Our local paper recently ran a story about a church that was being demolished. In the process, the workers discovered a time capsule from 1882. They found a newspaper that carried a story about a woman that had died from overexposure in the harsh winter. She was described as an “elderly woman of forty-seven!”
It is hard for us to imagine that just a hundred years ago the mid-forties was a full lifetime for most people. This got me to thinking about Mary the mother of Jesus, who would have been in her mid-forties at the time of His death.
How often do we think of Mary as “elderly”? In our culture, where youth is at a premium and people seem willing to do anything rather than age, we usually focus on Mary the teen-age maiden who learns that she is to be a mother. But what about the rest of Mary’s life? In particular, since Jesus was about thirty years of age when he began his public ministry (Lk 3:23), how can the mature Mary at age forty-five be our example too?
In order to reflect on this, we need to understand something about the cultural meaning of the age of forty-five for their world. Then, since Luke’s gospel highlights Mary more than the other gospels, we can reflect on Luke’s example of Mary at forty-five to discover how we might emulate her example of mature wisdom, connectedness and care.
Continue reading "Mary at 45: Luke's Model of Mature Wisdom by Steve Mueller" »
