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.

Photo by Ruth Gledhill on Unsplash