’ve dug for ourselves. Mary, he saves, but he saves her in a more radical way because he helps to prevent her from falling into the pit of sin in the first place. Now you might say, oh, you’re just kind of making up that use of deliverance or salvation. But no, this is very much the twofold way. Scripture speaks about these themes that when you hear about salvation or deliverance, it sometimes means, God, you allowed me to fall into this, but then you brought me out of it other times. It means thank you God, you kept me from going into it in the first place.

I’ll give a few examples. In Psalm 56, king David praises God saying, thou has delivered my soul from death. Yay, my feet from falling. That’s very much the you kept me from falling into the pit, in this case the pit of Hades. Now obviously God didn’t have David die and then bring him back from the dead. He’s delivered from death by being spared dying In that moment, his life saved in the ordinary way. We talk about someone’s life being saved. When you hear about a life-saving treatment, you don’t mean somebody died and came back from the dead. We ordinarily mean they’re saved by not having to experience it in the first place. Likewise, Mary is saved from sin the way David is saved from death. Second example in Genesis 32, Jacob prays to be delivered from the hand of his brother Esau. But notice he hasn’t been captured by Esau at this point.

He is praying that he won’t ever be captured by Esau. So David is delivered from death. He is saved from death. Jacob is delivered from Esau, he’s saved from Esau, and Mary is delivered from sin. She is saved from sin. So she does need a deliverer. She does need salvation. She can with full confidence, declare God her savior and she’s not mistaken. If anything, he is her savior in a yet more radical way than the way he saved all of us. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean this line is perfect. The actual dispute in question is that Lowery assumes that Jesus will soon deliver you, whereas the Catholic view at the very least is that Mary already was delivered. So obviously that whole thing is a bigger question than we’ll probably resolve in just reading line by line through a Christmas song. But at the very least I think we can say this one, you can’t give a yes or no answer to a Mary did you know because it’s a leading question and it assumes a certain theological framework that it should be asking questions about rather than assuming.

Alright, the fourth question, Mary, did you know that your baby boy will give sight to a blind man? He’s going to ask this twice, kind of the second time he kind of declares it. But yes, Mary did know that. In fact, this is one of the Messianic prophecies in Isaiah 35. It talks about how the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. We’re going to get back to this in a little bit when he gets back to this, but for now it’s sufficient to say yes. Mary did know one of the prophecies associated with the Messiah involved healing miracles and particularly healing physical deformities and disabilities and the like. Alright, fifth, Mary, did you know that your baby boy will calm a storm with his hand? This is very much like the very first question where it’s an aquatic related messianic activity that isn’t specifically prophesied in the Old Testament.

Here again, you have these lines like in Isaiah 35 when it’s talking about sailors at sea, it says how they cried to the Lord and their trouble and he delivered them from their distress. He made the storm be still and the waves of the sea were hushed. But that’s not saying the Messiah is going to do that. That’s just talking about how we can see the power of God that he has control over the weather. So did Mary know that Jesus was going to exercise that divine power in that way? No, seemingly not. Alright next, Mary, did you know that your baby boy has walked where angels trot. Now we’re moving away from aquatic miracles to I think the heart of the question that Lowery is wanting to know, which is how well did you realize that your infant was God? And I think we can see that the answer is she did know this, but it’s not immediately obvious.

And so it’s a totally valid question to ask and it’s worth kind of unpacking that. I’m going to focus on the angel’s part and get more into the divinity part as we get into the questions that ask that more directly. But it’s clearly considering Jesus’s preexistence that he doesn’t come into being in her womb. He’s already existing. He has walked where angels trod. So what would be some of the clues we have for that prior to the New Testament? What would be some of the clues we have for that at Christmas or before here? Modern Christians are at a disadvantage because we typically use the Hebrew versions of the Old Testament texts because there was a longstanding belief that these versions were older and more reliable basically based on the idea. While most of these writings are in Hebrew, so of course we trust the Hebrew over the translated ones in Greek, but in fact there are several prophecies that we don’t find in the Hebrew versions that have come down to us, but which were known to the New Testament authors and they quote mostly always from the Greek.

So I’m going to give a few of those. But don’t be surprised if there’s an Old Testament prophecy you don’t see because the Old Testament that we have doesn’t have these sig prophecies. Sept being the Greek translations in the Sept translation of Deuteronomy 32 43. There’s a clause in there that we don’t have. And that clause, well, the sentence goes like this, rejoice the heavens with him and let all the angels of God worship him. That’s the line we don’t have. Let all the angels of God worship him, rejoice the Gentiles with his people and let all the sons of God strengthen themselves in him. So it’s about kind of the nature of angelic worship and you might say, okay, why does that matter? Well, in Hebrews one verse six, the author of Hebrews applies this to the incarnation and says, and again, when he God brings the firstborn into the world, he says, let all God’s angels worship him.

Now, I mentioned all this subru thing. You might read Hebrews one, six and say, I don’t know what Old Testament prophecy that is. I don’t see that in my Old Testament and your right because we’re using a different translation of Deuteronomy 32. This is true of Catholics and Protestants typically, but maybe we should be using the subru because there are plenty of these prophecies that we see them and think, oh, okay, that’s clearly pointing to the incarnation, this being one of them, and it ties it to angelic worship. Similarly, the author of Hebrews is going to point to Psalm eight verse five, but here’s the problem. In the Hebrew version of Psalm eight, it is talking about man, both the limitation and the glory of man. And it says yet thou has made him little less than God and does crown him with glory and honor.

Okay, so it sounds like we’re just a little bit less than God, but the sig thus made him a little less than angels. So sometimes angels are referred to as Elohim, which is literally Gods, but it refers to spiritual beings. And so it makes sense how this would be translated as angels if contextually Elohim meant angels there. But Elohim can also be used as a name for God. So you can imagine the Hebrew could be read in either way, but made him little less than angels actually makes more sense there that we’re not just slightly below God, nowhere we’re actually beneath the angels. And in Hebrews two, that’s exactly what it says. It says that Jesus and the incarnation was made lower than the angels for a while. Notice there that it sort of presupposes the preexistence of Jesus with the angels. So did Mary know this?

I’m going to say yes, she did. And that’ll become clearer when we get into the other passages about Jesus’s divinity and what she knew about that. But for now, just we can see kind of from Hebrews that there were prophecies connected to the Messiah and God himself in the worship of angels. Alright, Mary did you know when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God. This is my favorite line in the whole song. I think it’s a very beautiful way of getting to the heart of that question that when you kiss your little baby, you kiss the face of God. And it also by the way speaks to this deep rooted desire that we have this desire to see the face of God. And David talked about this in the Psalms. This is a recurring kind of theme. St Athanasius will argue this is one of the reasons for idolatry that we have this longing for this kind of face-to-face connection.

And so we struggled with the fact that God is invisible and so we’d created visible false gods for ourselves and rather than just penalize us for this, Jesus responds to this by coming into the world and taking on human flesh in the incarnation he meets us in our weakness. This is part of a much bigger conversation about why we view images and everything as okay now of God because he’s given us a visible depiction that we can depict, whereas before he hadn’t. And so we didn’t have the authority to do that much bigger conversation, but I for those reasons, love that He’s asking Mary, did you know that when you kissed your little baby you kissed the face of God? And the answer is yes, she seemingly did. Again, I’m going to give more as we go, but for now I want to point you to a couple of prophecies.

In Malachi chapter three, the prophet Malachi quotes, God is saying, behold, I send my messenger to prepare the way before me and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. Now think about that, the sending of the messenger to prepare the way and then the Lord himself who will come to his temple. Now imagine that you are Mary listening to Zacharia proclaiming how John the Baptist is the forerunner, he’s the messenger and you know are carrying the Son of God. Now the fact that he’s the son of God means that he’s God. If you remember in John chapter five, one of the things people are upset about is Jesus declared God his father thereby making himself equal to God. So it’s already a divine sounding claim, but then you connect it with these Old Testament prophecies that the Messiah was seemingly to be the Lord himself in some mysterious way that God was going to send his messenger ... Read more on Catholic.com