<p>2:19 <i>And Mary treasured up all these sayings, pondering them in her heart</i>- When the shepherds came to worship, Mary pondered within herself what it all meant, as if she was now rather lacking in comprehension. Luke describes his Gospel as a compilation of eyewitness accounts. Where did he get the material from about Mary pondering things in her heart 2:19,51? Was it from interviewing her himself? Or was her inward meditation and frozenness evident to others who on this basis told Luke?</p><p>We read that Mary &ldquo;kept&rdquo; God&rsquo;s words in her, yet the Lord in one of His allusions to His dear mother says in Lk. 5:38 that we must preserve or &ldquo;keep&rdquo; s.w. the new wine of the Gospel in us. The Lord saw His mother as a pattern for us all. When He heard the comment &ldquo;Blessed are the breasts which you sucked&rdquo;, His comment is to draw attention rather to the spiritual side of Mary: &ldquo;Blessed are they like My dear mother who hear the word of God and keep it&rdquo;. Thus He held her up as an example to them all; she shouldn&rsquo;t be marvelled at just because of the fact she carried the Son of God (Catholics take note) but rather because of her reflective and tenacious attitude to the word of God. Mary&rsquo;s song has so many Biblical allusions in it.&nbsp;Mary&rsquo;s Bible minded-ness was really quite something. The Greek word translated &ldquo;ponder&rdquo; (Lk. 2:19) comes from syn, &ldquo;with&rdquo;, and <i>ballein</i>, &ldquo;to throw&rdquo;, as if she combined Scripture with her experience of life, seeking to find her place in the mass of OT allusion and teaching which she was being presented with. Her every phrase has multiple allusions to Scripture, which in itself indicates a fair level of intelligence to think on so many levels simultaneously. <br />The descriptions of Mary as keeping things in her heart (Lk. 2:19,52), and the way it seems she didn&rsquo;t tell Joseph about the Angel&rsquo;s visit, but instead immediately went down to Elisabeth for three months&hellip; all these are indications that Mary, like many sensitive people, was a very closed woman. Only when Mary was &ldquo;found&rdquo; pregnant by Joseph (Mt. 1:18- s.w. to see, perceive, be obvious) was the situation explained to him by an Angel. It seems His move to divorce her was based on his noticing she was pregnant, and she hadn&rsquo;t given any explanation to him. She &ldquo;arose&rdquo; after perhaps being face down on the ground as the Angel spoke with her, and went immediately off to Elisabeth. And then, after three months she returns evidently pregnant (Lk. 1:39). Mary is portrayed as somehow separate from the other ministering women. It would have been psychologically impossible, or at best very hard, for the mother of the Lord to hang around with them. The group dynamics would have been impossible. Likewise in Acts 1:14 we have &ldquo;the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus&rdquo;, as if she is separate from them. She followed Him to Cana, uninvited, and also to Capernaum. Next she is at the cross risking her life, but she isn't among the women who went to the grave. Why not? It was surely natural that she would go there, and that the other women would go with her to comfort her. But she was a loner; either she went alone, as I think I would have tried to, or she just couldn&rsquo;t face contact with the others and simply hid away. And could it be that Jesus, in recognition of her unique perception of Him, appeared to her first privately, in a rightfully unrecorded meeting? But by Acts 1:14, she was in the upper room, as if His death led her to be more reconciled to her brethren, to seek to get along with them... although by nature, in her heart and soul, she was a loner, maybe almost reclusive. A struggler to understand. A meditator, a reflector, who just wanted to be alone, one of those who take their energy from themselves rather than from other people. &nbsp;</p>