Rowan Williams on John Burt's poem 'Mary of Nazareth III'. This is literary and theological reflection of the highest order, in which a poem's assumed Christology refuses to be confined in concepts, but is explored in the human experience of the Christ's mother. That Jesus must learn to translate the eternal and divine into timebound and human experience requires a daring speculative leap that perhaps the poet is best placed to articulate without being over-protective of the metaphysical assumptions intended to keep such speculation orthodox, sound, and safe.
"Mary has to teach Jesus how to be human, as any mother teaches a child. And if this humanity is uniquely the vehicle of the eternal Word of God, Mary has to teach her child how to that unique human.
Jesus must learn to be God incarnate from his mother; that is, he must learn how to make his life gift not campaign;
to do what has to be done by 'being done to', by loving and attentive receptivity that will embody the eternal loving receptivity of the Son to the Father in the Trinity;
by making loss and catastrophe and death a means of growth.
Mary's familiarity with receptivity and the transformation of risk or vulnerability becomes the specific, concretely human means of Jesus growing into a humanity that is the agent of universal renewal, the door opening in to a new humanity and a new creation."
(page 50)
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