Reveal Christ through the Work of Our Hands

 

Now great God he you wis,

And mend you of your miss

Of me, what so betide.

As he is king of bliss,

Send you some sand of this,

In truth that ye might bide. 

- Mary to Joseph in the play "Joseph's Trouble About Mary" (YMP, 56).

          In this small passage, we find  the Virgin Mary saying a prayer for Joseph. This passage is taken from a conversation between Mary and Joseph in which they discuss the truth of her pregnancy. Mary sees that Joseph does not believe that she is pregnant by the Holy Spirit. In order to quell Joseph's misapprehension, Mary prays that God may send proof of her situation to Joseph. It is fair to say that Mary's words comprise a prayer because everything Mary says in this play is prayerful. In these York Mystery Plays, everything Mary says is "theologically exact;" she is always prayerfully devoted to God and never strays from the fact that her Son is the LORD, no matter how fictitious these claims sound to her neighbors (YMP, 48). I chose to share the above passage from the play because it reveals something deep about Mary as well as the author. Mary prays for Joseph so that he may know the truth and fulfill his part in the story. Deeper still, Mary's prayer reveals that she is the advocate of truth, who is Christ. She desires that all might know Christ and recognize their part in his story so that they too might mirror Christ.

          Within this play, we see Mary act as an advocate for Joseph, for Jesus, and the truth. Likewise, I believe the author assumes the role of advocate for Jesus, the truth, by creating this play. We have learned throughout the class that Mary reveals God to the world: He whom the heavens could not contain was born of the Virgin Mary. Mary is the most perfect mirror of God. Similarly to Mary's role in presenting Christ to the world, the author of this play presents Christ to their audience. The playwright wishes to reveal Christ and so the subject matter of their play is Christian. By the work of their hands, the author, artists, actors, performers, and the like become Christ's advocate. Just as the Virgin Mary did before them, these artists wish to cooperate in the sacred mysteries and bear Christ into the world. These artists use their craft, the work of their hands, to do this. With Mary as their prime example, they participate in the Christian story by bearing Christ into the world and proclaiming his glory. The work of these Christian artisans reveal Christ not necessarily in a new way, but one that is theologically and symbolically consistent with the Christian Scripture.

          The desire to bear Christ into the world is also seen in the Christian calendars found in Medieval Books of Hours. Within these calendars, almost every day has a sacred Christian significance, be it to memorialize a saint or an historical or cosmological event among other things. But why include the dead-and-gone saints or events? I believe Medieval Christians would argue, or advocate, that the saint or event reveals God to the world, which is no small thing.

          For example, the York Mystery Plays were performed in a procession during the feast of Corpus Christi. The idea behind these plays is not only to celebrate the Christian mysteries, but to reveal them again to the world. The act of performing these plays each year, again and again, for hundreds of years, is a testament to the fact that Christians desired to re-experience the Christian story and remind themselves that the story is still ongoing. For Medieval Christians, time itself became an exercise in re-experience. The desire to "re-experience" the Christian reality only strengthens my point that Christians wished to participate, cooperate, and imitate Christ and the Virgin Mary. We have learned previously in the Marian discussion in class that she is regarded as the most perfect mirror of Christ. Therefore, to become like Mary is to reveal Christ to the world. In order to truly live a Christian life, Medieval Christians set before them Mary as their model because she was the most perfect human model of virtue.

          However, many people do not view the Christian crafts (plays, calendars, art, apocrypha, etc.) as tools of participation, cooperation, or imitation. Instead, these works of human hands become to the Christian tradition a sort of "alien" offspring of "primitive peoples." For example, Emile Male believes that the apocryphal stories are alien and oriental legends of primitive peoples. Apparently these "primitive" folk were not content with the Gospels because they were "too short." Consequently, more stories had to be made to fill in the minor details that the Gospel failed to mention. However, the apocrypha do not provide minor details to please the wandering imagination of primitive peoples. The apocrypha are sober, theological, and symbolic stories of Christianity that are not alien or oriental compared to the Christian Tradition, but actually fulfill the same story structure as the Gospels.

         Similar to the Christian calendar, which inspired Christians to participate in an exercise of re-experience, the Apocrypha are likewise an exercise in re-experience. The writers and readers and artists of the Apocrypha experienced in new way the Gospels and Christian mysteries. I say "new way" not to suggest that these stories had theology or symbology different from Scripture, but that it focused on an aspect of the text that might make the story more relatable or more theologically or symbolically explicit among other things. Consider how the York Mystery Plays manifest the biblical characters in time, right before the eyes of the audiences. Performing these plays means presenting an audience with the opportunity to actually view these legendary figures. Not only does Mary, Joseph, and Christ become visible, but they speak in the local tongue!

          The most fruitful aspect of manifesting these figures physically before an audience is that it presents an opportunity not necessarily present within Scripture. The audience has the opportunity to see these figures wrestle with the choices they have to make. The audience can see these figure's understanding, faith, and morality play out. Instead of remaining words in a text or verbal characters in a story, the artisans who craft these apocrypha, plays, and other Christian art, make Christian figures visible to the world in a physical way. The way in which Christ is made visible does not have to strictly be some lofty, austere, sublime creation, but can be brought down to "street" level. Recall how Joseph scurries about in misapprehension about the truth of Mary's pregnancy... But how can we bring the divine down to earth? Does it not disrespect God? Eric Auerbach reminds us that Medieval authors frequently looked to the Incarnation of Christ, the supreme example of blending sublimitas and humilitas.

Mary's desire to remove the blindness of misapprehension from Joseph in a symbolic way underlies the Christian artist's desire to create. Just as Mary advocates for the truth of Christ so that others might take their place in the Christian story, so too do the artists of plays, images and stories, desire to reveal Christ to the world.

The Virgin Appears in a Play!

-MJ