. . .Mary, who was engaged to him, and was with child. - Luke 2.5
Rosa Parks was not the first who refused to give up her seat.
Nine months before Parks' courageous act, Claudette Colvin went to jail for the same decision. The fifteen year-old had boarded a bus in th Capitol Heights section of Montgomery on her way home from school when the driver ordered her to yield her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, the driver called the police, who yanked her off the vehicle and charged her with disturbing the peace, violating segregation laws and, for good measure, assault.
Colvin's case went to trial, where she prevailed, but the canny leaders of the civil rights movement chose instead to make Parks the face of the bus boycott. Colvin was too young, for one thing. Also, she did not project the middle-class image which Parks possessed. Perhaps most important, she became pregnant shortly after the incident, and an unwed mother was seen as playing to the racist narrative of the white establishment.
History has born out the wisdom of this move, but one cannot escape the irony: No one thought that a lower-class unwed teenage mother could be the vehicle of freedom.
Mary had the same liabilities, and the same doubts: How can this be? But when she launched into her own version of "We Shall Overcome," she embraced God's insistence on using not only the least, but the least likely. He has exalted those who were humble.
So be careful before you decide who can and can't be the means of Christ breaking into the world. Who knows, it might even be you.
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