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Mary |
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A MARY FOR OUR TIMES
Mary as Model for the Church Those who love the Church deeply can never forget the sins of the Church, but we make a very grievous mistake if we equate the Church with hypocrisy, as so many are inclined to do these days. I once asked a friend of mine who was a very fine theologian to give me a definition of the Church: he replied without hesitation “Ecclesia semper sancta, semper reformanda” – the Church, always holy and always in need of reform. The definition embraces both the divine and the human elements of the Church, the God-like and very weak human dimensions of those who make up the Church. All the Christian churches have suffered a bad press in recent times, and it has to be admitted that the media are no friends to the Church, so that what is evil in the Church is stressed to the point of exaggeration and what is good is overlooked to the point of disappearance. The good lives of many in the pews and in the pulpits are completely disregarded, the good works of the Churches are overlooked, the struggles of so many Christians (and it is the Christian Church that is the object of the journalists’ disdain rather than any other religious group) to lead good and indeed holy lives are forgotten. It is commonplace to say today that spirituality is replacing religion – in other words, one’s personal relationship with God has pushed aside one’s commitment to a group of like-minded believers who hold a common body of teaching and worship together on a regular basis. And while one can only applaud the development of a personal spirituality, surely the development of such is encouraged – not to say safeguarded – within the embrace of a loving religion (as millions of believers, of whatever persuasion, all around the world would testify). Within our own Catholic Church today there is a quest amongst the lay members of the Church for a richer spirituality, a spirituality based more on personal commitment and on the richness of the Scriptures (and let’s be honest, the Scriptures are still pretty much a closed book for too many Catholics!). Many Catholics are drawn to a Church where compassion reigns rather than competition, where relationships are more important than teachings, where humility and service predominate over power. These feminine qualities seek to replace the masculine dominance which has marked the Church for many centuries. The qualities of Mary – service, humility, doing good quietly, compassion – cry out to be heard in the Church of today. Our young people – and our older folk too! – are calling for a place where they are listened to, where God is made present not just in the sacrament of the altar but also in those amongst whom we stand and pray and worship. I believe that a Church which is genuinely a Church of service will have a greater appeal than the “pray, pay and obey” Church - though I have to say that such a Church is a caricature of the Church I have belonged to and loved for my lifetime. I have always accepted the Church as mother – we use that phrase, “our holy mother, the Church” – but we have to work hard to make it a reality. We must never settle for being merely “pew members” but we must take full responsibility for being active members of our pretty brilliant Church – members who are mature in our personal spirituality, members who take seriously Christ’s words “I am amongst you as one who serves”, and members who are prepared to be personally responsible for our growth in holiness. Mary of the Visitation “Mary arose with haste and went to the hill country of Judea” says the author of Luke’s Gospel (1:39). Tradition has it that the little village where her aged Cousin Elizabeth and her equally old husband Zechariah lived was called Ein Karim. It was here that Mary, again, according to the author of the Gospel, proclaimed her beautiful manifesto, the Magnificat Mary’s action was prompt – she arose with haste – but it also entailed some difficulty for her: a young girl making her way on a two or three day journey, maybe in uncertain company. But whatever the circumstances our imaginations might surround the journey with, the image of heading for the “hill country” is clear enough. Most of us would prefer to remain on the flat, where every valley has been filled and every mountain laid low. This must have been a wonderful moment, this meeting of two holy women, one on the threshold of her young life, the other coming towards the end of her long life, both willing to do whatever the Lord was asking of them. The moment was so wonderful for both of them that the baby John leapt in his mother’s womb and the Holy Spirit filled the heart and mind and soul of Mary of Nazareth. We are present at the beginning of Mary’s journey, but the canticle she speaks, which we call the Magnificat (after the first word in the Latin version), sums up the understanding which the early Church had of Mary’s role in the life not only of the Messiah, Jesus, her son, but also of the early Christians. “My soul glorifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour.” And why? Because God has looked with favour on the low position of his servant – what hope there is in those words for those people who have little role or position or standing or profile in the society in which they live. Then comes that extraordinary statement: “from now on, all generations will call me blessed”. The Gospel writer must have had very good reason to include that statement in the Book: it is either profoundly true or it is the statement of a very stupid person. But why this high praise for Mary? The reason is found in the words that follow; they are the words that reflect the words and actions of Old Testament prophets and of Jesus himself: “God has shown a strong arm and scattered the proud in their smug self-satisfaction and power games. God has put down the pompous from their high seats and their inflated sense of their own importance and has made much of the simple people who go about doing good quietly. God has, in some mysterious way, filled the deepest hungers and yearnings of those who make God the centre of their lives, with all their faults and failings and weaknesses.”. Mary’s words are the words of Isaiah and the Psalms, of Micah (ch 4) and Amos (ch 6) , of Hannah (1Sam 2:1-10) and Miriam (Ex 15:20). They are the words of Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth where he takes his own manifesto from the great prophet Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to give sight to the blind, to set the captive free, to lift the burden from those who are oppressed” (Luke 4:18, Isaiah 61). This the first generation of the Third Christian Millennium will proclaim Mary blessed only if we learn from her what faith and discipleship mean in our lives today and live out the implications, as she did in her life, only if her manifesto becomes our manifesto. Mary of Bethlehem The story of the birth of Jesus is structured around several epiphanies, that is, several manifestations or “showings off” of Jesus. In fact, the first “showing off” occurred at Ein Karim, where Mary and Elizabeth met and the powerful presence of Jesus caused the babe in Elizabeth’s womb to leap for joy. Mary’s role in the Christian tradition may well be seen as presenting Jesus to us in a variety of manifestations, revealing to us the presence of Jesus in a wonderful array of situations, in some of which we would least expect to find him – like a stable. There are three epiphanies associated with the birth of Jesus: the manifestation to the shepherds, the manifestation to the magi and the manifestation to Simeon and Anna at the “presentation” of Jesus in the temple. Each of these epiphanies, in which Mary features almost as prominently as Jesus, gives us an insight into the significance of the birth of this Divine Child and also into the role of Mary as model disciple. The story of the appearance of the angels to the shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem is one of the most charming of the many vignettes that make up the whole Christmas pageant. But what is its deeper meaning, beyond the emotional appeal and childlike pleasure it has provoked for centuries; what is its significance for the adult Christian seeking the will of God in daily life? There are three images worth contemplating. The first is that, like Mary at her visit to Elizabeth, these shepherds went with haste once they had heard the message (Luke 2:16): they were swift to respond to the call, the message. The second image presents a by now familiar Mary: the young woman keeping all these experiences and pondering them in her heart (Luke 2:18). The third image from this epiphany to the shepherds is that they returned to their job after this peak experience, they got back to the humdrum, the dull, daily routine of their ordinary lives – but they did more. They “made known” what they had experienced (Luke 2:17); in other words, they spread the good news, they evangelised, they proclaimed the Gospel to anyone who would listen), and they went on to glorify and praise God for all they had seen and heard (v. 20) The story of the visit of the wise men, which is found in Matthew’s Gospel only, has a meaning which is more difficult to unpack, but is basically the same as that in Luke’s Birth narratives. Several wise men read the signs of the times and responded, at some cost to themselves: a long journey to God alone knew where, sorting out hypocrisy from truth, learning to trust the inner voice – it’s all so familiar to us. They bring gifts, symbolic surely: gold for the Kingship of Jesus, frankincense to honour the Divinity of Jesus, myrrh for Jesus the Suffering Messiah. The presentation of the baby Jesus in the Temple is the third epiphany in the Birth Narrative. Mary and Joseph take the child, the first born, as required by the Law, and present him to God. Here they encounter the old man Simeon who has been awaiting this moment, as promised him by the Holy Spirit. He exclaims, in another of Luke’s Canticles: “Now have you given your servant, Lord, leave to go in peace; for my eyes have seen the salvation that you promised – this child who is to be a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the one who will be the glory of your Chosen People.” (Luke 2:29-32) Mary is at the centre of the Birth Narratives but she is there not only as mother. She is there also as witness and model disciple: she too is on a journey towards understanding the role of God in this world and she is there as the model who shows us the way, taking all these things and pondering them in her heart, as we must. Mary at CanaOne of the most extraordinary episodes in the Gospels is the turning of water into wine at the Wedding Feast of Cana. Jesus provides 120 to 180 gallons of the best wine for an obscure couple in an obscure village in an obscure province of the Roman Empire. But the episode has less to do with wine than it has to do with the theology of John’s Gospel. The Cana episode was “the first of his signs … and manifested his glory” (John 2:11). What is curious is that Mary appears in this episode: John did not need to stress Mary’s presence, the story could have been told without that detail – unless it had a special significance for the way John wrote his Gospel. The answer, I think, is to be found towards the end of John’s Gospel where Mary appears yet again, the second and last appearance she makes in this Gospel. Here John places Mary at the foot of the cross on Calvary, which none of the other Evangelists do. Mary is not there at the beginning and the end of Jesus’s public life without some reason. In the Cana episode, let me overlook the issues of the sensitivity of both Jesus and Mary to theirs hosts’ embarrassment and the generosity of Jesus’s response, and look at Mary’s role. She pushes a reluctant Jesus into his first public act: he is thirty and still says “My time has not yet some”. Well, come it did and in a big way when his mother turned sweetly to the stewards and said “Do whatever he tells you!” There are a number of lessons to learned from the episode, but the one I want to stress derives from Mary’s proclamation “Do whatever he tells you.” To me , that goes to the heart of Mary’s role in the story of salvation and it goes to the heart of he way the Christian should approach the God at the centre of our lives. Mary’s statement in John is found in Luke’s Gospel where, at the Annunciation, Mary says to the Angel: “I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word” (1:38), and where later in the story Jesus praises his mother because she “hears the word of God and keeps it” (11:28). This, of course, is the whole story of Jesus: the search for the Father’s will and the struggle to carry it out. In professing her own commitment to the will of God, Mary models for us the ideal response and attitude. It is for this reason that the Gospel writers accord her such a significant role, and we do them wrong if we overlook her contribution to the history of salvation Just as Luke has Mary reflect Jesus’s powerful manifesto – delivered in the synagogue at Nazareth in the words of Isaiah – in her Magnificat when she visited Elizabeth at Ein Karim, so John has Mary at Cana reflect Jesus’s total commitment to discovering and following the will of God. Mary’s role in the Scriptures demands that we take her seriously, not turn her into a plaster saint, not wreathe her statue with flowers and bank notes, not speak and sing sentimental, wishy-washy words about her: she deserves much more than that. Mary of GalileeThere is little point in our thinking that Mary’s journey in faith was all plain sailing. If we read between the lines of several Gospel episodes, we sense the tension between Mary and her son. By the time the Gospels came to be written thirty to sixty or seventy years after the events they portray, the factual components are far less important than the faith dimension, which is the key to understanding the Gospels. We cannot seriously believe that Mary became the woman of faith presented in the Gospels without having to walk the path that the rest of humanity has to walk, however full of grace she may have been. For the Lord to have made her journey plain sailing would have been to deprive her of that opportunity to become perfect through the combination of grace and human experience that we are all called to. Besides, to believe in calm seas for Mary’s voyage is to turn our back on the warning Simeon issued to her (Luke 2:35) – “a sword will pierce your own soul too.” The episode at Caphernaum as presented in Mark 3:21, 31-35, is merely one more of the confrontations between Mary and her Son. The first goes back to the twelve year old boy on one of the yearly trips to Jerusalem. Forget the pious, compliant, sweet-faced, curly haired Jesus of popular imagery and picture him as an intense, thoughtful, searching, intelligent and independent lad, into puberty, and a budding adolescent with the testosterone rising. That may make more sense of his staying behind in Jerusalem, surely sensible enough to know that Mary and Joseph would be concerned when they discovered his absence. His pert answer to her question, “Didn’t you realise your father and I looked for you with a certain amount of anguish in our hearts?”, “Didn’t you know I had to be about my father’s business?”, must be familiar to many parents. And Mary’s response? “She kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:52). The fact that the boy went down to Nazareth and was obedient to them and grew in wisdom and stature and favour with God and man was only realised after years of patient contemplation and effort to understand this mysterious boy who was her son and the Son of God. The next episode where strong, determined woman meets reluctant, not to say touchy, son is at Cana, at that famous wedding feast where the wine ran out. Jesus at this time is about thirty years of age and has not really begun his career. We know what anguish that causes in a family, what embarrassment that can give to parents. Mary may well have felt it was about time he made his move out of the nest, and in fact she gave him a gentle but firm shove. What follows is described by John (1:11) as the first of Jesus’s signs, which manifested his glory and caused his disciples to believe in him. We might be forgiven for wondering what he would have done if his mother had not nudged him out so convincingly, and for wondering what kind of woman this was: the sureness, the faith, the firmness modified by gentleness … qualities born of contemplative pondering over many years. The tension is nowhere more clearly present than in an episode in Mark’s Gospel, the first of the Gospels to be written and the one where the human nature of Jesus is least modified by the divinity that modifies it in the other Gospels, especially John’s. In this episode (Chapter 3) his family in Nazareth hear about his activities in Caphernaum over on the Lake. They are not very impressed; in fact they are embarrassed because the neighbours are saying “He’s gone mad!”, so they travel across to bring him back home. When he is told that his mother and his relatives are outside asking for him, he is not happy. “Who are my mother and my relatives!” (Mark 3:33) The Gospel writers soften the effect of his response by having him say “Whoever does the will of God is my mother, my sister and my brother.” In Luke’s Gospel the episode is recalled but Luke adds a much gentler episode which serves at the same time to encapsulate Mary the woman of faith in one of the most beautiful images we have of her. A woman in the crowd calls out to Jesus: “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts which fed you” and he replies: “The truly blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” (11:28) Surely this is his way of saying “My mother is even more blessed because she heard the word of God and kept it.” This is high praise from the Son of God, and the formula for all Christian living. The struggle to believe in Jesus is not just ours: Mary also had to travel that road. The Yes she said at the Annunciation of the Angel Gabriel was not the final word, any more than we have ever said the final word in our own faith journey. The key to Mary’s story, the reason all generation have called her blessed, is that she continued to say Yes, whatever the circumstances, and – as a matter of course – she pondered all these things in her heart, as Luke tells us several times. Mary of Calvary The next time we encounter Mary is at the foot of the Cross. Whether Mary stood at the foot of the Cross in historical fact is a controversial issue: the only Gospel writer who places her there is John. It is all very well to say that the other Gospel writers expect us to assume that she is there, but that is drawing a long bow. But Mary stands firmly at the foot of the Cross in John’s Gospel, so what is she doing there? At the human level, Mary’s presence is the comforting support of a mother for a son who has been unjustly condemned to death. Her presence there has also been a comfort to generations of Christians who look to Mary for similar support in their own Calvaries. This is a powerful part of our Christian story and faith. The touching episode where Jesus turns to both Mother and Beloved Disciple is also often seen at the human level – as Jesus is dying he shows concern for his widowed mother about to be left on her own, and he leaves her in the safe care of the beloved disciple. But there has to be more to the episode than this: John the Evangelist is concerned with another level of theology beyond family ties. John aims to point us elsewhere, he works at a more symbolic level: the picture of the disciple taking the mother to his own flat somewhere in Jerusalem (John 19:27) can hardly be taken literally, given the way John’s Gospel is written. The historical role of Mary in the story of Jesus is far from clear: in the body of the three Synoptic Gospels, Mark, Matthew and Luke, Mary and the family of Jesus would seem to be on the outer in terms of commitment to and understanding of his work. There is no doubt that somewhere along the road Mary became fully committed to the work of her son: Luke’s Infancy Narratives make this abundantly clear – the Annunciation with Mary’s powerful “I am your servant. Let it be done to me according to your word”, and the Visitation with its deep expression of her commitment in the Magnificat – this is Mary the model disciple. Matthew’s Gospel concentrates more on Joseph than on Mary, and he adds the extraordinary story of the visit of the Magi. By the end of the First Century Mary is firmly entrenched in the history of salvation. In John’s Gospel, however, Mary’s entry into the faith family of Jesus is accomplished at the foot of the Cross when Jesus invites Mary to regard the Beloved Disciple as her son, and the Beloved Disciple to regard Mary as his mother and take her into his “home”. It is immediately after that moment that John announces that Jesus knows that all things are finished. (John 19:27) This understanding of Mary puts a different complexion on her journey in faith towards the Kingdom of God. It is arguably more encouraging to the struggling Christian to see Mary as having to make the same choices and decisions that we have to make in seeking out the Gospel message, struggling to make it real in our lives, choosing to be deeply committed to it in spite of all the ups and downs of life, the moments of heavy doubt, of confusion, of the sheer difficulty in giving assent to the call of the Gospel in this age. It is because Mary was faithful to this journey and also because she must have taken on the Gospel call to holiness and total commitment to the will of God that we now call her blessed, as we read in the Magnificat, put into her mouth by the writer of Luke’s Gospel around about 80AD. This is a Mary for our age which is not so uncritically accepting of a literal understanding of the Scriptures. If we are not able to make sense of the Scriptures, we will reject them; if the figures of Scriptures are not accessible to us on a familiar, daily basis, they will not speak to us. If Mary is seen as the perfect woman from the moment of the Annunciation, a woman who never had to struggle to understand and accept the call God made of her, a woman who never put a foot wrong and was always there barracking for the boy, she will not make sense to those who know what struggle and defeat and confusion are in their own daily journey towards commitment and fidelity. The Assumption Where was Mary buried? Was it in Jerusalem just near the Garden of Gethsemane at the foot of the Mount of Olives, or was it up on the south-west highest part of the city on the spot marked by the Dormition Church? Or was it in the city of Ephesus? Well., of course, no one knows. No one even knows where she died because after she appears in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, there is no historical mention of Mary at all in the Scriptures. She is there with the apostles at the beginning of the Church, but after that, “the rest is silence”. There are lots of stories and legends, but sorting out the historical truth is an impossibility at this time. The Dormition Church in the south-west of the city near the Sion Gate was built in 1900 as part of a Benedictine Abbey complex. Its claim to fame may well rest on the fact that it is near the “upper room” where the Apostles met after the death of Jesus – the present “upper room” is found in a Crusader building which also houses “David’s tomb”. The Tomb of the Virgin is found in the north-east part of the city, just across the Brook of Kedron and nearby to the Garden of Gethsemane. Mary’s burial in this area is referred to in a Second Century text. Ephesus claimed that distinction in 431AD, but over the next few years the claim was settled in Jerusalem, and by the Sixth Century the origins of what is now the Tomb of the Virgin, in the hands of the Greek Orthodox Church, seem to have been in place. The story of Mary’s “assumption” into Heaven is well known: she dies (or perhaps she just falls asleep, as the word “dormition” seems to suggest), she is placed in a tomb. The ever-late apostle Thomas demands to see the body some time later and when the tomb is opened it is found to be empty of everything except the fragrance of lilies. The story of Mary’s body and soul being taken up to Heaven by flights of angels goes back hundreds of years in the Christian Church, both Eastern and Western. In 1950 Pope Pius XII, in conjunction with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, proclaimed the Assumption as a dogma of Catholic faith, that is, something to be accepted by the Catholic faithful as part of their belief. The literal truth of the tradition may strain our modern credulity, but that should not prevent us from recognising the deeper truth that lies behind the story. The tradition follows on from the privilege of Mary’s Immaculate Conception - so that, free of Original Sin herself, she should be a worthy vessel for the sinless Son of God - and her Divine Maternity. As Jesus was raised in a glorious body and later ascended into Heaven, so Mary, after her death, was assumed body and soul into heaven. These teachings are expressions of our Christian hope in the afterlife which is an essential element in the way we live our life in this world. We know, deep in our hearts, that we do not have a “lasting city” in this world, and that we do look for one that is to come. The Assumption also holds out to us the hope that our imperfect material creation will finally share in the new creation heralded by the resurrection of Jesus and itself be redeemed. In Mary, the woman assumed into heaven, we have great hope of our own ultimate destiny and the possibility of our own role in the transformation of our world. The Assumption of Mary into Heaven – a feast for all We live in an age where people are not too happy with special privileges for the few – that is as much a reality for us as an acceptance of a monarchy and a hierarchy of privileges was for an earlier age, and age which saw the promotion of the feast of Christ the King, or an understanding of Mary as the mediatrix of all graces (a notion which derived from an understanding of God as so far removed from the day to day struggles of his people that the Church placed Mary between us and God as the one who would ‘mediate’ for us). We probably accept Christ as King without too much hassle, but we expect a more immediate and personal relationship with God today. So, when we hear that Mary’s immaculate conception (her freedom, from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb, from original sin) and her assumption into heaven are privileges unique to her, we can be forgiven for thinking, “Well, that’s OK for her! But what’s that got to do with my personal relationship with God?” I do not doubt Mary’s unique role in the history of salvation – mother of the Word made flesh, first disciple – but I want a Mary who walks the same ground that I do, one who had to struggle with understanding the role she had Yes to, one who knows the battles I have to go through to continue faithful to the call of life. I can find that kind of Mary in the beautiful prayer, the Salve Regina, the Hail, Holy Queen, in spite of some of the medieval language and concepts: Hail, holy queen, mother of mercy; hail, our life, our sweetness and our hope. To you do we cry, poor banished children of eve; to you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn, then, O most gracious advocate, your eyes of mercy towards us. And after this, our exile, show us the blessed fruit of your womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet virgin Mary. Mary, understanding and merciful mother, ready to stand with us, support us and take us at the last to the right hand of God where she herself stands. That is what the Assumption of Mary means to me. Mary, Mother of the Church After all this long journey of hers, what does Mary have to offer the Church of today? This series of articles on Mary has attempted to unpack a few thoughts about the significance of Mary in the early Church and how the early Christians came to understand her role in the history of salvation. By the end of the First Century Mary’s role was quite clear: she was a significant, indeed essential, character in the drama of the conception, birth and life of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour of the World; but she was also significant in the early years of the Church’s growth and development. It is worth repeating that if Mary had not taken a significant role in the early Church, we simply would not have the Birth Narratives of Matthew and Luke, we would probably not have the one reference to her in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (“All these [the apostles] with one accord devoted themselves to prayer together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers” Acts 1:14.) And we would not have John’s recognition of her place in the early Church in placing Mary at the foot of the Cross on Calvary In the nineteen hundred years since these texts were written, the Christian Church has continued to reflect on the significance of Mary in the daily life of her members. We too at the beginning of the Third Christian Millennium must find her a place in our hearts and lives. With the reflections of these article in mind, here is a one way of looking at the journey of Mary the model disciple which may provide material for contemplation of Mary’s place in our own journey in faith. Assuming that Mary was about twelve years of age when she conceived the Son of God, this selection of Scripture quotations hints at Mary’s personal ponderings on her journey and her place in our lives. She offers them to us as Model Disciple and as Mother of the Church. Mary of Nazareth aged 12: “Here I am. I am your servant. I will do whatever you ask me.” (Luke1:38) Mary of Bethlehem aged 13: “I present the Saviour of the World to you”. Mary of Jerusalem aged 24: “Why do you treat me so? I have sought you with a heavy heart.” (Luke 2:48) Mary of Cana aged 42: “Do whatever he tells you.” (John 2:5) Mary of Galilee aged 44: “If I am blessed it is because I have tried to hear the word of God and keep it.” (Luke11:27) Mary of Calvary aged 45: “I am your mother; you are my children.” (John 19:27) Mary of the Upper Room aged 45: “I am the mother of the Church and the model of all who call themselves my son’s disciples.” (Acts 1:14) Mary of Ephesus aged 70, using the phrase she used at Ein Karim when she visited her cousin Elizabeth: “Behold, all generations will call me blessed.” (Luke 1:49) All of us, whatever our position in this world, can profit from the experience of Mary’s personal journey; all of us walk the same path to salvation that Mary did, with its pitfalls and problems, its privileges and pleasures. Her experience may just possibly serve to sustain us on the journey. SOME MORE THOUGHTS ON MARY
Mary of Nazareth Maria – Deipara, Virgo, Immaculata, Assumpta, Mediatrix: these words are incised in four huge stone blocks that support the tower that rises above the main chapel of the Marist Brothers’ General House in Rome, and they encapsulate the Catholic teaching about Mary, the virgin of Nazareth. They translate as God-bearer, immaculate (that is, conceived without original sin), taken up (that is, into heaven) and channel of all graces from God to us. However much we may debate some of these titles, they are canonised by Catholic usage. How did this simple girl from Nazareth come to be so exalted in the eyes of the world? Who was this woman; where did she come from? The question is easier to answer in these days of archaeological and anthropological studies. We know that Mary came from Nazareth and it is a reasonable assumption that she was born about 20BC (if we accept that Jesus himself was born about 6BC – I know that seems strange to say, but the scholars say it is so.) While the dense settlement of modern day Nazareth makes it difficult for large scale archaeological work to be carried out, we can learn a lot from the excavations that have been done in Caphernaum about 30k away on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, and other Galilean villages of the period which have been excavated. First century Caphernaum shows no defensive walls, no public buildings in any public area – in other words, no synagogue, which demands the question “What are the Gospels referring to when they mention a synagogue at Caphernaum and at Nazareth?” There were no paved streets, no marketplace, no shops or public storage facilities, no evidence of glassware, no marble, no public inscriptions or mosaics or frescoes; and Nazareth reveals some of the same evidence. Houses seem to have been poorly made of field stones and mud with thatched roofs, or were sheltered caves. On the outskirts of Nazareth indications of terracing have been found as well as a vineyard tower and other indicators of winemaking activity, as well as grinding stones and silos; but no indication of any imported or luxury goods. The pejorative comment in John’s gospel, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (1:46) seems apt. Subsistence farming, often producing scarcely enough to pay the exorbitant taxes of the period, left little for family survival. Each village produced and consumed its own grain, wine and oil through all the stages from planting to harvesting and processing; they wove their own clothing from hand-made thread, tanned leather to make sandals and engaged in other crafts necessary to maintain the household. Apart from metal tools, they were basically self-sufficient. Galilean villages of the time reveal no craft workshops, stores or small markets: this was subsistence living rather than a market economy. As wife of the village “tekton” – carpenter, stonemason, joiner – Mary belonged to the peasant world and to the lower rank of the artisan class. In villages like Nazareth, dwellings were small and clustered together, three or four dwellings built around a courtyard open to the sky, each family occupying a space or “house” of one or two small rooms. Each cluster had a door opening onto an alleyway, one of several running higgedly-piggedly through the village, an alleyway without drainage, which also served as dumping ground for all household refuse: dusty and dry in the hot months, muddy in the short rainy season, and smelly throughout the year. The enclosed family rooms were used for sleep and sex, giving birth and dying and taking shelter from the elements; in the common courtyard the extended family shared an oven, a water cistern and a millstone, and kept their domestic animals. It was in such a setting that Mary was born, grew up, married, gave birth and raised a family. This was the setting for the annunciation of the Angel to Mary; and in such a setting it would have been impossible to keep an untoward pregnancy a secret. It was this woman who over the centuries came to occupy a unique position amongst women. How on earth did that happen? (Much of this material is taken from a wonderful book on Mary called “Truly Our Sister”, written by Elizabeth Johnson, Continuum, 2003.)
The virginal conception of Jesus From the very earliest years of Christianity, it has been held that Jesus was conceived in a virginal manner, that is, without the intervention of a human father. The virginal conception of Jesus is not to be confused with what is called “the immaculate conception”: this is a much later teaching of the Church, confirmed as a dogma of our faith in 1864 by one of only three infallible teachings of Church, and it refers to the belief that Mary was conceived by her mother, in the normal biological way, but without original sin. It is commonly held by a whole range of biblical scholars that the writer of Matthew’s Gospel inherited an older, pre-gospel tradition that there was something irregular about Mary’s pregnancy – and given the close intimacy of the village living conditions, this could hardly go unnoticed. It seems that people remembered that Jesus was born too early after his parents started to live together: this is very likely to be true because the gospel writer is hardly likely to invent an embarrassment about Jesus that he later has to explain away. Matthew – and, later, Luke – explains that the child was the fruit of the action of the Holy Spirit, but that has not stopped people wondering what the actual scandal was. From about the Second Century there have been four explanations put forward (if you read the popular press, you will find some of these options put forward as new and scandalous revelations – probably designed to sell papers). The first explanation is that Joseph was the biological father of Jesus and that the child was conceived in the betrothal stage of Mary and Joseph’s marriage; the second is that Mary was seduced by an unknown man who thence committed adultery with her. The third explanation gives the father a name: a Roman soldier named Panthera forcibly violated Mary, rape being an occurrence not uncommon amongst the Roman soldiery. The charge of Jesus’s illegitimacy by adultery or rape is well documented from the Second Century in both Jewish and Christian sources: it is possible that John 8:41 contains an oblique reference to Jesus’s illegitimacy when the Pharisees say to him, “We were not born of fornication”, and indeed the story of Panthera became so well known in Jewish circles that Jesus was often referred to as Ben Panthera, or son of Panthera. If you read that lengthy genealogy of Jesus found at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel – the one about So-and-so begot So-and-so who begot So-and-so – you will come across four women amongst Jesus’s ancestors: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba. Tamar posed as a prostitute to seduce her father-in-law, Judah, who had attempted to avoid his responsibility to marry Tamar (the wife of his deceased son) and so carry on the family line; Rahab was Canaanite woman of Jericho (that is, a foreigner), and a prostitute who – though unfaithful to her own people – uses her ingenuity to secure safety for her family as well as success for Israel, producing an heir who was one of the ancestors of Jesus. Ruth, a Moabite woman and hence another foreigner, climbs under the blanket with Boaz (Tamar’s son in the previous story), and Obed is the result: while her action may not have been a seduction, it was certainly tainted with scandal. Bathsheba was seduced by King David (who also managed to have her husband – and his devoted soldier – Uriah, murdered) and became the mother of Solomon, another of the ancestors of Jesus. Mary’s suspect pregnancy was not the only one in the line of the ancestry of Jesus. There is a strong message here of the work of the Spirit in the scandals of life – and the Gospel of Jesus is itself a highly scandalous story, throughout his life and certainly at his death. The fourth explanation of Mary’s pregnancy is that it was a physical, biological miracle, the Holy Spirit causing the genesis of the child in Mary’s womb without the intervention of human biological father. It is this position that has been and remains the official teaching of the Catholic Church and it explains why Mary is entitled the Virgin Mother. (Reference: Elizabeth Johnson’s book on Mary, “Truly Our Sister”, Continuum, 2003.)
Mary creeps into the Gospels Mary makes few appearances in the Scriptures, which is not surprising because the New Testament Scriptures are basically about Jesus. Apart from a rather vague passing reference to Mary in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, where the writer says “When the time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … ” (Gal 4:4), and a much clearer statement in Luke’s Act of the Apostles – the apostles “devoted themselves to prayer with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and with his brothers” (Acts 1:14) – all the references to Mary in the New Testament occur in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. Something serious had occurred between Mark’s curt little story (3:21, 31-35) about the mother and brothers of Jesus, and their warmer presence in Acts. In Mark, Mary and the brothers get very short shrift! They had come to seize Jesus and presumably take him home (The Life of Brian’s Mary saying “He’s not the Messiah; he’s just a naughty little boy” actually has some Scriptural warranty) because people were saying “he’s beside himself” – in other words, mad! (Mark 3:21). A few verses later Jesus seems very dismissive when told that his mother and brothers were outside asking for him: “Who are my mother and my brothers?”, and looking around on those who sat about him, he said “Here are my mother and brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother, sister and mother” (3:31-35). Now that’s very pious, but not exactly positive towards his family. The change in attitude to Mary is apparent in Luke. While the episode recorded in Mark (the earliest Gospel, written about 65AD) is told also by Luke (8:19-21), it is told in softer terms; and a little further on in Luke this episode is complemented by a similar one which adds greatly to our knowledge of Mary (Luke’s Gospel was not written till about twenty years after Mark’s). A woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to Jesus “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts you sucked.” Jesus’s reply goes to the heart of his mission: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it” (11:27-28). Luke seems to include Mary and the brothers of Jesus as family rather than exclude them as Mark appears to do. That is why they appear in the Upper Room after Jesus’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, “devoting themselves to prayer” and good works. It may well have been from this small snippet of information that Luke was able to go ahead and write the Infancy Narrative which tells of the conception and birth of Jesus to Mary. At the centre of Mary’s role in this mystery are her words: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it happen to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). Scripture scholar Raymond Brown says in his great work, The Birth of the Messiah, that “Luke needed no special source nor personal reminiscence from Mary for this response; he needed only to make the portrait of Mary in the infancy narrative consistent with what he knew of her from her sole appearance in the common Synoptic tradition of the public ministry.” (p318) It is from that small seed of a reference that Luke, but also Matthew and John, build up a beautiful, consistent and inspiring picture of Mary as the model disciple of Jesus. At the heart of Mary’s life is her readiness to hear the word of God and keep it. Surely that extraordinary encounter between her and the angel of God (that is, God himself) in Luke 1:26-38, must have had a profound impact on her; and while she undoubtedly struggled to understand what it all meant as well as just who this child was, there can also be no doubt that commitment to the discovery of what God was calling her to day by day was at the centre of Mary’s heart. Luke tells us several times that she kept all these things and pondered them in her heart (2: 19, 51). In that sense, Mary has to be a model for those who seek to do the same.
Mary shows the neighbours her new baby In some ways the episodes that follow Mary’s conception of Jesus can be seen as Mary’s revelation of Jesus to the world. She shows him off to her family – cousin Elizabeth; to the overlooked people – the shepherds; the faithful Jewish people – Simeon and Anna; and the wise gentiles – the magi. But she doesn’t show him off to the wealthy or the powerful like Herod and the Pharisees. There has to be a message in there somewhere about the values Mary holds, values which are not just the values of Jesus but are profoundly discovered in the Old Testament. Mary’s values are summed up in the canticle she spoke to Elizabeth when they met at Elizabeth and Zachary’s home near Jerusalem. After the angel left her, Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country of Judea: there she greeted the pregnant Elizabeth, whose child leapt in her womb at the presence of the Promised One, the Messiah, in Mary’s womb. This encounter between the two women is itself pregnant with great hope, great joy, great mystery. In speaking her Magnificat, Mary aligns herself with the great figures of the Old Testament, men and women, who heard the word of God and kept it. Mary lines up with several Old Testament women when she says “God has looked upon me in my lowly state”. We only have to think of the childless Sarah, Abraham’s wife, embarrassed and hurt by her barrenness, until, blessed by God, she became pregnant with Isaac in her old age; or of Hannah, who became the mother of Samuel after years of barrenness. It is Hanna who proclaims the prototype of the Magnificat: My heart exults in the Lord … there is none holy like the Lord … the bows of the mighty are broken … those who were hungry have ceased to hunger … he raises the poor from the dust” (Samuel 2:1-10 passim). It is in her Magnificat that Mary spells out for the new young Christian church her way of responding to the call of God. Even if we agree with those who say that these words were put into the mouth of Mary by the writer of Luke’s Gospel eighty years after the event, nonetheless we must see the words as spelling out how Mary lived her life in the infant Church: prayer and good works, care for the anawim, the poor, the overlooked, the powerless, the needy, the suffering, the “losers” of society. Mary’s Magnificat is her version of Jesus’s own manifesto to the world when he proclaimed in the Synagogue at Nazareth, in the words of Isaiah, the great Jewish prophet: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor; he has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” He goes on to say “Today this scripture is being fulfilled as you listen” (Luke 4:18-21). In those beautiful episodes in Luke and Matthew (the visit of the magi occurs in Matthew’s Gospel), Mary is proclaiming the greatness of the Lord to those who will listen. If we talk about the Epiphany to the wise men, we can also talk about the epiphany (the manifestation or showing off) of Jesus to Elizabeth, the shepherds and to Simeon and Anna. In this sense, it is also our calling, as baptised Christians, to hear the word of God and keep it and to manifest the word of God in our behaviour, our actions, our words. Thus we help make God present in this world, we become the human face of God for our fellow travellers as well as non-believers; thus we help give religion a good name rather than the bad name we are so often accused of giving it; thus we carry out Christ’s own instructions to let our light shine before all the people so that they may see our good works and so give glory to our Father in heaven.
Mary takes Jesus on his first trip to the Temple We tend to be quite familiar with the story of the annunciation of the angel to Mary and the incarnation of God as Jesus in her womb at the moment she said Yes; we know the story of the birth in Bethlehem, the chorus of angels, the visit of the humble shepherds and of the magnificent Magi; and we know something of the story of the finding of Jesus in the Temple when he was twelve years of age. But I think that the story of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple and his subsequent encounter with Simeon and Anna are not such well known stories (Luke 2:21-40). Yet for many centuries the feast of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple was a quite significant feast in the Church calendar, celebrated on 2 February. The child Jesus had been circumcised eight days after his birth; and a month after his birth, the family went to the Temple for the purification of the mother and the presentation of the child to God. The presentation of the child is conventional enough: it was the law that every first-born child should be offered to the Lord and then bought back with an offering; in the case of Mary and Joseph, relatively poor people, the offering was a pair of turtledoves. It was what happened afterwards that seems to contain the seeds of the story. Mary and Joseph’s story appears to recall the Old Testament story of Elkanah and Hanna, the parents of Samuel, who took their long awaited child to the High Priest Eli to present him to the Lord (1Sam2:20-28). It is also balances the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, found int Luke’s Gospel (1:5-24). After the sacrifice of the turtle doves was complete, Mary, Joseph and Jesus encounter Simeon and Anna, two elderly people who have dedicated their lives to the service of God in the Temple. Simeon, an upright and devout man, had looked forward to “Israel’s comforting” and the Holy Spirit rested on him, revealing to him that he would not see death until he had seen the coming of the Lord. Prompted by the Spirit he comes to the Temple that day. He takes hold of the babe and with wonderful insight he recognises the true nature of the child in his arms, praying a most beautiful prayer of thanks and hope and praise, a prayer that we might pray daily. In fact it is part of the Office of Compline, the official night prayer of the Church. Simeon prays: “Now have you given your servant, Lord, leave, as you promised, to go in peace. For now have my eyes seen the salvation that you have promised for all the nations to see – a light to enlighten the Gentiles, and a light to be the glory of your people Israel.” This beautiful, peaceful moment is shattered by Simeon’s next words: he turns to Mary and says “This child is destined for the fall and the rising of many in Israel; he is a sign destined to be rejected. Your own soul will be pierced by a sword too.” Mary also has to pass the test, which she does – and this is Luke’s theme: Mary is the one who heard the word of God and kept it par excellence. Simeon’s words reflect the pattern of our own lives: joy and sadness, hope and desperation, success and failure, summer and winter, light and dark. This human paradox is found throughout so much of the writing of the ages. In Shakespeare’s “King Lear”, the faithful daughter Cordelia’s recovery of her tormented father is described thus: “You have seen sunshine and rain at once; her smiles and tears were like, a better way. Those happy smilets that played on her ripe lip seemed not to know what guests were in her eyes; which parted thence as pearls from diamonds dropped” (IV.iii.17ff). Joy and sadness are so often intermingled in our lives. Then is it that Anna appears, the feminine balancing the masculine. An elderly woman of eighty-four years of age, widowed for fifty or sixty years, she has served God day and night in the Temple, fasting and praying. She came by just at that moment and began to praise God, and she spoke of the child to all who looked forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem. And this episode ends on a peaceful note after moments of sadness and some hurt for the young parents - though Mary must have kept the threatening words about the piercing sword in her heart and pondered them along with all the good things she had heard in the past ten months.
The brothers and sisters of Jesus Several times in the Gospels there are references to the brothers and sisters of Jesus. Apart from the reference in the Galatians to James, the brother of the Lord, who became a leader of the Jerusalem church (1:19), we hear from Mark’s Gospel of Jesus returning to his village of Nazareth and preaching in the synagogue (probably a term which means the assembly, the gathering, in one of the dwellings or in some bigger space in the open, since there does not seem to have been a synagogue building in Nazareth at the time of Jesus) “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here amongst us?” (6:3); and in Matthew we read “Is not this the son of the carpenter? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph, Simon and Judas? And are not his sisters here amongst us?” Who were these brothers and sisters? – a reasonable question amongst Catholics, whose Church teaches that Mary was a virgin and had no other children but Jesus, whom she conceived virginally, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Ever since the early years of the Church there have been three approaches to this question, and today the same three approaches are still taken by various Christian groups. One point of view is that the brothers and sisters of Mary are the children of both Joseph and Mary, born after the birth of Jesus. The Gospel texts, “she gave birth to her first-born son” (Luke 2:7) and “[Joseph] knew her not until she had borne a son” (Matt. 1:25), do not necessarily imply that sexual relationships followed the birth of Jesus, though the texts can be interpreted that way. Certainly Mary had a close relationship to these young men and women throughout the Gospels, though the Gospels never call her their mother. The second point of view is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus are Joseph’s children from a previous marriage. In the mid-second century apocryphal gospel, the Protoevangelium of James, there is a story that the High Priest, guided by a sign from Heaven, chooses Joseph to be Mary’s husband. Joseph says “I already have sons and I am old, and she is but a girl.” In this view the brothers and sister of Jesus are actually his stepbrothers and stepsisters and Mary is their stepmother, so that Jesus is the youngest of some seven children in the household at Nazareth. The Protoevangelium is not regarded as a reliable document amongst scholars; however, this point of view is favoured by Orthodox Christians. The third point of view is that these six or so people are actually cousins of Jesus. This is the point of view adopted by the Catholic Church, as it supports the Church’s doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity. The age-old explanation is that the Greek word for “brother” – adelphos – can also mean close relative or even members of the same tribe, clan or nation and it is used frequently in the New Testament with this meaning. But contemporary biblical scholars cast doubt on this explanation: on purely historical and linguistic grounds, they say, the most probable opinion is that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were true siblings. (cf Elizabeth Johnson, “Truly Our Sister”, Continuum, 2003; p198) Whatever the historical facts – and the Catholic Church’s teaching still stands firm – none of the three points of view can be used to deny that Mary was responsible for mothering a larger family than just one son. Even if the “cousins” did not live in the same room in Nazareth, they must have lived within the same compound and all have grown up together with Jesus, and Mary was greatly involved with these youngsters, having some responsibility for their upbringing – the Gospel of Mark, at least, suggests that (3:21, 31-35). You can imagine the noise, the mess, the arguments, the love, the frustrations, the laughter, the work that had to go into producing enough food, the work of teaching these children the elements of the Torah. Can you imagine them as adolescents sitting around discussing justice and oppression, the meaning of the law and the prophets of their Scriptures? And Mary was certainly there in the thick of things after the resurrection, a part of the early Christian Church. Just think of it: she had lost one son to a violent death. How did she feel when James, “the brother of the Lord”, was executed by stoning in 62 AD – another son maybe, or her nephew – though maybe her own death had spared her that further suffering. (cf Elizabeth Johnson, “Truly Our Sister”, Continuum, 2003; p199)
Mary there at the beginning and at the end According to the Gospel of John, Mary was there with Jesus at the wedding feast of Cana and at the foot of the cross on Calvary. Neither of these episodes is mentioned in any of the Synoptic Gospels. (Mark, Matthew and Luke, because they tell basically the same story of Jesus with much the same time line, are called the Synoptic Gospels.) It makes you wonder why Mary is not mentioned by the Synoptic authors as being at the foot of the cross, when she is such a significant figure in the Gospel story. Matthew refers to “many women” who followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering to him, including Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of the sons of Zebedee (the apostles James and John), but they “looking on from afar”; Mark includes Salome among the women named by Matthew; and Luke simply refers to “all his acquaintances and the women from Galilee who stood at a distance and saw these things”. In John’s Gospel the women standing right next to the cross are “his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene”, as well as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” We are prompted to ask why this seeming anomaly. What is John’s purpose in placing Mary at the foot of the cross with two other women and one man, when in fact it is not very likely that the Roman soldiers would have permitted anyone not directly associated with the execution to be within such proximity to the cross? (in spite of Gibson’s film version). If we recognise that the writer of John’s Gospel (not likely to be the Apostle John) also put at the beginning of Jesus’s public life a scene in which his mother was so prominent, we come closer to the answer. The first chapter of John’s Gospel firmly establishes that that Jesus is God (this is the first time that any of the Gospel writers say as much - John writing about 95AD), also Lamb of God, Son of God and King of Israel. From that exalted beginning John writes the story of Jesus’s earthly journey from baptism to resurrection, but it is the journey of the One who was conscious of his divinity, of himself as the living water, the bread of life, the true vine, the good shepherd. It is all the more bewildering that this super-confident being, one who is never shown as subject to the temptations of the Synoptic Jesus, is so very reluctant to proclaim himself as the One who was to come – until his mother forced his hand at the wedding feast of Cana. The Gospel writer gives Mary a most prominent role in the life of Jesus at the beginning of his public journey. Turning water into wine was the “first of his signs and manifested his glory”, and his mother was an integral part of that moment. Whatever else we make of Mary’s appearance here – her concern to prevent the young couple being embarrassed, her sensitivity, her motherliness, her generosity – we cannot overlook the significance of Mary in the public life of her son from the beginning: her determination to walk with him, to be part of his journey, her commitment to the will of God in her personal life. Mary’s presence at the end of Jesus’s public life says the same thing: she followed him to the end. And her dying son gives her a special role in the Church – that of mother of the beloved disciple. If you believe that much of what John has written in his Gospel has to be taken up a level from reality to metaphor (which certainly makes the Gospel far more significant than a mere personal history of Jesus of Nazareth) then you might well see the Beloved Disciple as each Christian who chooses to follow Christ in all he asks and represents in the journey of the soul to God. In which case, Mary is there as the mother of the Church, the first disciple and the model disciple. Whether Mary stood physically, personally, at the foot of the cross is ultimately irrelevant. The real significance of John’s story is that Mary was a vital and significant part of the developing infant Church, whether it was in Jerusalem or in Antioch or at Ephesus. If, perchance, we did not have Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, we could very happily take the beginning of the Church from the end of John’s Gospel where Jesus gives Mary, the Mother, and the Beloved Disciple to each other. We simply do not know enough of the history of the early Church to answer many questions. But we do know that as far as the mind of Jesus was concerned, Mary was there at the beginning of his journey and there at the start of the journey of the Christian Church: motherly, supportive, leading by example, serving the people, discerning the will of God day by day in her life – in other words being a model for all Christians who were to come.
Mary for the New Millennium Life is a journey for all of us. Mary, the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, our Good Mother, has, over the past two thousand years, had her own journey, which undoubtedly will continue as long as the Christian faith continues. I would like, this year, to present a number of reflections on the place of Mary in our Christian faith, and indeed in our own lives. We Catholics are often accused by our Protestant brethren of “mariolatry”, that is, worship of Mary. If you consider the way Mary was regarded in many Catholic circles until about the 1960s the Protestant stance might be forgiven. For several hundred years – certainly from the Council of Trent (mid-Sixteenth Century), and, arguably, from the Medieval years of, say the Twelfth Century – Mary’s role in the Church became more and more prominent and at times threatened to swamp the role of Jesus Christ, Son of God, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. Just consider the theological contradiction of saying the Rosary during Mass – in terms of theological nonsense it ranks with saying a Hail Mary to Saint Joseph for fine weather.By 1950 this approach to Mary reached something of a climax in the Catholic Church: in 1864 Mary’s Immaculate Conception (that is, her personal freedom from Original Sin, from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb, NOT NOT NOT her virginal conception of Jesus in her own womb) was proclaimed a dogma of the Catholic faith – that is, something to unquestionably believed as a part of Catholic teaching. In 1950 Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of Mary into Heaven as another Catholic dogma. As recently as the 1990s there was talk that Pope John Paul II was considering proclaiming Mary as Mediatrix of All Grace (that is, none of God’s grace comes to us human beings unless Mary is the vehicle) as another dogma of our faith. I, for one, am pleased he did not do so. After Vatican II many Catholics lost any sense of the credibility of Mary in their faith journey. Mary, the subservient doormat of God and anybody else who bothered, was not an appealing figure for either men or particularly women searching for their own identity and the fulness of their own personalities. Consequently Mary was thrown out with the bathwater of the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, the innumerable feast days and titles, devotions like the Novena to Mary of Perpetual Succour. For myself this was certainly the journey. And what were we left with? I struggled with my own approach to Mary until one day in 1988, when I was studying at the University of Birmingham (UK), I was approached by a couple of Christian students who asked if I would talk to a mixed group of Christians about the understanding of Mary in the Church today. I agreed, only to realise that the only ready source material I had was the Jerusalem Bible and the recently published new Constitutions of the Marist Brothers. I could not have had two better sources. In the first place I was forced to read what there was about Mary in the Bible (what a novelty!) and then consider the reflections made about Mary in the Constitutions of my Order. I prepared what I could, but was not able to bring any kind of binding theme to my thoughts. By good fortune I happened to be living in the Marist Brothers’ community at Wolverhampton (just up the line from Birmingham) and we had a visitor: a Marist Brother who was a member of the Brothers’ General Council in Rome. I put my plight before him and he responded immediately: “Mary as model disciple.” I had my answer – not just to how I would approach my talk to the students at the Chaplaincy at the University, but more importantly to the struggle that had been going on in me for twenty years: how could I make sense of this woman to whom I had had a strong personal devotion since my childhood, whose Order I belonged to, but who no longer made much sense to me. My dilemma was not a new one, I came to realise. As far back at the post-Jesus years in the Church the question had been asked: who was Mary and what is her place in the Christian story? In Mark’s Gospel (the first to be written), Mary and other member’s of Jesus’s family seemed to be amongst the widening circle of those came to reject Jesus. In Matthew and Luke’s Gospel (especially the latter) Mary comes to life as the woman who says Yes to God’s request and becomes the woman of faith, the first disciple. In John’s Gospel she is there at Cana at the beginning of Jesus’s public life, and at the foot of the cross at the end, she and the other Beloved Disciple, at the beginning of the Christian Church. Keep your heart and mind and ears and eyes open to the treasure that is Mary. Brother Tony Butler 2005
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