The three wise women of Christmas — OP-ED

With Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna, the gospel message moves forward.

After Thanksgiving about four years ago, I was having one of those Charlie Brown moments. My usual mood upswing heading toward Christmas had stalled out. Was Christmas becoming a problem for me just as Linus says of his friend in the famous opening scene of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”?

“You are the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas and turn it into a problem. Maybe Lucy is right. Of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you are the Charlie Browniest,” exclaimed Linus.

I knew I was missing something. A few years ago, I thought I had found an antidote to the Black Friday binge buying that depressed me. I rediscovered Advent as a sort of second Lent for fasting, prayer, and giving up nonessential worldly distractions in anticipation of the moment when Jesus came as Immanuel, “God with us.”

That helped me up to Christmas eve, but it didn’t quite get me to Christ and Christmas Day. I felt that I was still looking for some undiscovered puzzle piece.

So, I started rereading Bible commentaries. I turned toward the prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible. Then, I read and reread the gospels of Matthew and Luke with their birth stories. I compared translations. I was really searching for the missing clue to Christmas joy, which I felt must be there.

Then late one night, a light bulb popped on. Right in Luke’s narrative, there was a glimpse of something I had missed. There were three women in the Christmas story whose wise words and actions seemed to reinforce each other’s response to Christ. Could this be the bit of understanding that I was missing? Was I missing the often unnoticed role of women in advancing God’s story to me?

I came to realize that Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna were a cohort of mutually supporting witnesses that can be viewed as the female part of the Bible’s Wisdom Tradition. And if this is so, how could these understandings enrich our experience of the purpose of Christ’s birth?

Collective Consciousness?

Almost all aspects of the Christmas story were covered by the combined wisdom in words and deeds of Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna. Each in their own way enlisted themselves at the start of God’s mission through Jesus Christ.

Elizabeth was old, barren, and disgraced despite being married to a prominent priest Zechariah. Through her husband, she did occupy a coveted spot within her community, but she faced near life-long disgrace since she bore no children.

The ancient Jews viewed a barren woman as punished by God. In Genesis 30, the childless Rachel exclaimed to Jacob that she preferred death to barrenness. The comparison of one’s barrenness to the women with children must have at times been unbearable to Elizabeth. Then, her husband Zechariah had shocking news: she would become pregnant.

After that happened, she kept herself hidden from public life, perhaps fearful that she would miscarry. Yet all along, Elizabeth’s heart was youthfully joyful awaiting God’s Messiah, the one true Child of God, because such awaiting had become her mission in life.

Her cousin Mary was also perplexed when the angel Gabriel told her that she would bear a child directly from God. Mary needed some guidance and rushed over to see Elizabeth. Even though ancient Jews had a tradition of the angel Gabriel appearing to Daniel and at other times to interpret God’s purposes, it was extremely unusual that an angel came to women!

When Mary entered the house, Elizabeth’s heart instantly knew from the Holy Spirit and the leap in her womb, that Mary is “the mother of my Lord.” Sometimes, a wise utterance is a holy blurt, which in this instance endorsed Gabriel’s message to Mary.

Mary was young, betrothed, and pregnant. Betrothal was not like the engagement of a modern-day couple signaling their intention to marry that could be broken off. In ancient times, a betrothal was almost like marriage in its commitment, and it would be a family-rupturing disgrace for a woman to become pregnant during her betrothal. So, the angel Gabriel’s message was as disturbing as it was audacious. Yet with a humble recognition, Mary replied, “May your word to me be fulfilled.”

Luke wrote in his book that as Mary heard testimony about her son, she “sumballo’ed” the words, meaning that she threw them together in her heart trying to work out what was happening.

Upon getting Elizabeth’s reinforcement of the meaning of Gabriel’s words, Mary finally let out an exultant song that is called “The Magnificat.” It starts, “My soul magnifies the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.” (ESV) It is one of the most beautiful poems in existence, and it was inspired by two women sharing their fates with each other.

In too many contemporary Christmas pageants and sermons, this dynamic between these women is downplayed for who knows for what reason. This is a great loss for the contemporary church because here was a moment when the weight of God’s great grace came to rest upon two disgraced and pregnant women. Let’s put it this way, God placed his Son into the hands of two women. This divine vulnerability was truly beyond human imagination then and now.

The third woman to bring attention to Jesus’ birth was Anna. She was widowed and very possibly childless, and a gnarly prophetess of vision.

She is one of the ten women in the Bible who are named as a prophetess. For example, Exodus recounts that Miriam was not only the sister of Moses and Aaron but also the first woman to be named as a prophetess. Some of the others named as prophetess included the judge Deborah and the prophet Isaiah’s wife.

As a prophetess, Anna embodied an exemplary public role model of devout worship by a woman. She also lived to fill her calling from God as a widow. We have largely lost the whole meaning of widowhood in the Bible. Mostly, we classify widows as desperately needy people like orphans, strangers, and the poor. Certainly, they could be vulnerable and need careful attention to their well-being. Supported then, widows can perform completely their God-given vocation of exemplifying godliness to their family and keeping in steady prayer for people’s needs and God’s work. (See Paul’s words on widows in chapter five of his first letter to his protégé Timothy.).

After Simeon composed his poem about the mission of Jesus (a song of praise called “Nunc Dimittis” in church services), Anna became the first person to carry the message of the Messiah’s birth to Jews gathered at the temple.

The widow prophetess spread the Gospel message of Messiah’s birth for the first time in Jerusalem. Luke 2:38 says, “Coming up to them at that very moment, [Anna] gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem.” (NIV) Anna attains her status as an authority figure through fasting, prayer, and by her “night and day” worship in the temple. She was well prepared in her heart to be the first evangelist of the gospel.

In the 1970s, there was a re-evaluation of the early church’s idea of widowhood. Roger Gryson, a noted French Catholic historian of the church, published “The Ministry of Women in the Early Church.” In one section, he explored the order of widows detailed in the “Teaching of the Apostles”(Didascalia apostolorum), likely written around A.D. 230. Gryson’s book figures prominently in the 2019 dissertation, “Widow as the Altar of God” (L.M. Moore, Marquette).

Moore makes the case that today we should return widowhood to its proper vocational place in the church as a motif for the altar. “Widows in the early Church,” she writes, “offer a challenging Christian ethos, which derives from their good works and from a rootedness in ascetic practices that comprise a whole way of life for Christian discipleship.” Luke, she says, writes more about widows “than any other evangelist.” Significantly, a disciple of the Apostle of John, Polycarp, also endorsed this idea about widowhood.

In conclusion, Moore wrote, “The widow evolves from someone who is pitied in the Old Testament into an authoritative figure who is to be emulated in the early Church.”

So, Gabriel’s message moves through Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna to the Jewish people. The essence of their combined wisdom is twofold: They realized they had witnessed a new truth (birth of Messiah) and accepted responsibility for sharing this good news. It’s a stunning example of collective consciousness, which sociologists define as “the set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes. which operate as a unifying force within society.” It’s in these liberating moments that women begin to gain new unity in Christ and become a force for redemptive change and discipleship.

Journalism and the early church

This re-evaluation of the concurrent words and deeds of these three women is possible because the Book of Luke provides so many details about the birth of Jesus.

If you look intimately at these details of what Luke shared, you realize that this narrative feels different from many of the narratives in the Bible. Luke was not reporting his first-hand knowledge of the events that took place. Rather, he is like a reporter who writes a historical journalism background to events that he did witness. Luke seems to take first-hand stories that circulated in the early church and culls out a riveting summary decades after the fact. In journalism, we know that the full story often emerges slowly over time and the most authoritative account may not be revealed for years or even decades.

In the first chapter of Luke, the author sets out for himself the task of an orderly account that will be reliable. (He uses a word related to the one used to describe prisoners locked up “securely.”)  He relies on eyewitness accounts, so he admits that he isn’t trying to do anything new.

Luke narrates with authority but does not source the story. This is unlike his narrative strategy in his Acts of the Apostles. He knew the actors and often participated in the key events. In his Gospel, he summarizes the background to the personalities and events in Acts.

His work as a journalist was analogous to really good journalistic accounts of history like Stephen M. Ambrose’s popular histories of World War 2. Ambrose would interview many of the participants and look at their notebooks and the like, consult written records, then write a gripping summary narrative. He described it this way in his book The Band of Brothers, “The veterans had frequently contradicted each other on small points, and very occasionally on big ones…I felt it was my task to make my best judgment on what was true, what was misremembered, .. [and] what acts of heroism had been played down by a man too modest to brag on himself.”

Luke had excellent sources. He was very close to the Apostle Paul, probably knew several other of the disciples, probably used the Gospel of Mark and other documents passed around at the time, and may well have spoken with the younger participants in Jesus’ life.

Luke wasn’t trying to create literature but a journalistic history. I. Howard Marshall, the late New Testament scholar and author of “New Testament Theology: Many Witnesses, One Gospel,” called Luke, “the historian,” but Marshall and other scholars also realize that Luke had an interpretive theme of salvation that weaves through the story.

This storyline of salvation is what makes his re-telling of the three women’s words and deeds so gripping, even in their small moments.

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists in summary demands that journalists: Seek the truth and report it. Minimize harm. Act independently. Be accountable and transparent. Does Luke pass this test? You be the judge. I think he does. I think that it is likely that so many used Luke’s gospel because it did such a good job of providing the overarching background story to Jesus’ life and the early church.

Wisdom’s seven pillars

Luke’s inclusion of these women, Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna, foreshadows the startling love and attention that Jesus lavished on women during his years of public ministry. By name, Jesus engaged with women privately and with women publicly and referenced women (and widows) as examples of God-fearing righteousness and generosity. Women are eyewitnesses at his moment of birth, at many of his miracles, at his time of death, at the discovery of his resurrection, and at Pentecost.

Today, we must recover the central vocational role of women acting in concert, not isolation, in the birth of Jesus and their clear affirmation at his birth of his messianic mission. At Christmastide today, we have edited down motherhood and womanhood so we see these three, Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna, as almost solitary, role-playing actors, when in reality Luke reveals that each of them had a critical yet interdependent purpose in this miracle story of God incarnate.

Wisdom is elusive and difficult to define, but we recognize wise decision-making when we see it. When I look at the Christmas story through the lens of wisdom (chokmâh, in biblical Hebrew), I glean new insight about Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna. This is about the wisdom of deeds, not just words. The Talmud says, “Do not be wise in words alone but also in deeds, for the wisdom of deeds will be necessary for the world to come while the wisdom of words remains on earth.”

A concept of wisdom having seven pillars comes from Proverbs 9:1, “Wisdom hath builded her house, she hath hewn out her seven pillars.” I’m citing the King James here because it memorably uses “hewn out.” In Judaism, there is a reference to the Torah as a flowing stream, watering a tree of wisdom. The seven pillars (sometimes branches) are often labeled: love, mercy, judgment, righteousness, truth, meekness,  and holiness. There are also the seven books of wisdom, though two are omitted from many contemporary Bibles.

“Wisdom is the right use of knowledge,” wrote Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon. The “rightness” Spurgeon referred to concerned righteous acts and utterances at the right time and place. The wisdom was at the ready to respond to new circumstances, obviating the need to be timely and not always being bogged down in debate, reflection, or hesitation.

Knowledge of God, self, and others emerged as the prerequisites to the fateful actions of Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna. Elizabeth provides sanctuary to the expectant Mary, and prophetess Anna’s cameo appearance seconded the public affirmation by Simeon that Jesus is Israel’s redeemer.

In his writing, Luke showed that he was a distinctive lover of dyads and triads: Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and Anna, Jesus and John the Baptizer, Mary and Martha, the sons of thunder (James and John), and Paul and Barnabus. It’s in the relational interplay of twos and threes that we catch a truer glimpse of the divine nature and God’s gift of wisdom. As a gift from God, wisdom always evokes its divine author and demands to be shared, not hoarded, with others.

Matthew explicitly picked up this communal ideal in quoting Jesus, who said, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I will be among them.” Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna are luminous examples of such a triad gathering. To our knowledge, they were never all in the same physical space, yet they acted in sequence with a shared awareness of being in the presence of God incarnate. To be in God’s presence is to be the presence of ultimate wisdom.

What was it that made these three women wise and why were they able to see things that others missed?

I don’t think there are simple answers to such questions. We can be confident that all three were steeped in God’s covenantal words through their worship, study, fasting, prayer, and righteous deeds. But these are not the women of Proverbs 31. Rather, they are the women of Isaiah 53, expectant, watching, enduring all things, drawn into the greatest story ever told. They show us that wisdom requires the integration of our knowledge, experience, understanding of the human condition–and action.

If we allow their wisdom to become ours, we may see God incarnate in the unexpected and rejoice. Elizabeth, Mary, and Anna offer us a teachable moment if we are willing to see it.

That’s also what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

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