Holy Mary of Nazareth

(On this vigil of the Annunciation, when Mary’s fiat changed the course of history forever, here are some words of preparation from contributor Carl Sundell). Editor

 

What pain Christ must have suffered

As the nails were pounded in.

But Mother Mary suffered as well

Watching him pay for our sin.

The story of Mary of Nazareth, mother of Jesus, is a story that has been told from many points of view. We hear it told in the Gospels and in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles. We hear it told again and again, but especially in the last several centuries, by those who have witnessed apparitions of Mary and personally known her healing powers. We have been told it again in the living tradition of the Church through the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary into heaven. The case can even be made that as the mother of the Messiah, she was foreshadowed as early as the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:14) when God announced the ultimate defeat of the serpent who had seduced Adam and Eve:

Then the Lord God said to the serpent: “Because you have done this, you shall be banned from all the animals and from all the wild creatures; On your belly shall you crawl, and dirt shall you eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; He will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel.”

Some Christians downplay the great importance of Mary in the scheme of salvation. But without Mary’s humble and obedient submission, there would be no birth of Jesus, and therefore no salvation. It follows that Mary is the most important Christian who ever lived. Surely more than all the celebrated heroes of history she deserves universal days of honour. Catholic Christians emphasize her rightful place even above the prophets and the apostles and all the saints. For Mary, no more fitting title could be found than Queen of Heaven. That she was aware of her universal importance is apparent just from a single sentence of Scripture: “From now on, all generations will call me blessed.” (Luke 1:48) The Catholic Church, more than any other, has fulfilled that prophecy.

Mary was the only human being to have lived with and loved Jesus for thirty-three years. (We know not how long Saint Joseph did, but he likely died before Christ’s public ministry – editor). When he was a boy, she must have been the one who taught him how to pray to his Father. She was the only person – after Saint Joseph – whom he could not disobey when she asked him for anything, including that first reluctant miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. And when she stood in his presence at the foot of the cross, her Son entrusted her welfare to his favorite disciple, John; so that in giving her to be John’s mother, he gave her to be the mother of us all … our Blessed Mother.

How can it be that we, who stand at the foot of the cross with John, cannot also embrace Mary as our own mother? And when each of us needs a miracle in life, as we all sooner or later do, why would we not go to the one who was able to talk her Son into one even before his time had come? And so it was Mary who compelled Jesus to begin his ministry; and not only his ministry, but also the long path to the Cross where Mary would be waiting for him again to perform his greatest miracle of all.

If Jesus was to be the second Adam, it stood to reason that none other than Mary could be the second Eve. The Church in her divinely given wisdom fathomed that Mary was born immaculate, like the first Eve, because she was to play a role even greater than the first Eve, just as her son was to play a role even greater than the first Adam. Not bearing the stain of inherited original sin within her, Mary could not pass it on to her Son. Yet he still chose baptism for himself, as a sign to us that we should all be cleansed by the saving waters of his amazing grace.

And because Mary was sinless, her body could not be be corrupted as Eve’s body was corrupted, she who had sinned and brought death into the world. This is the Catholic doctrine of the Assumption (not officially declared until 1950) whereby the Church affirms that Mary at the end of her earthly life slept, but was preserved from the corruption of the flesh that Adam and Eve had brought into the world. For many this tradition is hard to accept, yet the early Fathers of the Church believed it to be so, as St. John Damascene says:

St. Juvenal, Bishop of Jerusalem, at the Council of Chalcedon (AD 451) made known to the Emperor Marcian and Pulcheria, who wished to possess the body of the Mother of God, that Mary died in the presence of all the Apostles, but that her tomb, when opened upon the request of the apostle Thomas, was found empty; wherefrom the Apostles concluded that her body was taken up to heaven (in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca Cursus Completus 96:1).

This helps to explains too why the early Church was not able to find and preserve the relics of Mary, as it had found and preserved the relics of so many other early saints.

Mary revealed to us the Catholic lesson we need most of all to learn: that just as pride is the first and last of sins, humility is the first and last of virtues. Mary humbly accepted her grand part in her Son’s mission, and her humility kept her out of the limelight even to her dying days. But her Son, who denied us the veneration of Mary’s bones, did not deny us the gift and the grace of her constant and mothering love.