A world turned the right way around…

Feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary

St Bene’t’s Church, Sunday 16th August 2026

The Rev’d Dr James Crockford

Isaiah 61.10–end

Galatians 4.4–7

Luke 1.46–55

Ten years ago this autumn, the African-American artist Kehinde Wiley opened their first French exhibition of works at the Petit Palais, entitled Lamentation. The works included draw on key references and representations from the canon of Western religious art and stained glass media. They are recognizably of that ilk; but Wiley places Black figures, contemporary figures, as the featured characters, replete with flip-flops, tight jeans, baseball caps, footballs and board shorts. This is no merely provocative clash of styles, but rather a reimagining of the significance and challenge of our faith. Most effective, I think, to Wiley’s pieces is the way in which they refuse to clarify what you are looking at.

For instance, in two of them, a young adult male dressed in modern urban wear, fresh from the High Street, bears in his arms the limp corpse of his young child. Both are adorned with halos. Is this asking us to imagine this as the deposition of Christ, a traditional pietá of countless artworks, and what this might look like in our own day, if Jesus and Mary were people that look like us or our neighbours, our colleagues? Or is the inference that, in a world that still perpetuates violence disproportionately against people of colour, in a world where houndings and lynchings still happen by mobs or by media – in that world that we live in, Wiley’s image makes us face head-on the shame and sorrow of the countless depositions, both those thrust into the headlines, and the many, many that go unseen and unheard?

As any good artist, Wiley refuses to settle the matter, and you’re left with a sense of being dislodged into seeing the world in a different way, seeing new avenues for how to imagine faith’s story, new responsibilities and convictions.

 Wiley also includes, in a more joyful, celebratory way, young adult Black figures, male and female, who pose enthroned as pseudo-Maries, with a mid-sized young boy: the typical Virgin and Child pose, but not how you’ve ever seen it before. In each of these the boy is pensive, serious; the Mary figure is commanding, watchful, and, I think, a little unsure of what to make of the observer, how to read their interest, their gazing at her and her boy. I love the way that Wiley’s figures celebrate the love and validation of contemporary people and communities of colour, and imagine their lived experiences today of perpetuated and normalized violence, sorrow, and suspicion.

What do you think of, when you think of Mary? The Blessed Virgin, Gate of Heaven, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God? Much of her traditional artistic representation leaves me at a bit at a loss – she seems docile, pious, and bored, doing little more than providing a throne for Jesus to sit on.

The New Testament gives us many Maries to consider, and I wonder which resonate with you and how.

There is assertive Mary, at the wedding at Cana, refusing to let Jesus back down from stepping up with his excuses that his ‘time has not yet come’. She makes it clear he ought to do something, and as soon as he’s just refused to, Mary forces his hand by telling the servants to take their instructions from him. Water turns to wine, and although Jesus can be credited for doing the miracle, let’s not forget it was Mary’s idea to get the party going, it was Mary who was conscious both of the social embarrassment that was about to emerge with the wine all gone when the guests were just getting started, and it was Mary who recognized that Jesus needed to stop fidgeting and get on with being useful.

There is Mary, distraught and distressed at having misplaced the young boy Jesus on a trip to Jerusalem, who returns to find him and give him a good talking to – and who, finding him in the temple holding court among the scribes, has to put up with his response that, well, of course you should have known I’d be in God’s house doing God’s business (which I think parents might well recognize as a bit of a smart-alec comment). I like to think Mary banked that one in her mind that day, and, when they got to that wedding in Cana a few years later and the wine ran out, she enjoyed saying – come on then, get on with God’s business then, if you think you’re all that!

There’s Mary who, some time later, tries to rein Jesus in a bit, perhaps concerned his ministry is going a bit far, getting a bit of odd attention; couldn’t he just come home for a bit, spend some time with his family? And she is upbraided, slighted by Jesus, whose idea of the kinship of humanity is used to cut off her claim to him.

There’s Mary at the cross, following, watching, weeping, holding; others have fled, but not her. She knows what love demands, and what it will take. ‘A sword will pierce your own soul too.’

There’s Mary, the teenage girl signed off for marriage already, finding she is pregnant and on the cusp of disgrace, at the mercy of her fiancée. Surely everyone will know; surely no-one in their right minds will believe me; doesn’t God know the penalty the community must enforce on her?

There’s the Mary that St Paul references in our epistle reading – reduced to ‘a woman’, a birth machine, a vessel for something greater, but a vessel nonetheless.

Then there is Mary whose song we hear in our Gospel reading, the Magnificat; a song rehashed from that of another young Jewish mother in the Hebrew Bible, Hannah, who rejoices in the surprising and longed-for gift of the child growing in her, Samuel, who will be the great prophet of the Lord. Mary’s song is far from the obvious, tepid and slightly apologetic piety with which she is too often associated: the Magnificat is a manifesto for a world turned upside down by mercy, humility, and justice. The lowly are seen by God, and are blessed and extolled by all generations; he scatters the proud, deposes the mighty from their thrones, and exalts the humble; the rich are emptied, and the hungry are filled. And people say religion isn’t political? Well, Mary’s got my vote.

And then there’s Mary, a young Palestinian Jewish woman, soon recovered from birth, having to escape as a migrant fleeing the violence of her homeland, taking refuge in Egypt until things seem safe again. I wonder when Herod’s men came round Nazareth, looking for the children to slay, if rumours kept circulating of that young, suddenly pregnant, barely married woman, where had she gone? Or if when they went to Bethlehem, they would hear about that woman in labour the other day, who had been knocking on all the doors of all the inns, and it was said ended up in a stable, and popped the baby in a trough? I wonder how she told Jesus why it was that there weren’t any other boys his age around the village, at the synagogue, anywhere to be seen?

Of all these windows that the Scriptures offer us onto Mary, I wonder which of them Mary could see herself in, truly, properly.

Mary has been venerated in various ways over the years. Some of these honourings of her have deep roots theologically – if we take the incarnation of Christ seriously, that the Word of God, in very nature God, took on human flesh as the tiny set of cells inside Mary’s womb, then how precious that womb, how remarkable the gift she bears within her; and how blessed she is to be the one whose humanness in particular is assumed by God – her genes, her traits, her flesh. The fourth-century Syrian hymn-writer Ephrem put it beautifully: ‘She gave the little vest of the Body to him that covers all’.

In other ways we marvel at Mary for more human reasons, hazarding a guess at the path her life must have taken, trying to look after God the crying child, God the stroppy teenager, God the weird anti-celebrity celebrity, and then God nailed to a cross to die, needing her then too, before she would hold is lifeless body in her arms and bear witness to the violence of the mob, yes, but more so to the faithful, unending love of God; she will not budge. In her life of labours, we might see a solidarity with all our human struggle to rise to the demands that life, and those with whom we share it, may place on us – demands by which we, like Mary, may serve and honour God by serving and honouring all God’s children, made in God’s image – every single one, precious in God’s sight.

In Mary’s witness, we see all of life, and indeed even and especially death, is the arena of God’s presence, which is such gift, and such responsibility. How to hold this precious thing, of God with us, closer to our very selves than we can ever grasp, but in the midst of a world with other ideas? Mary’s faithfulness to the charge to do this very thing, holding her son throughout, shows us a life of gripes and disagreements, a life bright with joy in the good things of God that transform the injustices of this world and yet deep, profound sorrow as she holds his corpse, the victim of those very injustices, and wonders what happened; she performs what love must in those numb, cold hours; she holds on, she tends the body; she does nothing dramatic, nothing warranting a headline.

And if we too are fellow-heirs with Christ, children of God by adoption in the Spirit, then may she too hold us, in all we bear, helping us to see beyond what tears we may know, to be able to dream of a world turned the right way round, and may she help us to perform what love must, whatever is happening around us. Holy Mary, mother of God; pray for us.