Hail Mary, Blessed Virgin, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, …
We have many, many titles for Mary. One list I found has 50! That might be more than we need and today we are focused on one – Mary, Mother of God.
On this Sunday after Christmas we would usually be celebrating the Feast of the Holy Family. This year is different because Christmas itself fell on a Sunday. So we celebrate instead this special feast of Mary which occurs on January 1 – the Octave of Christmas (the eighth day). If you were hoping for the Feast of the Holy Family I’m afraid you missed it – that was moved to Friday.
Clearly it’s appropriate to recognize the family life of Jesus in the context of Christmas. But it’s also good once in a while to have the opportunity to reflect specifically on Mary as mother. Our gospel reading (Lk 2:16-21) provides us with an image of Mary, together with her husband Joseph, and their new-born baby – both glorious and pathetic, lying in a feed trough in a barn, visited by stinky shepherds. But our feast today is not celebrating Mary as mother of Jesus, but Mary as Mother of God. This might seem fairly obvious – Mary is the mother of Jesus, Jesus is the Son of God, Jesus is God, therefore Mary is the Mother of God.
But what does it actually mean to say Mary is the mother of God when God obviously can’t have a mother? This was a topic of fierce debate in the Third and Fourth Centuries, until it was finalized at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The debate was not really about Mary but rather about the nature of Jesus and his relationship to God, what it meant that he was “Son of God”, and should that somehow be transferred to the status of his mother as “Mother of God”. That may not seem problematic to us, but in a Roman world with many female gods, and divine fertility symbols being hugely important, we can perhaps appreciate why there was concern about a possible slide into Mary being seen as some sort of female deity.
This may seem like ancient history and to some degree it is. But how we think about Mary and relate to her has been a recurrent question over the centuries since. The apparent idolatry of Marian devotions in the medieval period led the Protestant reformers to downplay the significance of Mary, and the Counter-Reformation contrariwise to emphasize Marian devotions. But what may be most interesting in all of this is that devotion to Mary has typically been a grass roots movement (as we would refer to it in modern terms). The recent (in church terms) promulgation of the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption of Mary (only in 1950) came about more from pressure from “ordinary” believers than the thinking of theologians or prelates.
We may be unfamiliar with such sentiments. But if you live in the south of Spain, or many parts of South America, the importance that people ascribe to statues and processions celebrating Mary is hard to overstate. This widespread popular devotion is often apart from and maybe even counter to respect for the Church as an institution, which has often been seen as failing in its mission to support the poor – so they turn to Mary instead.
What seems clear from these experiences, ancient and modern, and all those titles, is that we can easily project onto Mary all sorts of emotions, hopes, fears, joys and sorrows. The image of Mary as she “kept all these things [all her experiences], reflecting on them in her heart” makes her the perfect recipient of our experiences also. There is no judgement, no condemnation, only sympathy and comfort. As the mother of Jesus she was closer to God than any other human being, as the mother of God she displays to us the nature of God, just as her son did. In her we can recognize power and strength, perseverance and hope. And this is not some distant relationship. We are closer to her and her son than those shepherds were. We are sons and daughters of God, as Paul tells us (Gal 4:4-7), we are brothers and sisters of Christ, Mary is our mother also.
Mother of Jesus, mother of God, our mother – all these relationships are bound together. This is family as much as Jesus, Mary and Joseph. This is the family into which we have been adopted. These relationships are not based on control and domination but on that Spirit which enables us to cry out “Abba, Father”. (Gal 4:6)