No, Mary didn’t know.

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There has been a few memes rocking around the social media tree this week calling out Mark Lowry’s song ‘Mary, did you know?’ The point they’re making is something like, ‘Sure she knew! She knew all these things… the angel told her, dummy!’ This has led some to believe that the song is, in reporter Holly Scheer’s words, ‘biblically illiterate’ (The Federalist, 2016).

There are some who defend the song by saying the questions in it are rhetorical. I want to go further than that today and ask: did she, in fact, know? I want to look at the Bible and explore to what extent do the relevant passages suggest she knew the things in the song.

What was there to know (the claims)?

There are twelve specific questions asked of Mary in the song ‘Mary did you know’. Three are from the miracle stories, three are about salvation, three are about divinity, and two are about eschatology. In order of appearance, they are:

Jesus would one day:

1. Walk on water (miracle)
2. Save God’s people (salvation)
3. Bring in new creation (eschatology)
4. Would deliver her personally (salvation)
5. Heal a blind man (miracle)
6. Calm a storm (miracle)

Jesus has previously:

7. Walked with angels (divinity)

Jesus is:

8. God Himself (divinity)
9. Lord of creation (eschatology)

Jesus will:

10. Rule the world (eschatology)

Jesus is:

11. The sacrificial lamb (salvation)
12. God (as Yahweh) (divinity)

Then there are also five assertions, that she isn’t asked if she knows—and they all allude to the miracle stories.

The:

i. Blind will see
ii. Deaf will hear
iii. Dead will rise
iv. Lame will leap
v. Dumb will speak

We will refer to these as ‘the claims’ throughout.

There’s clearly a lot of these—most obviously the miracles stories—that we have no reason to assume Mary knew as she was never told about them, never mentions them, or in most cases was never there. There are others, however, that maybe she knew. Let’s take a step back and have a look.

We can only decide on what Mary knew from the information we are told about her. There are three major pieces of evidence:

  1. What was Mary specifically told by the angel in Luke 1:26-38, and by Elizabeth in vv.39.45.
  2. What did Mary suspect about Jesus, shared through her song in Luke 1:46-56.
  3. What did Mary understand about Jesus, shown through her interactions with him throughout his lifetime most notably (Luke 2:25-35; 42-52; Mark 6:1-6; and John 2:1-11).

1. Mary, were you told?

Mary was told by the angel Gabriel that Jesus would be the ‘Son of the Most High’ (Luke 1:32a) and ‘Son of God’ (v.35b), that he would ‘sit on David’s throne’ (v.32b), and would ‘reign over’ the Jewish people (v.33a) ‘forever’ (v.33b). She is told he would be the ‘Holy One’ (v.33a) and was told to call her baby, Jesus (v.31), which means ‘the lord is salvation.’

We can add to this that Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, believed Mary’s baby to be ‘blessed’ (v.42), and that He would be Elizabeth’s ‘Lord’ (v.43).

All this is a recognisable description of the expected Jewish Messiah. It’s a picture of a great, powerful, God-appointed King to rule over His people. These are the same Messianic descriptions that would have been understood by the Jews who ‘tried to make Jesus’ king by force’ (John 6:15). These prophecies were seated in an idea that the kingdom would be restored to Israel as it was and not a new kingdom that Jesus brings in (with gentiles grafted in through faith in a dying and resurrected messiah). Mary’s is an understanding at the beginning of Jesus’ character arc—before he blew those standard expectations clear out of the water.

We now have interpreters’ hindsight. By that, I mean we read Gabriel’s and Elizabeth’s words through the lens of knowing how Jesus played out. We understand salvation by faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how that specifically fulfilled Israel’s hopes in unexpected ways. Mary did not have this hindsight and was not told about these things in advance. I think it’s unreasonable, therefore, for us to assume she heard Gabriel’s words outside of common Jewish expectations.

So, some claims in the song are perhaps alluded to (particularly claims 2, 7, 8 and 12), but none of them are specifically told to Mary.

2. Mary, did you suspect?

Mary’s Jewish expectations come across even more clearly in how she responds to the foretelling of Jesus’ birth through her song in Luke 1:46-55.

It’s a beautiful piece of Hebrew poetry that reads very similarly to a subset of the Psalms. It does point to God as her personal saviour (v.47). However, this is described by God’s remembrance and choosing of her, rather than what we might understand the word to mean today (v.48). She then zooms out to paint a picture of God as mighty and holy (v.49), bringing down His enemies and lifting up the faithful (vv.51-53), and then fulfilling the promises made to the Jewish people through Abraham (vv.54-55). This re-enforces the idea that Mary had a common Jewish understanding of the messianic arrival of the God’s kingdom.

It’s an amazing piece of worship, and one that would have been fully recognisably in form and content to Jewish poetry. However, it omits Jesus, and it doesn’t give any impression that the things within it will be accomplished through Him. She probably sees some link between her child, God’s promises, and God’s rule, but there’s not enough in her response to claim that she ‘knew’ or even really suspected who Jesus truly was or what He was going to do.

3. Mary, did you understand?

As any of us can testify, there’s a big difference between being told something and knowing something. However, so far we can see that without hindsight, there wasn’t much Mary was told about Jesus in relation to the claims, and that her expectations were seated in a pre-Incarnation Jewish understanding of what God’s rule for Israel would look like.

This is made clearer by seeing how Mary interacts with Jesus after He is born:

Luke 2:25-35
Jesus is presented at the Temple as expected, and Simeon tells His parents that Jesus would cause ‘the rising and falling of many in Israel’ and that ‘hearts would be revealed’ by Him. Their response wasn’t ‘we knew that’. Instead, they ‘marvelled at what was said’ (v.33). And for a kicker, Simeon also tells them they too will ‘have their soul’s pierced’ by Jesus (v.35). It certainly sounds like they haven’t come to grips with who their baby is yet.

Luke 2:41-52
Jesus, as a young boy went missing, and was subsequently found talking with the Jewish leaders in the Temple. When mum and dad find Him they were upset, but Jesus says in v.49 ‘Did you not know I had to be in my father’s house’. They did not know, and they ‘did not understand’ (v.50).

Mark 6:1-6 (cf. Luke 4:16-30; Matthew 13:53-58)
Jesus is teaching in His hometown and is rejected by those who were there and Jesus says ‘a prophet is without honour… among his relatives and in his own home.’ Jesus is not understood or known by His family. This is emphasised in Mark 3 when his family went to ‘take charge of him’ saying He was ‘out of his mind’ (v.21). This may not mean Mary, but she is often included with the relatives (Mark 3:31-35; Luke 8:19-21; Matthew 12:46-50).

John 2:1-11
Mary understands something of Jesus’ power at the Wedding at Cana, however, the sense of His salvation purpose (my hour has not yet come, v.4) goes over her head.

What we learn from these verses is Mary knew to some degree that Jesus was chosen by God and has some power, but did not understand that he was the sacrificial, divine, saviour of the world, as the Lowry’s song suggests.

So, Mary, did you know?

No, she didn’t. The song’s rhetorical questions are accurate.

My instinct is that the song is a reflection upon Luke 1:19 which says, ‘Mary treasured all these things, pondering them in her heart’. As a mother wonders over her child’s future, so Mary would – with the additional experience of the visits of the angel, the shepherds, the magi, Elizabeth, and Simeon – ponder on exactly who her Jesus would be. The song is rhetorical at its heart, inviting us to ponder with Mary the sacrifices of God and the life of Jesus.

An egotistiacal meme too many.

What bothers me about a Christian meme culture that’s refelcted in some of the critics posts about this song is not just the poor accuracy, but the egotistic roots feeding it. Theres a too oft-unchallenged strain of Conservative evangelicalism that is suspicious of, and sometimes downright disdainful towards creative expressions of worship. Conservative evangelicals can be unnecessarily mean-hearted.

There are plenty of metaphors, similes, colourful descriptions, and technicolour worship responses across the Bible. It is not exclusively propositional. When Isaiah 55:12 says ‘you shall go out with Joy’ it doesn’t mean to find a nice girl called Joy, and you can’t dismiss ‘the trees of the field shall clap their hands’ in that same verse because trees don’t actually have hands.

The purpose of Mary did you know, is to move the listener towards worship through a reflective focus on the person of Jesus. Mary, in the song, represents all of us, and how we should respond to Jesus today. It does a pretty competent job describing both the divine and the human natures of Jesus, and it places these in a context of self-sacrifice. It might be a little soppy for your taste, but that’s a whole different thing.

We are called to be reflective and creative worshippers. Yes, it’s important that we explore creativity within propositional boundaries, but that doesn’t mean that creative expressions are uniquely open targets to come under special scrutiny in a way other expressions are not.

The memes that I’ve seen ‘taking down’ this song look like they’re covered in some macho hyper-analytical cold rationalism. They come with a sense of ‘look how stupidly wrong this song is, of course Mary knew, an angel told her!’ That approach is lazy and simply incorrect. Mean, hypercritical, sarcastic, and Christian memes should have no place in Jesus’ Church. They are symptomatic of a culture at war with itself and at odds with the great commandment to love God and love others.

 

 

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Should we want to be Prophets?

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There’s a desire among some quarters of the church to be ‘prophetic’. Now, at first glance, that’s not a bad thing – 1 Cor. 14 tells us to eagerly pursue prophecy after all! The problems sneak in, however, when we equate the New Testament call to prophecy with the Old Testament office of Prophet. They are simply not the same thing.

Prophets in the Old Testament

An Old Testament prophet was a specific category of person, a divinely appointed office. They rarely enjoyed it, took great pains to avoid it, and we’re often lambasted for it too! Ezekiel lay on his side for 430 days, Isaiah walked around naked while preaching for three years, Hosea was told to marry a prostitute, Balaam had to compete with a donkey, Nehemiah went on a rampage—mostly pulling people’s hair, and Jeremiah wasn’t allowed to wash his pants. Does this sound like a glitzy job description? Prophets were unique, very rare individuals who were called to speak into specific times within the developing drama of biblical history.

Apart from some eccentricities, you can tell an Old Testament Prophet because they consistently did three things: they clarified the past, interpreted the present, and they predicted the future(s). This is a formula that’s unique to the Old Testament Prophetic office. The uniqueness of their office is underlined because their words carried enough divine inspiration to be able to say with no irony: ‘thus saith the Lord.’ Put another way, their words were infallible, beyond question, and subsequently could be added to the Bible.

It’s my belief—and as rare as this is for me, it’s the belief of most of the Christian Old Testament scholastic community—that the office of Old Testament Prophet no longer exists. If they did, then we’d constantly be adding to the Bible, and there’re all kinds of reasons that that’s a bad idea. However divinely inspired I might sometimes feel, I wouldn’t dream of boldly suggesting that my words are infallible or beyond question, and that there should be a ‘book of Tim’ in the Bible … well, not another one anyway! If you’re interested, I think the last ‘Old Testament-style’ piece of prophecy was Peter’s speech at Pentecost in Acts 2.

Prophecy in the New Testament

Now prophecy in the New Testament is a different thing all together. There’s some overlap, but not in the most obvious places. First, it’s important to understand that within Paul’s epistles, the English translation of the word ‘prophesy’ doesn’t cover all the contextual nuances of the Greek. In some contexts, it’s clear that all Paul actually means is ‘preaching’ or even just speaking some kind of gospel message. The puritan William Perkins wrote an entire book on preaching based on this simply called ‘The Art of Prophesying.’

Under that definition, which we unfortunately easily miss through the limitations of English translations, we should understand prophesy to primarily mean something like the movement of an edifying message from a speaker to a hearer. As pretentious as that sounds, it’s the best I can come up with to explain the concept without just saying ‘preaching’, which would be too narrow.

So, the broad umbrella of prophecy is simply sharing God’s word and truths with each other through preaching, talking, edification, and encouragement.

Who actually receives the gift?

Right now onto ‘noetic quality’. This was what 19th Century psychologist and philosopher William James called the idea of obtaining information in a way you wouldn’t have known otherwise, or ‘hearing directly from God.’ This is what we tend to mean when we use the word prophecy. Prophecy certainly can have noetic quality, but this is not the central feature of it, and is not even required of it. In fact, like most spiritual gifts in 1 Cor. 12, we have interpreted the preposition for this backward. Let me see if I can explain.

Take ‘gift of healing’, for instance. We assume if person A prays for person B, and person B is healed, then person A is the one with a ‘gift of healing.’ This is why we say some people are ‘faith healers.’ But that doesn’t make any sense logically, and it’s not supported textually. Logically, the person who is healed certainly seems to be the most obvious recipient of a ‘gift’, not the other person praying for it. I’ve I’m healed, then I received a gift of healing from God, right? Textually, almost every English version of the Bible makes a basic translation error: It should read gifts of healings, not gift of healing. It’s two plurals, not two singulars. That makes it gifts and healings.

So, prepositionally, the person who receives the effect receives the gift—and this makes sense contextually too, as the verses all around it are about mutual edification, not mutant superpowers. It’s about building each other up, not coming to grips with our individual tool-belts.

As a quick example, my young people often ask me to pray for their exam results. If they do well, they don’t then tell me I have a ‘gift of good grades, as they understand they are the recipients of those grades.

A deeper dig into 1 Cor. 14

So, who receives the gift of prophecy—the one who speaks, or those who hear? And what is the gift? Is it noetic quality, or just clear gospel truth? 1 Cor. 14 can help us out with both.

Who receives it? It is the collective church who should eagerly desire prophecy (14:1), as the church needs to mutually hear God’s word. The person who prophesies (v.3—and note it is in third person plural) does so for the strength, encouragement, and comfort of the whole body, and edifies the church (v.4). Prophecy is a gift for the church (vv.12, 22).

What is it? Throughout this whole chapter, Paul is contrasting prophecy with tongues. It’s the longest explanation we have of prophecy in the whole New Testament, and not once does Paul even mention noetic quality. Instead, he talks about speaking intelligible words to instruct others (14:9, 19). Words that clearly set out the gospel (v.24). If anything, it’s the gift of tongues that actually holds noetic quality (vv.5, 16). Paul does mention revelation in v.6, but that is not the same as prophecy either (he says or).

However, there is possibly one spanner in the works for my interpretation here, as Paul says, prophecy will ‘lay bare the secrets of the heart’ (v.25). This verse might need a second look, as on first glance it sounds like a public revelation of someone’s personal secrets using the noetic quality of prophecy. Widely regarded as one of the best commentators on 1 Cor. Anthony Thiselton says this is not noetic, but is the natural result of clear gospel preaching. He says, ‘the words of the prophets bring home the truth of the gospel in such a way that the hearer “stands under” the verdict of the cross.’ And even Gordon Fee (who was immensely charismatic in his theology!) says that this refers to the Spirit’s accompaniment to gospel teaching—so the Holy Spirit reveals sin directly to the listener through conviction—not through the open public revelation of a ‘prophet.’

The problems with claiming to be a ‘Prophet’ today

The reason this is important to clear up is there are a lot of voices in the contemporary church who claim to be prophets, or to have the gift of prophecy uniquely or keenly—and by that they almost exclusively mean noetic quality.

This bothers me for a few reasons, but first a caveat:

I believe God can and does reveal truths to people who pray, and those truths can and sometimes do have noetic quality. I believe in that continuing phenomenon in the church today. I think praying and asking God to speak directly to us is a good practice for the church.

I don’t believe, however, that prophecy is a gift that only some people ‘own’ individually, or that it is specifically attached to only certain people. It might manifest itself at certain times or places or even people as the need arises, but it’s not a ‘skill’ or ‘tool’ that God bestows on someone for all time. The gift is receiving the message, not being the messenger, and often it is sharing the gospel or even just reminding people of what God has already said. I think this is available to everyone through prayer as need arises – which is why Paul tells the whole church to eagerly desire it, not just a few selective people.

So, what’s my problem? My issue is when someone says, ‘I am a Prophet’. Usually, they have in reality mixed some Old Testament office theology with some misunderstanding of the New Testament concept and wodged together a job description for themselves. There are several ways this can manifest is itself, and all of them I think are unhelpful.

How does this manifest itself in the church?

It can manifest as a person or a group of people who seemingly have ‘extra knowledge’ or ‘special revelation’ in the church that exist as a separate power-base to the pastor, subtly (or not so subtly) undermining the pastor’s shepherding of a people.

It can manifest as pride or even manipulation of those around, coming with a sense of ‘God prefers me’ and ‘others must do what I say.’ This can lead to all kinds of abuse and a broad lack of accountability.

It can manifest as street preachers who think they are divine inspired and are impossible to talk to. These come with a sense of misplaced authority, and a shocking lack of understanding of both preaching in the Bible, and how to communicate effectively.

It can manifest as competing revelation—with each other, and with the Bible—so if they say something different to somebody else, or to the Bible, then who has, ultimately, the true ‘infallible’ revelation.

It can manifest as unhealthy church plants, missional organisations, or ‘apostolic’ ministries, where a ‘prophet’ refuses to connect with a church, and continually isolates themselves, or they just surround themselves with similar (or susceptible) people.

Prophecy is a beautiful thing. It’s not a power to be harnessed and wielded like a sword, but a Spirit-filled sharing of God’s word together across the entire church. Let’s ask to receive it together, not try to ‘own’ it for ourselves.

So, should we want to be Prophets? No. But we should eagerly desire the gift of prophecy!

 

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