Some people told me that Mary was not portrayed very well. “Too passive and expressionless,” they said. But after I saw the movie, I felt that the portrayal of Mary was done just right.

The movie portrayed well the powerlessness of the life of the ancient poor. Especially as a peasant-class girl in a small rural village, Mary’s life does not consist of many rights. A personal sense of entitlement would be completely alien to her. No one consults her opinions about anything. If she has preferences, no one ever asks her what they are, nor does she ever express them. She has very little control over her destiny, and the very idea that she can, by her choices, map out a certain path for her life is not a part of her world. Things just happen to Mary, including when and who she will marry.

During the first half of the movie, Mary seems undefined. We don’t see her acting particularly pious. The movie does not show her praying, or taking care of the sick, or possessing some radiant spirituality that draws children or the birds and squirrels. There is no close-up to a particularly meaningful expression on her face, accompanied by dramatic music that hints of a hidden spiritual quality underneath the apparent ordinariness. She is shown only in an entirely ordinary way, and her reactions and expressions are quite plain. The audience can figure out very little of her character, her emotions, her disappointments, fears, or dreams.

The annunciation scene, too, is handled in this understated way. Mary’s amazing statement, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be done to me as you have said,” too, is given without hardly any display of emotion. Even here, at this extraordinary moment, Mary seems utterly plain, even vacant. She remains ill-defined as a character.

All of this resolves in one brief, powerful moment in the movie. When Mary goes to visit Elizabeth, Elizabeth utters the words that define for the audience who Mary is: “Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!” This was the most moving moment in the movie for me, as I suddenly realized the beauty of Mary’s character. She believed the Lord’s words. That’s who she is. That is the entirety of it.

We are used to thinking of ourselves as unique individuals with unique set of thoughts, opinions, and preferences, with personality and life bursting to the surface in some quirky, interesting, bold, special way. So we prefer screen portrayals of characters with character. The contrasting portrait of what seems like Mary’s passivity is really a beautiful picture of yieldedness, the powerful expressionlessness of a surrendered person. When we think about the concept of “servanthood,” what it involves is really very difficult to grasp. When Mary said to the angel, “I am the Lord’s servant,” she was not reaching for some higher level spiritual language; she was speaking out of her reality. Servanthood is her daily life. Her servanthood is simple, unadorned, and therefore, undramatic in sharp contrast to our complicated “servanthood” in which we are aware of so many rights we need to give up in order take on the life of a servant—the right to a good reputation, the right to personal choices, the right to be heard, consulted, to control my own destiny and forge for myself a preferred future, the right to a certain quality of life, and a certain level of physical comfort.

The entirely ordinary Mary, who so undramatically and quietly yields to the Lord’s activity in her life served as a huge rebuke to the notions of autonomy and self-rule that I find myself taking for granted. The daily grind of the peasant-girl’s life in ancient Israel, daily yielding to the claims of family, village and others, is a far superior training ground for the kind of faith Mary displayed than the modern choice-rich, rights-rich life. On the other hand this kind of training for servanthood is not beyond the reach of modern life. We, too, can yield daily to others, allowing the claims of church, family and friends to come before my own personal agenda, and receiving with humility and grace the setbacks, frustrations and inconveniences life throws at us. It’s not a life imposed on us by our society or station in life; but we can choose it, and intentionally seek it. I pray that we will value such a life and the quality of yieldedness it produces in our hearts--the readiness to say: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as you have said.”