The images we are used to seeing of Mary the mother of Jesus are of a demure young woman with her head bowed slightly in humble reverence. She is generally dressed in blue with a white head covering, and her features were until very recently universally European. I doubt you would need to close your eyes to visualize this iconic image of the Madonna.

But the little we know of the teenage Mary (or, more authentically, Miriam) from the gospel of Luke indicates that a different portrait may be in order. I imagine her as a punk, or what used to be known as a riot grrl, sporting spiky purple hair, black eyeliner and fingernails, a sleeveless vest to show off her tattoos, multiple piercings, maybe a thin chain running from nostril to earlobe. She was anything but demure, and she boldly made direct eye contact with all comers—women, men, even angels.

This Miriam was clearly a young woman of deep faith, but she did not interpret faith as a reason or a directive to be quiescent. She must have been fearful when the angel revealed her destiny, but she met her fear with a deep-rooted courage that was prepared to take on all challenges. How else could she expect not just to endure but to rise above the taunts, jeers, and outright threats she would face in her tiny village when her unexpected and (by human authority, anyway) unauthorized pregnancy became public knowledge? The punk Miriam would not be cowed by the misguided gatekeepers of conventional morality. She knew the truth, and that was enough.

We hear punk Miriam’s voice most clearly in her Magnificat, a rebel song if there ever was one. It is a song of reversals, of a world tipped on its side until the structures of domination and oppression topple, making space for a new reality where people, not systems or ideologies or multinational corporations, are in the ascendancy. 

[God] has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

[God] has brought down the powerful from their thrones

and lifted up the lowly;

[God] has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty (vv. 51–53).

These are not the words of “gentle Mary meek and mild,” but rather of a social reformer, a gadfly, a revolutionary even, who sees clearly the injustices under which she and her people live and who knows the remedy. She sings proleptically, “[God] has helped [God’s] servant Israel, / in remembrance of [God’s] mercy, / according to the promise [God] made to our ancestors, / to Abraham and to his descendants forever” (vv. 54–55). The solution lies, Miriam knows, where it always has: in the people’s covenant with God, and she boldly calls on God to uphold the divine end of the deal, just as her son, taught at her knee, will call on the people to hold up theirs.

Jesus—Yeshua—learns at the knee of punk Miriam. We don’t think about that very often. We assume that because he is the Son of God he comes by his radical thought and subversive action automatically. But just as the child Yeshua has to learn to walk and talk, so he has to learn how to look at the world and then to think and act accordingly. What better model can he have than the mother who is revealed in the words of the Magnificat?

Ave Maria. Hail, Punk Miriam!