01 January, 2020. Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Prayer (ICEL 1998)
Most high God,
you come near to us this Christmas season
in the child born of the Virgin Mary.
In the depths of darkness, she gave birth to light;
in the depths of silence, she brought forth the Word.
Grant that we who ponder these things in our hearts
may recognise in her child
our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
in the splendour of eternal light, God for ever and ever.
1st Reading: Numbers 6:22-27
A new-year prayer for God to bless and protect his people
The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to Aaron and his sons, saying,
Thus you shall bless the Israelites: You shall say to them,
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.
So they shall put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them.
Responsorial: Psalm 66: 2-3, 5, 6, 8
Response: May God bless us in his mercy
God, be gracious and bless us
and let your face shed its light upon us.
So will your ways be known upon earth
and all nations learn your saving help.
Let the nations be glad and exult
for you rule the world with justice.
With fairness you rule the peoples.
you guide the nations on earth.
Let the peoples praise you, O God;
let all the peoples praise you.
May God still give us his blessing
till the ends of the earth revere him.
2nd Reading: Galatians 4:4-7
Through adoption, we can call God “Abba, Father!”
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.
Gospel: Luke 2:16-21
The shepherds visit the manger. Later, Jesus is circumcised and named
So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.
May your words, O Lord, be in my thoughts, on my lips, and in my heart. May they guide my life and keep me near to you.
A woman of strong faith
At the Council of Ephesus (431), the mother of Jesus was solemnly proclaimed as Mother of God or Theotokos, acknowledging the Godhead of her Son, Jesus Christ. Under this noble title she is still honoured by most Christians around the world, and today’s feast invites us to place our hopes and plans for the new-starting year under her motherly care. We can entrust to her our personal concerns and those of our era, the conflicts the glaring injustices, the unequal wealth and opportunity, the war in Syria and Iraq; in short, all that troubles peace and fairness in our world at this time.
In spite of everything, we can enter this new year with a sense of wonder and trust. Somehow we can share in the spirit of Saint Peter at the Transfiguration of Christ when he said, “Lord, it is wonderful for us to be here.” Such wonder and reverence was typical of Mary, our Mother in the faith, the first believer in our great Christian family. But Mary was also a flesh-and-blood woman of her times, a hard-working girl from Nazareth, cheerfully willing to be of service to others. It would be illusory to imagine her as a Christmas-card Madonna, set serenely against a golden background with hovering angels. Such a figure is simply not true to her life-story as told in the Gospels. The real Mary from Nazareth knew no riches or privelege in her lifetime. Nobody has ever lived, suffered and died in greater simplicity, marked by a strong and simple faith.
As she saw herself, Mary was the handmaid of the Lord, trusting in Providence and sustained by the goodness of God. Indeed, she stands out among the Lord’s anawim, the humble hearts who confidently trust that God has everything in hand (Lumen Gentium 55). In the first four Christian centuries, Church writers emphasised Mary’s faith rather than her divine motherhood. As St Augustine put it, “She conceived Jesus in her heart before conceiving him in her womb.” Also venerated as Mother of Good Counsel, Our Lady can be our guide and counsellor in the area of faith. She wants to beget faith in us, to be our Mother in faith. That is why, in the gospel of John, she is present at the beginning and the end of Christ’s public life.
John is the only one to record Mary’s presence at Calvary, as in the terse statement, “Near the cross of Jesus stood his Mother” (Jn 19:25). When all the miracles of Jesus seemed a delusion to many, his mother stood there faithful to him to his last breath, still believing in God’s power to save. Her faith did not need astounding miracles, but rested on childlike trust in the mysterious ways of God our Father. Nor did her role as mother cease then, for in his dying hour Jesus gave it a new focus when he said to John, “Behold your Mother.” The mother of Jesus will henceforth be the mother of all his disciples, sharing with us her strong and simple faith.
To marvel and treasure
Today on the feast of the Holy Mother of God we see Mary marvelling at what has happened, treasuring the events of Christmas in her memory, and pondering them in her heart. The image is that of the contemplative woman who ponders the marvels the Almighty has done for her and for all people. She ponders in response to what the shepherds said to her. Those simple, humble shepherds had preached the gospel to her, repeating what had been told to them by the angels, “Today in the town of David, a Saviour has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” It is this good news, this gospel, that she treasured and pondered over.
The same gospel has been shared with us, and we are invited to treasure it, to ponder it and to respond to it, as Mary did. Today, New Year’s day, is a day when many feel drawn to make good resolutions. What better new year’s resolution could we make today than that of adopting Mary’s stance before the grace of God? Today’s feast invites us to share in Mary’s sense of awe and wonder before God’s merciful love, made known to us in Christ, her son. As we look towards the new year, which begins today, we ask Mary to help us to treasure the gospel as she did, so that we can mediate Christ to others as she did.
Council of Ephesus 431
MARY IN PERSPECTIVE (Homily)
1. So who’s the first woman mentioned in the New Testament? Anyone know? Well, I had to look it up myself. She’s Tamar, and along with Ruth, Rahab, and Bathsheba makes up an unsettling quartet among the ancestresses of Jesus, taking us into murky areas of prostitution, adultery, and even murder. Mary too appears under the sign of sordid shame, as a fallen woman, whom her righteous fiancé must of course dismiss, hushing up her offence as much as possible. But a remarkable revelation of the Holy Spirit puts all in a new light. The child to be born is Jesus (‘God saves’) and Emmanuel (‘God with us’). So the divine comes right into the heart of our murky, troubled, contentious existence and touches all with grace and light.
Mary is a very discreet and passive presence in this story; Joseph takes the lead, himself led by angelic dreams, and saving the child amid dreadful massacre and the hardships of exile. Only in Luke’s version does Mary come into her own, cooperating with providence by her consent (“Be it done unto me according to thy word”). And with Luke the great Marian epic is well and truly launched. John mentions her only twice, but at key moments: she is the one who prompts his first “sign” at Cana and she is placed at the foot of Cross. The slightest mention of Mary was no doubt already sufficient to set off a conflagration of pious enthusiasm and speculation.
2. Mary is essential to Christmas, because she is the one who guarantees that “Jesus Christ has come in the flesh” (1 John 4:2), fully human. For what is it that every human being has? Anyone know? A mother! It was said that she alone quashes all heresies (‘Cunctas haereses sola interimisti’). She crushes Manicheanism by showing the goodness of the body and childbirth, Docetism by showing the reality of Christ’s humanity, Nestorianism by showing that the mother of Jesus is the mother of one and the same person who is truly human, truly divine, Monophysitism by showing that his humanity is not confused with the divinity or altered in nature by the union, and all errors about grace and free will by the way that everything depends on grace in her story (she is nothing apart from grace), yet her free consent shows grace elevating and magnifying freedom.
She crushes the illusions of pride by her humility and obedience, reversing Eve’s pride and disobedience. “We know that He, before all creatures, proceeded from the Father by His power and will,… and by means of the Virgin became man, in order that the disobedience which began from the serpent might have its undoing in the same way in which it arose” (St Justin). Note that salvation comes through but not by Mary. So when St Irenaeus says that “Mary, being obedient, became the cause of salvation for herself and for the entire human race” what he means is that she let God work and did not place an obstacle in his way, as Eve did (just as Christ humbled himself and did not think equality with God a booty to be seized, as Adam did; Philippians 2:5-11). She gave birth to the Saviour, so salvation is from her, as it is “from the Jews” (John 4:22).
Christ the Redeemer comes to us first carried in his mother’s arms. An Italian friend, an Opus Dei theologian, remarked to me of Lutheran colleagues at a conference: “I pity them, because they don’t know their mother!” I asked some of them, and indeed they admitted that Marian devotion played no role for them; a pity, since Luther himself contributed greatly to Marian thinking, and it is said that some pope said, when reading Luther’s writing on the Magnificat without knowing the author’s name: “Blessed be the hand that wrote this book.”
3. Mary has always had great mass appeal. Just as the people of Ephesus cried “Great is Diana of the Ephesians,” so at the Council of Ephesus in 4…, mmm (voice from the congregation: “431 AD!”), thank you, in 431 AD a threatening crowd let the bishops know that if they did not defend the Theotokos (God-bearer) they would suffer dire consequences. What a stange and wonderful place is Ephesus, where the ancient town still seems quite alive. It’s also the site of the house of Mary, identified on the basis of a German visionary, Catherine Emmerich, and which displayed when I visited a schmaltzy sign: “Mary invites you to celebrate her son’s 2000th birthday.” Diana looms behind Mary, and so do Isis and Ishtar (Astarte), awesome archetypes that we meet again in the goddesses of India or the bodhisattva Kannon (Guanyin) so popular in Japan and China. But this cult has to be restrained by recalling that Mary is not a myth but a human being, a Jewish woman of a certain time and place.
Now we see a manifestation of Marian mass appeal in the renewed push for the “fifth dogma”—that is, after the Virgin Birth, the Theotokos, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption, a dogmatic definition of Mary’s status as Co-Redemptrix. Despite the motto, “never enough of Mary” (“de Maria numquam satis”), the Vatican has often strained against the pressure of popular devotion, in this case primarily in Mexico and the Philippines, though with precedent in an Amsterdam visionary whose movement had a prayer to her “who once was Mary”; the CDF insisted the wording changed to “the Blessed Virgin Mary,’ defending the anchorage of both Jesus and Mary in real history, and not in ballooning fantasy. There is so much lore around the Blessed Virgin, that it’s quite difficult to bring her into focus as a human being. But scholars are keenly conscious of the historical Jesus nowadays, and they are correspondingly attentive to the historical Mary as well.
In the late middle ages the Co-Redemptrix title was promoted by Franciscans but rejected by Dominicans. St Bridget of Sweden (1373) claimed a vision in which Jesus said: “My Mother and I saved man as with one Heart only,” and Mary confirmed: “My Son and I redeemed the world with one heart.” Benedict XV made a similar remark in a text of 1918, but today the magisterium refrains from such extravagant expressions.
What’s wrong with Co-Redemptrix? Well to begin with, it’s inopportune, it would be a way of thumbing our nose at Protestants who have suspected us of Mariological and papal idolatry for centuries and with whom we have built toward an ecumenical entente on both these themes. It also risks enflaming excesses of fanatical devotion is some circles.
Further, it is ambiguous. In a sense we are all co-redeemers, in that we cooperated by free will in the process of our redemption and of the redemption of the worlds, “making up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). So it’s not clear what the title would claim for Mary.
Thirdly, if taken in the strongest sense, it borders on heresy. It is Christ, not Mary, who is “the Saviour of the world” (John 4:42).
4. To bring Mary into perspective in a helpful way, we need to restore her to the biblical horizon, seeing her as a daughter of Israel, interpreting her experience as the fulfilment of God’s promises to Israel. We also need to place her in ecclesial perspective, as Vatican II did in Lumen gentium and as the Church has done in its skilful management of Lourdes. Mary is glorified for the access she gives to Christ, but her glory is in radical subordination to the glory of the Messiah—“the glories of Mary for the sake of her Son” as a sermon of St John Henry Newman has it. When Jesus reveals his glory at Cana, he does not tell the stewards, “Do everything that she commands you,” but rather she tells them “Do everything that he commands you.” Her glory is that she is inseparable from Christ, but this entails that to separate her from Christ in an excess of devotion is to undermine that glory and to embark on troubled waters. She brings all the truths of faith into focus in the most illuminating way, but conversely these truths bring her into focus. Let them lead us to her, and let her lead us to them.
The opening scene-setting paragraph raises alternative perspectives. The rest of “MARY IN PERSPECTIVE” does not depend on the first paragraph.
“The first woman mentioned in the New Testament” is Tamar, if we take the traditional ordering of the books of the New Testament. There seems to be no generally accepted chronology of the books, but, as regards the gospel accounts, it seems very likely that Mark was written before Matthew. Disregarding the inclusion of women in the “all” who went out to John the Baptist, the first individual woman mentioned in Mark is Simon Peter’s mother-in-law in Chapter 1, although unnamed. Mary comes in at the end of Chapter 3. She too is unnamed; his mother and brothers arrived, asking for him. John, much later of course, mentions a number of Marys, but mentions Mary the mother of Jesus twice, without naming her! In each case Jesus addresses her as “Woman”, echoing perhaps the woman in Genesis whose son would overcome the power of evil.
The “unsettling quartet” of Tamar, Ruth, Rahab and Bathseba in Matthew’s genealogy?
Yes and no. Tamar (Genesis 38) resorts to drastic action because her father-in-law Judah had failed in his duty to her when her husband died. It seemed to be the only way to call him to order was to trap him was to disguise herself as a prostitute and trap Judah after his own wife died. Judah recognises that he was wrong and she was right. Sadly it is not unknown today to resort to prostitution when there seems to be no other way. She is presented more as a strong woman rather than as a cause for shame. She is praised in Ruth 4:12.
How did Ruth go astray? There is no trace of it in the Book of Ruth, unless perhaps in her forwardness (urged by Naomi) in bringing herself to the attention of Boaz who had the “right of redemption” over her; but then he had been flirting with her. Her faithfulness to her mother in law Naomi is celebrated in the song, “Wherever you go, I shall go …” Rather than anything murky, she, a Moabitess and not a Jew, is a model of integrity. Interesting, in the light of the total eternal ban on Moabites in Deuteronomy 23:3,6.
Rahab of Jericho (Joshua 2) was a prostitute, and yet a woman who saved the lives of the Jewish spies with considerable courage. But this Rahab is at the very start of the conquest of the Promised Land. Boaz in the Book of Ruth has an established agricultural business at Bethlehem following the migration of Elimelech to Moab and seemingly must be a century or more later, so the Rahab of Jericho in Joshua 2 cannot be his mother. But then the genealogy in Matthew is more theological than historical.
Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11). We are not told what her reaction was when David seduced her, but it was at that stage a most unequal relationship – he the king, she the wife of one of his soldiers. Perhaps she fully and willingly consented, but what would have happened if she rejected his advances? Today too we regard such actions of one in a position of authority as a grave injustice. When David had her husband Uriah murdered, he married her, and she played an important part in the life of the people of Israel as his wife and as the mother of Solomon.
All in all, the “unsettling quartet” seem to me to have a lot going for them, a rather formidable quartet.
“Mary too appears under the sign of sordid shame, as a fallen woman, whom her righteous fiancé must of course dismiss, hushing up her offence as much as possible.”
We do not, of course, know details of how it went, but it does not seem like that to me. One might expect Joseph to be angry with her, and bitter at being betrayed. But this is not what Matthew (at 1:20) conveys. The angel says to Joseph: “Fear not.” The fear indicates rather awe and unworthiness at the presence and action of God. To refer to Joseph as her fiancé suggests our current model of engagement before marriage. Betrothal, however, was much more: it was the first stage of the marriage itself, not a preliminary stage. Although the betrothed couple (unlike today) did not live together for a time, a formal procedure was indicated to break the publicly established betrothal. We are, of course, in the realm of mystery here. But while the situation might seem sordid to us, it seems to me that this is not what the account in Matthew conveys.
As you write, “Mary is not a myth but a human being, a Jewish woman of a certain time and place.” She fits in well with the formidable four.
But I don’t think I’ll risk inviting input from our congregation here about the year of the Council of Ephesus. (Did you really forget, or was it a ploy?) You had at least one well-informed member of your congregation to prompt you!
The four women are no doubt thoroughly vindicated in the sight of God, but all four appear as outsiders or irregular in some way, as does Mary. All of this underlines the humanity of Mary and consequently of Christ.
That may seem to be undercut by the story of the virginal conception, which is in severe tension with the portrayal of Mary in Mark and which is even contradicted in Luke when he calls Mary and Joseph the parents (goneis) of Jesus. Is it a product of the mistranslated verse in Isaiah (“a virgin shall conceive”)? There’s a passage in Philo that claims that Sarah conceives Isaac in the absence of her husband. Yet the Fathers affirm this miracle and St Augustine says that no one who denies it is a Catholic.