Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?

Mary was a young Jewish woman from Nazareth, a small hill town in Galilee that nobody expected anything from. When her story opens she is engaged to Joseph, a carpenter descended from King David, and by the customs of the time she was probably still in her teens. Luke says simply that God sent an angel to her (Luke 1:26).

The Gospels give Mary more space than any other woman, yet she speaks only a handful of times. Luke shows her receiving the angel, visiting her relative Elizabeth, singing, giving birth and pondering. John shows her at a wedding and at the cross. Acts places her among the first believers praying together after the ascension (Acts 1:14).

Christians of every tradition honor Mary as the mother of Jesus, and the early church defended calling her the God-bearer because her son is truly God. Beyond that, traditions differ. Catholic and Orthodox Christians hold that she remained a virgin all her life and read the brothers of Jesus named in the Gospels (Matthew 13:55) as cousins or as Joseph's sons from an earlier marriage; most Protestants take them to be younger children of Mary and Joseph. Catholics also teach that she was conceived without sin and taken bodily into heaven, which other Christians do not hold as doctrine. What all of them share is the portrait the Gospels paint: a woman of faith who said yes to God at great cost.

The angel in Nazareth. Gabriel greets Mary as someone God has favored and tells her she will bear a son who will reign forever on David's throne. She asks how, since she has never been with a man, and is told the Holy Spirit will make it happen. Her answer is consent: she calls herself the Lord's servant and accepts what he has said (Luke 1:26). Joseph, meanwhile, learns the truth in a dream and takes her as his wife (Matthew 1:18).

The song in the hill country. Mary hurries to her older relative Elizabeth, who is expecting John the Baptist. Elizabeth blesses her for believing what God promised, and Mary responds with a song that Christians have prayed for two thousand years. It praises a God who lifts the lowly, feeds the hungry and keeps his ancient promise to Abraham (Luke 1:39).

Bethlehem and the temple. A census takes the couple to Bethlehem, where Mary gives birth in humble conditions and shepherds arrive with a message from angels. Luke notes that she held on to all of it and kept turning it over inwardly (Luke 2:1). When the child is presented in the temple, old Simeon warns her that grief will one day cut through her like a sword (Luke 2:34). Soon after, Joseph's dream sends the family fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod (Matthew 2:13).

Losing him and finding him. At twelve, Jesus stays behind in Jerusalem and his frantic parents find him three days later among the teachers. His reply points to a Father other than Joseph, the first hint that his mission will outgrow his family (Luke 2:41). Years later at a wedding in Cana, Mary simply tells the servants to follow his instructions, and he turns water into wine, his first sign (John 2:1).

The cross. Simeon's sword falls on Good Friday. Mary stands near the cross while most of the disciples have fled, and Jesus, dying, entrusts her to the beloved disciple and him to her (John 19:25). The last glimpse Scripture gives is of her in the upper room with the apostles, waiting in prayer for the Spirit (Acts 1:14).

Mary is the first person in the New Testament to say yes to Jesus. She did not understand everything, and she said so, but she trusted the God who was asking. Elizabeth's blessing names the heart of it: she believed that what God had said would come true (Luke 1:45).

Her yes was costly. An unmarried pregnancy in a small town, a birth far from home, a flight into exile, a son whose mission she could not control, and finally a public execution. The Gospels never pretend that following God spared her pain. They show her carrying it the way she carried everything else, by pondering and holding on.

She also teaches a way of listening. Twice Luke tells us she stored what she saw and heard and kept thinking it over. Jesus himself, when a woman in the crowd praised his mother, redirected the praise to everyone who listens to God and obeys (Luke 11:27), and that is exactly what Mary had been doing since Nazareth. Paul sums up her place in God's plan in one line: at the moment God had chosen, his Son came into the world through a human mother (Galatians 4:4). Through her ordinary, obedient life, the extraordinary entered the world.