Celebrating the birth of a girl ?

Feast Day of the Birth of Mary, Prophet 
8th Sept 2019

Congratulations it's a girl!

A huge, recent, analysis of worldwide population data suggests sex-selective abortions have led to at least 23 million fewer girls being born in the world. The majority of these “missing” girls are in China and India.  (The New Scientist, 16^th April 2019, Deborah MacKenzie)

This puts in very real terms the effect of the devaluation of women which is directly linked to their lack of economic power. If girls will be a financial burden to a family living in poverty, the choice to abort when it becomes available, is understandable if not ethical. Throughout history women have had to earn their value (if they make it into the world) through brave and creative responses to the unprotected and perilous positions they find themselves in.

Think of Ruth in the Old Testament who is commended for her faithfulness to her mother-in-law, Naomi. All the men in their family die and Ruth’s sisters return to their home country in order to find protection there. Ruth stays by Naomi’s side, refusing to leave her- a woman -alone; she restores their fortunes by finding a husband and having a son.  The story finishes with Naomi nursing her grandson, and the women around her say this:

‘Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without next-of-kin; and may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of old age; for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him’.

Which is a wonderful twist: Ruth is more to Naomi than 7 sons, but only because she has been able to bare a son. Women, despite all their ingenuity and faithfulness cannot escape the economic realities in which they live, which means they cannot provide for or protect themselves.

For many families in today’s world the sad truth is that the birth of a girl is no reason to rejoice. We are inheritors of a Judeo-Christian tradition which celebrates the birth of sons over girls. It’s written, after all, into the main narrative of our salvation history – the proclamation and expectation of a son who will save the world – and it’s not just any son, but God’s own son, his only son.

How are we to live with our sacred texts, cradled as they were through thousands of years of history, in which women were of limited agency, identity and value? In a society in which gender equality and politics is at the fore, we might well wonder how Christianity can speak hope into such a context.

We can, because Jesus’ birth to Mary is Good News, not in the way that was expected. Jesus isn’t a great son in any normal terms – worrying his parents to death by running away to the temple in Jerusalem as a boy; rejecting his biological mother, brother and sisters (remember his words, "My mother and brothers are those who hear God's word and put it into practice Luke 8.21); getting dangerously caught up in a radical religious movement which leads to his violent crucifixion and death; leaving his mother without her first born son. By all normal standards, his sonship is not decent, let alone exceptional. 

And that is our reason to hope. To celebrate Mary’s birth today, is to celebrate the victory that Jesus brought over the old order of injustice and inequality. He disrupted the narrative: he is the anti-Messiah, the radical saviour, who encouraged women to sit at his feet and listen; who invited women from outside the Jewish faith to drink the waters of eternal life; who appeared to a woman after his death and commissioned her to go and tell the good news.

I have quite a deep sense that Jesus would want his mother to be remembered, not because she is his biological mother, but because her life was transformed by the Word of the Father -the living Word. It was because of that Word that she became a prophet – one of the first to trust in her Son: ‘Do whatever he tells you’ (Wedding of Cana); and at his side until the end.

It is because Mary saw and believed in the living Word that we celebrate and rejoice in her birth today, the birth of a baby girl who would transform the lives of billions.