Dear Women of Nazareth:

How quickly you turned your backs on one of your own. This unwed mother, this girl gone wrong, you presumed her guilty and wrapped her in shame.

In the marketplace, you bartered for the best cloth and grain, you spoke of family and friends, and you didn’t give Mary a second thought. You sent her into the shadows as you gave yourselves up to sunnier things, pulling cloaks of respectability around you and counting your blessings.

Even as she stood in the shadows, how could you not see the Light of the World piercing the city, piercing the world? But then, you had no eyes to see that the greatest blessing was right there in your midst. God chose the very woman whom you cast off to carry His son. That’s how He works–with the least, the unexpected, the shamed and shameless.

And you missed it. You might have fallen to your knees in adoration, humbled by the presence of the living God growing inside this hometown girl, but you busied yourselves with such trivial things: what you would wear, what you would eat, when you would sleep.

We have women like you today, and they send their accusations and presumptions into cyberspace with the touch of one finger. Unfiltered and unexamined, their words shred the reputations of others and leave their victims mere shells of their former selves. Like you, they have no eyes to see and miss the greater light that shines inside each of those they accuse. They miss the miracles–blooms discernible to only the faithful–that unfold around them. In truth, they miss it all.

Like you, they delight in playing God, believing their throne rooms to be impenetrable and their judgment to be unimpeachable. I suppose they find it easier this way, believing themselves charged with the work of sorting the sheep from the goats. But do they ever stop to think that all this sorting and judging was never their business?

It’s easy for me to say that I would have befriended Mary, perhaps even defended her publicly. Sadly, I’m really not sure. I may have walked the dusty streets, smugly and wholly unaware of the miracle in my midst. I, too, may have missed it all.

With both scorn and empathy,

Shannon