If Men wrote the Bible to Preserve their Power, How do We Account for Mary’s Song?

Sometimes an earnest neighbor rightly tired of injustice will tweet her understandable outrage and frustration by attacking the Bible.

The bible was written by power-hungry men who just wanted control over everyone and wanted to make sure women had no rights.

Many of us look around at our current world and feel this too. Our first-hand experience with male God-talkers (like myself) using the Bible to hurt and harm others, combined with the podcasts and news we hear, makes a tweet like this feel right. We want justice, rest, peace. We’re worn out with Bible talk that tears people down.

But what if our just longing, our accurate personal, cultural, and historical experience, has nonetheless, made us mistaken when attacking the original male writers of the Bible? What if some of the male writers are more of an ally than we think? Let’s take the gospel of Luke for example.

The Bible Privileges the Song of a Poor Minority Woman

Mary, Jesus’ Mother, wrote a song (Lk. 1:46-55). Each Christmas season, Jesus-followers reacquaint themselves with Mary’s lyrics. (If you haven’t read Mary’s song before or in a while, you can do so here.)

Reading her song, a question nags at me.

If powerful men wrote the Bible to leverage and preserve their power, doesn’t it seem like they did a poor job?

What I’m wrestling with is this:

(1) Mary’s song is recorded for us by a man named Luke. Luke and Mary are both oppressed minorities living beneath an occupying force that uses violence to keep the peace. Neither has access to cultural power. Both are telling a history that majority powers would denounce.

(2) This man Luke records Mary and her words in such a way that as we read these Bible verses, we are all sitting at the feet of a woman and we are learning about God and life from her.

(3) This woman has no education, rank, status, or credibility as a witness to events. In fact, the entirety of this history written by Luke places marginalized poor women and men front and center, chapter after chapter. Privileging minority voices like this roused Roman criticism of those earliest Christians.

“Taking its root in the lower classes,” writes Celsus, “the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: Nay, one can even say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents” (57) . . . . so that “wherever one finds a crowd of adolescent boys, or a bunch of slaves, or a company of fools, there will the Christian teachers be also” (73)

(4) Mary says in her song that God has sent the rich away empty and instead has cared for the poor, filling the hungry with good things. Jewish and Roman thought at the time would not have agreed. People with money were blessed by God or the gods. People without weren’t.

(5) Even the men who followed Jesus with Mary are mostly marginalized and oppressed men: fishermen, carpenters, a zealot. In fact, the original male disciples of Jesus were oppressed minorities many of whom were ultimately mistreated or killed in the name of justice by majority powers.

Here is my question.

Let’s imagine that you and I were going to leverage our power in a patriarchal society that valued monetary advantage, ecclesiastical status, and maintaining good relations with an occupying majority. Would putting someone like Mary front and center as one of the faces of our movement, feel smart?

The Bible Places a Poor Minority Woman as our Teacher

In a world in which female voices are senselessly lost to history, it makes sense that we cry out for a different way! When crying out it makes sense that we want also to throw out the Bible. But there is an irony of grace here. It is the Bible’s pages that give voice to Mary. If we throw it out we unwittingly risk silencing her voice too; the very thing most of us are so tired of.

There is no doubt that this book has been used by powerful men to leverage their power. Wretched truth that this is. But such men do not represent the originals who were there and wrote down what they saw.

What if the original Gospel writers try to represent the very thing we long for?

What if they and the ones who wrote them, were attempting to counter the very misuses of power that you and I so desire to confront? A kind surprise of grace might still await us on the Bible’s pages.

On such pages we find.

A history that does not privilege the powerful but continually tells us that God draws near to the weak in this world,

that anyone can be rescued by this God, man or woman, young or old, Jew or Gentile, rich or poor,

and that anyone, even when forgotten by the world, can be remembered by him and given as a grace-gift to the rest of us,

This is the story most of us long for! A story of glad tidings and great joy!

A follower of Jesus takes these words from Mary and learns from her about who God is, what this world is like, why we are here, and who Jesus is.

You and I are at a crossroads of pain and grace. We desire to defend marginalized people like Mary. And now we learn that the Bible is also doing that and more. God speaks to us by allowing a poor minority women to be our teacher. Now we imagine what it might be like, not just to advocate for her but to learn from her, to learn to see what she sees in God.

Luke, a man changed by Jesus, asks us to hear her voice.