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Pentatonix - Mary, Did You Know?
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Welcome back to Advent of Carols from [VerseNotes][vn]. I’m Jerry Towler, and today we’re talking about Mary Did You Know, a modern carol that has quickly become a Christmas staple.
[vn]:
If you want to listen to the song before we dive in, you’ll find some links in the show notes, or more specifically today, you’ll find one link to the Pentatonix version, which is the only one you’ll need. I like most of their stuff, but they really killed it on this one.
Now, before we did Come Thou Long Expected Jesus last week, I’d have said that this was the most scriptural Christmas song, and today I think we’re going to see why.
The song is basically a highlight reel of Jesus’ entire life. It’s got everything. It’s got his incarnation, you know, “the sleeping child you’re holding.” It’s got all of his miracles, his walking on water, his healing the blind, his raising the dead. It’s got the theological stuff, the redemptive work—”he’s come to make you new,” “he’s heaven’s perfect lamb.” It’s even got second coming language: he will “one day rule the nations.”
We’ve got prophecies, first coming, second coming. He is God of all, the Lord of all creation, “the great ‘I AM’.” Mary has literally “kissed the face of God.” It’s like all the prophecies and fulfilled realities and future realities of Jesus set to music.
It is intensely, deeply scriptural, and it is awesome.
I love this song, and even better for me, it asks questions, or actually it asks one big question, and it just asks it 17 times:
Mary, did you know?
And this is kind of weird because it seems to imply that the answer is “No,” that she did not know. That’s not actually in the song, but it kind of sounds like it, right?
But biblically, the answer is almost definitely “Yes,” she did know. Mary was young, but she knew a lot. I mean, among other things, the angel showed up and said, “Hey, Mary, these things are going to happen.”
But then she visits Elizabeth—her cousin Elizabeth—who was pregnant with John the Baptist at this time. And when she first walks in the room and John leaps for joy inside of Elizabeth, Mary receives this prophecy and she sings this amazing song. It’s called the Magnificat, which we’ve already talked about.
I’m not going to read the whole thing to you, but you should go open Luke 1 and read it, because this woman had more prophetic clarity than the disciples would have for many decades afterwards, despite literally walking with Jesus for years.
Mary says that she knows God is going to topple kings, that he’s going to lift up the lowly, that he’s going to fulfill ancient promises made to Abraham and his offspring forever. That’s going all the way back to Genesis 12, you know?
Now, did she know that Jesus would literally walk on water? Probably not. But did she know that he was the great I am? Yeah, she definitely did.
She sings in Luke 1 like someone who understands what’s going on, like someone who understands the stakes of what’s about to happen. And, yeah, I suspect she’s scared and she’s worried and she definitely doesn’t know everything, but boy, she really does know a lot.
“Mary, did you know?” Yeah, I think she did.
Now, let’s jump out of the lyrics a little bit before we get back into some of that theology and look at where this song came from. It sounds like a contemporary worship ballad because it actually is quite modern.
It was written by a man named Mark Lowry in 1985, which I’m sad to say was now 40 years ago, originally written for a Christmas play at his church where these questions would be asked in between the scenes of the play, which I think is a great idea and I would love to see it done that way.
Six years later, a friend of his, Buddy Greene, set it to music. And since then, lots of famous artists have recorded this song. Some of those artists you would expect. Dolly Parton sings Christmas songs, Clay Aiken sings Christmas songs, but then also people like CeeLo Green. Why did CeeLo Green cover this song? I cannot imagine.
I think that this song caught on because it really nails the sound of popular Christmas music, but it’s also covered in devotion and curiosity and wonder. It asks a question that we should be asking ourselves. Did we know? Do we today know these things that Mary knew 2,000 years ago?
When I was doing some research for this episode, I found a few criticisms of its theology. I’ve always loved this song, so I was a little bit surprised, but it turns out there are some good points and some not so good points, but let me just discuss them briefly.
First, some Catholics dislike the line, “the child you’ve delivered will soon deliver you.” I mean, it’s clever, right? Mary will deliver the child, that is, she will give birth to him, and then he will deliver her, as in forgive her sins and conquer death forever.
But it contradicts the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which is the idea that Mary herself was born without sin and thus does not require deliverance. As a Protestant, I don’t buy that particular doctrine. I don’t find biblical evidence for it, and frankly, the Catholics didn’t even write it down until 1854.
But if you are Catholic, then inside that theological system, this is a fair concern. The line treats Mary as a simple human and not uniquely holy, and that’s a problem. That’s unbiblical for you. That actually undoes a lot of the theology of Jesus. And so it’s not okay to include this in your worship music, if you’re Catholic.
Ironically for me, that’s exactly what I love about the line. Jesus stepped into a human family. He’s one of us. Mary’s one of us.
Now, Jesus, of course, is also literally God, but Mary’s just a person, and she gave birth to God, and that’s important to me. And I know I keep mentioning these same verses, but Hebrews 2:14 says it’s important too, that Jesus partook of flesh and blood. It mattered that he was human.
Here’s another criticism, and I don’t agree with this one at all. A man named Michael Frost called it the “least biblical, most sexist hymn ever.” He’s not the only one with this complaint.
The argument basically goes like this: The questions patronize Mary. They infantilize her. They treat her as if she doesn’t know stuff, although obviously she does. We’ve already talked about, for example, her conversation with the angel and the Magnificat.
And so this guy asks, would you ask all these biblical men the same questions? And my answer is, absolutely yes.
You should ask, for example, Abraham all these questions, because after God repeatedly promises him and Sarah a son, he still goes and sleeps with Hagar, who is not his wife, and she gave birth to Ishmael, which causes a giant rift in his family and is still causing problems today.
The guy asks, would we ask David the same questions? Yes, dude, we would ask David the same questions, or we should. David is like this chaotic paradox of faith and self-sabotage. I don’t know. David’s an awesome guy, and he’s the ancestor of Jesus, but also he committed adultery with Bathsheba, and then he murdered her husband.
So yes, let’s ask David some hard questions.
Asking the questions is not sexist. It’s not infantilizing. It’s curiosity. And curiosity is how people learn Scripture. It’s how we get to where these complaining theologians already are.
If someone wants to know what Mary knew, they should go read Luke 1, not blog posts by whoever this guy is. Sorry, man. I hope your other writing is better.
It turns out some people take this dislike to serious extremes. I didn’t know this until this week, but apparently so many people dislike this song for this kind of reason that in 2017, a Canadian theologian named Jennifer Henry wrote new lyrics.
And they also ask questions, but they’re modern questions like, Mary, did you know your ancient words would still leap off our pages? Which is actually a cool question, and it’s a decent song.
But the weird thing for a song written by a theologian is that the new song teaches us nothing about Jesus. The original song, I think, is powerful because it points to him. It points to his miracles, his salvation, his divinity, the future rule when he comes back and all nations flow to him.
And that’s the whole point of Advent, wondering who this child is.
So, did Mary know? Yeah. Yeah, she knew more than anyone realized, and more than anybody else, for several decades afterward.
And this song invites us into that same wonder that she was feeling that night. The staggering cosmic truth that “that sleeping child you’re holding is the great I AM.”
And that’s why we sing.
Thanks for joining me today for Advent of Carols. If you’d like to help make more projects like this possible, check out Advent Commons at versenotes.org/commons. And we’ll be back tomorrow with another carol of Christmas.
If you’ve got thoughts about today’s carol, I’d love to hear them. You can always reach me at [email protected].
And if you enjoyed the episode, the best gift you can give me is to pass it along to someone else who would enjoy it too.