The Feast of the Mother of Our Lord is a time each year where we honor the women in our community and glorify the God who said "it is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18).
During this cycle of days we remember the promise given to the Woman that her child would rise up to crush the Serpent (Genesis 3:15). We celebrate in victory all of the serpent-crushing seed-bearing women in the Bible who were types and shadows of things to come. A few examples include….
Rebekah who raised-up her son Jacob to wrestle the blessing of the covenant from a father and brother whose hearts had gone serpentine.
Zipporah, the wife of Moses, who carried-out the rite of circumcision, touching her husband’s feet with the blood, thus marking out her household and serpent-crushing before their entry into Egypt, the land of snakes.
Jael, the wife of Heber, who crushed the head of the ophidian Sisera.
David who is raised up as the woman-born giant-slayer. Goliath dresses in scales like a big snake, but, like other snakes before him, finds his head crushed by a stone thrown out of Zion.
And so on.
During ‘Marytide’ we hail God's faithfulness to us as it is displayed in the lives of the women in Scripture, who joined God in crushing the little serpents of their time: crushing wicked generals (Judges 4), smashing tyrants (Judges 9), or subverting the thrall of evil viziers (Esther 7).
Of course, Jesus is the True serpent-crusher, adder-smasher, asp-stomping Seed. And Mary, his mother, is a fulfilment of that Genesis 3 promise. All women worldwide should hold their heads aloft: Christ was born of a woman. Praise be to God.
But the Story doesn’t stop there, with Mary and Jesus. God is not content to crush the serpent, the devil, once, in one life. He wants to crush the Satan under your feet also: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom.16:20). And it is in this feast that we celebrate the way He is doing that in the lives of the women at All Saints; for they are, each of them, bearers of the promise that their offspring will crush the head of the serpent.
During this time, we proclaim that we are a part of that Eve story, part of the Sarah story, the Hagar story, the Rachel and Leah story, the Zipporah story, the Rahab story, the Deborah and Jael story; we are the heirs of the lives of Judith, Esther and Anna; we are living members of that Virgin Mary story, which culminates in that image of the victorious bride who is crowned with a glory like the rising of the moon.
This is what it means to “keep the feast” —to live-out our place in the Story.
