Posted on 05/11/2005 10:04:08 AM PDT by NYer
It has to be one of the strangest things in the world: So many Christians who love Jesus with all their hearts recoil in fear at the mention of His mother's name, while many who do love her find themselves tongue-tied when asked to explain why.
Most of the issues people have with Mary are really issues about something else. "Where is the Assumption of Mary in the Bible?" isn't really a question about Mary. It's a question about the validity of Sacred Tradition and the authority of the Church. "Why should I pray to Mary?" isn't really about Mary, either. It's actually a question about the relationship of the living and the dead in Christ. "Do Catholics worship Mary?" isn't a question about Mary. It's concerned more with whether or not Catholics countenance idolatry and what the word "honor" means. And curiously enough, all these and many more objections both pay homage to and completely overlook the central truth about Mary that the Catholic Church labors to help us see: that her life, in its entirety, is a referred life. Sublime Neglect The Cultural Obstacles The Heart of Marian Doctrine Defeating Destructive Ideologies
Mary would, after all, be of absolutely no consequence to us if not for her Son. It is because she is the mother of Jesus Christ that she matters to the world at all. If He hadn't been born, you never would have heard of her. John, with characteristic economy of expression, captures this referred life in her own words: "Do whatever He tells you" (Jn 2:5). And, of course, if this were all the Church had to say about her, Evangelicals would be more than happy to let her refer us to Jesus and be done with it. What baffles so many non-Catholics is the Church's tendency to keep referring us to her. "Ad Iesum per Mariam!" we say, to which many non-Catholics nervously respond, "Isn't Christianity supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ? Why do Catholics honor Mary so much?"
That question sounded reasonable — right up until another question began to bother me: If Catholics honor Mary too much, exactly how do we Evangelicals honor her "just enough"? For the reality was that my native evangelicalism recoiled from any and all mention of Mary.
This was odd. After all, Evangelicals could talk all day about Paul and never feel we were "worshipping" him or giving him "too much honor." We rightly understood that God's Word comes to us through St. Paul, and there's no conflict between the two (even though Paul exhibits more character flaws than Mary).
Yet the slightest mention of Mary by a Catholic immediately brought a flood of warnings, hesitations, scrutinies of her lack of faith (allegedly demonstrated in Mark 3:21), and even assertions that Jesus was less pleased with her than he was with His disciples (because he called her "Woman," not "Mom"; and because He commended His own disciples as "my brother and sister and mother" (Mk 3:35)). And all this was despite the fact that not just God's word (e.g. the Magnificat), but God's Word, came to us through Mary (Jn 1:14). As Evangelicals we could say, "If not for Paul, the Gospel would never have reached the Gentiles." But we froze up if somebody argued that, "If not for Mary, the Gospel would never have reached the earth." Suddenly, a flurry of highly speculative claims about how "God would simply have chosen somebody else!" would fill the air, as though Mary was a mere incubation unit, completely interchangeable with any other woman on earth. "No Paul, no Gospel for the Gentiles" made perfect sense. But "No Mary, no incarnation, no death, no resurrection, no salvation for the world" was just too extreme.
Indeed, from evangelical piety and preaching as it is actually practiced, one could be forgiven for getting the sense that Jesus didn't really even like His mother (like a teenager irritated because Mom just doesn't understand him). Having "Mary is No Big Deal" hammered home whenever her name was raised tended to give you the feeling that — after her brief photo-op for the Hallmark Christmas card industry — Jesus was glad to spend time away from the family, in the Temple discussing higher things. The position in evangelicalism was more or less that we should do likewise and not lavish any attention on the mother who was too dim to understand Who He was, and whom He "rebuked" by saying, "Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?"
And so, our claims to honor her "just enough" effectively boiled down to paying no shred of positive attention to her beyond singing "round yon Virgin, mother and child" each Christmas. The rest of the time it was either complete neglect or jittery assurances of her unimportance and dark warnings not to over-emphasize the woman of whom inspired Scripture said, "From this day all generations will call me blessed."
It was a startling paradigm shift to realize we treated her so allergically — and one which, I have since noticed, isn't unusual for converts. Dale Ahlquist, President of the American Chesterton Society, told me once that when he was still hanging back from the Church because of Mary, a blunt priest he knew asked him, "Do you believe her soul magnifies the Lord? It's right there in Scripture." Ahlquist reflexively answered back, "Of course I do! I know the Bible!" But even as he replied he was thinking to himself, "I never really thought of that before." It can be a disorienting experience.
But, in fact, it is right there in the Bible. Her soul magnifies the Lord, and from that day to this all generations have called her blessed. So why, when we Evangelicals looked at Jesus, did we never look at Him through the divinely appointed magnifying glass? Why were we so edgy about calling her "blessed" and giving her any honor? That realization was my first clue that it was, perhaps, Catholics who were simply being normal and human in honoring Mary, while we Evangelicals were more like teetotalers fretting that far too much wine was being drunk at the wedding in Cana.
Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that evangelical fears about Mary are visceral and not entirely theological. Indeed, much of the conflict between Catholics and Evangelicals is cultural, not theological. Evangelical culture (whether you're a man or a woman) is overwhelmingly masculine, while Catholic culture (again, whether you're a man or a woman) is powerfully feminine. And the two groups often mistake their cultural differences for theological ones.
The Catholic approach tends to be body-centered, Eucharistic, and contemplative. Prayer, in Catholic culture, is primarily for seeking union with God. Evangelical approaches to God tend to be centered on Scripture, verbal articulation of belief, mission, and on the Spirit working in power. Prayer, in such a culture, is primarily for getting things done. Both are legitimate Christian ways of approaching the Gospel. Indeed, they should both be part of the Catholic approach to the Gospel. But because of these unconscious differences Evangelicals and Catholics often clash about culture while they think they're debating theology. The feminine spirituality of the Catholic can regard the masculine evangelical approach as shallow, noisy, and utilitarian, lacking an interior life. Meanwhile, Catholic piety can be seen by Evangelicals as a cold, dead, ritualistic, biblically ignorant, and cut off from real life. Thus, Evangelicals frequently criticize the Catholic life as a retreat from reality into rituals and rote prayers.
Not surprisingly, the heroes of the two camps are (for Evangelicals) the Great Human Dynamo of Apostolic Energy, St. Paul; and (for Catholics) the great icon of Contemplative Prayer Issuing in Incarnation, the Blessed Virgin Mary. As an Evangelical, I found Paul much easier to appreciate, since he was "biblical" — he wrote much of the New Testament, after all. You could talk about Paul since he'd left such a significant paper trail. Not so with Mary. Apart from the Magnificat and a couple remarks here and there — plus, of course, the infancy narratives — she didn't appear to occupy nearly as much psychic space for the authors of the New Testament as she did for Catholics. Marian devotion looked like a mountain of piety built on a molehill of Scripture.
Looks, however, can be deceiving. For as I got to know the Bible better, it became obvious to me that the authors of Scripture were not nearly as jittery about Mary as my native evangelicalism. Furthermore, they accorded to her honors which looked a great deal more Catholic than evangelical.
Luke, for instance, likens her to the Ark of the Covenant in recording that the Holy Spirit "overshadowed" her. The same word in Greek is used to describe the way the Shekinah (glory of God) overshadowed the tabernacle in Luke 1:35. Likewise, John makes the same connection between Mary and the Ark of the Covenant when he announces in Revelation 11:19-12:2:
Then God's temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of His covenant was seen within His temple; and there were flashes of lightning, voices, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery.
The chapter goes on to describe the woman as giving birth to a male child who rules the nations with an iron scepter and who is almost devoured by a great red dragon.
As an Evangelical, my own tradition found it remarkably easy to detect bar codes, Soviet helicopters, the European Common Market, and the Beatles encoded into the narrative of Revelation. But when Catholics suggested that the woman of Revelation might have something to do with the Blessed Virgin occupying a place of cosmic importance in the grand scheme of things, this was dismissed as incredible. Everyone knew that the woman of Revelation was really the symbolic Virgin Daughter of Zion giving birth to the Church. A Jewish girl who stood at the pinnacle of the Old Covenant, summed up the entirety of Israel's mission and gave flesh to the Head of the Church saying, "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word" — what could she possibly have to do with those images? Why, that would suggest that she was the Virgin Daughter of Zion and the Flower of her People, the Model Disciple, the Icon of the Church, the Mother of Jesus and of all those who are united with Him by faith and...
Come to think of it, Scripture was looking rather Catholic after all.
That was the revolutionary thought that made it possible for me to press on, as a new Catholic, to find out what the Church was trying to get at with her Marian teaching. In coming to understand this, it seemed to me, I'd come a long way toward understanding why Mary figures so prominently, not merely in the heads, but in the hearts of Catholics.
The first question that arises, of course, is, "Why Marian dogma at all?" Why not just dogmas about Christ and let Catholics think what they like about Mary? Why bind consciences here?
The answer is that Catholics do think what they like — not only about Mary, but about lots of things. And sometimes they think deeply erroneous things. When they do, and that thought imperils some revealed truth to the point it threatens the integrity of the Church's witness, the Church will, from time to time, define its doctrine more precisely. This is a process that's already at work in the New Testament (cf. Acts 15), and it continues until the return of Christ.
So, for instance, in the fifth century there arose (yet again) the question of just who Jesus is. It was a question repeated throughout antiquity and, in this case, an answer to the question was proposed by the Nestorians. They argued that the mortal man Jesus and the Logos, or Second Person of the Trinity, were more or less two persons occupying the same head. For this reason, they insisted that Mary could not be acclaimed (as she had been popularly acclaimed for a very long time) as Theotokos, or God-bearer. Instead, she should only be called Christotokos, or Christ-bearer. She was, they insisted, the Mother of Jesus, not of God.
The problem with this was that it threatened the very witness of the Church and could even lead logically to the notion that there were two Sons of God, the man Jesus and the Logos who was sharing a room with Him in His head. In short, it was a doorway to theological chaos over one of the most basic truths of the Faith: that the Word became flesh, died, and rose for our sins.
So the Church formulated its response. First, Jesus Christ is not two persons occupying the same head. He is one person possessing two natures, human and divine, joined in a hypostatic union. Second, it was appropriate to therefore call Mary Theotokos because she's the Mother of the God-Man. When the God-Man had His friends over for lunch, He didn't introduce Mary saying, "This is the mother of my human nature." He said, "This is my mother."
Why did the Church do this? Because, once again, Mary points to Jesus. The dogma of the Theotokos is a commentary on Jesus, a sort of "hedge" around the truth about Jesus articulated by the Church. Just as Nestorianism had tried to attack the orthodox teaching of Christ through Mary (by forbidding the veneration of her as Theotokos), now the Church protected that teaching about Christ by making Theotokos a dogma. That is a vital key to understanding Marian dogmas: They're always about some vital truth concerning Jesus, the nature of the Church, or the nature of the human person.
This is evident, for instance, in the definition of Mary as a Perpetual Virgin (promulgated in 553 at the Council of Constantinople). This tradition isn't so much explicitly attested as reflected in the biblical narrative. Yes, we must grant that the biblical narrative is ambiguous in that it speaks of Jesus's "brothers" (but does it mean "siblings" or merely "relatives"?). However, other aspects of the biblical narrative strongly suggest she remained a virgin.
For instance, Mary reacts with astonishment at the news that she, a woman betrothed, will bear a son. If you are at a wedding shower and tell the bride-to-be, "You're going to have cute kids" and she responds "How can that be?" you can only conclude one of two things: she either doesn't know about the birds and the bees or she's taken a vow of virginity. In short, the promise of a child is an odd thing for a betrothed woman to be amazed about... unless, of course, she'd already decided to remain a virgin even after marriage.
Likewise, Joseph reacts with fear at the thought of taking Mary as a wife. Why fear? Modernity assumes it was because he thought her guilty of adultery, but the typical view in antiquity understood the text to mean he was afraid of her sanctity — as a pious Jew would be afraid to touch the Ark of the Covenant. After all, think of what Mary told him about the angel's words: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God."
I'm not even a pious Jew, but with words like that echoing in my ears about my wife, I'd find it easy to believe that Joseph, knowing what he did about his wife, would have chosen celibacy.
"But nothing is sure, based on the text alone. It's still ambiguous," says the critic. Right. The biblical text alone doesn't supply an unambiguous answer to this or a myriad of other questions, including "Is the Holy Spirit God?," "How do you contract a valid marriage?," and "Can you be a polygamist?" But the Tradition of the Church in union with the biblical text does supply an answer: Mary had no other children, a fact so commonly known throughout the early Church that when Jerome attacks Helvidius for suggesting otherwise, nobody makes a peep. In a Church quite capable of tearing itself to pieces over distinctions between homoousious and homoiousious, you hear the sound of crickets in response to Jerome, punctuated with the sound of other Fathers singing hymns to "Mary, Ever-Virgin." The early Church took it for granted and thought Helvidius as credible as Dan Brown.
But why a dogma about it? Because, again, Mary's life is a referred life. Her virginity, like Christ's, speaks of her total consecration to God and of our call as Christians to be totally consecrated as well. Her virginity is not a stunt or a magic trick to make the arrival of Messiah extra strange. It is, rather, a sign to the Church and of the Church. And that matters for precisely the reason I'd thought it did not matter when I was an Evangelical: because Christianity is indeed supposed be about a relationship with Jesus Christ. But a relationship necessarily involves more than one person.
It comes down to is this: Jesus can do a world of wonderful things, but there is something even Jesus cannot do: He cannot model for us what it looks like to be a disciple of Jesus. Only a disciple of Jesus can do that. And the first and best model of the disciple of Jesus is the one who said and lived "Yes!" to God, spontaneously and without even the benefit of years of training or the necessity of being knocked off a horse and blinded. And she continues to do so right through the agony of watching her Son die and the ecstasy of knowing Him raised again.
This is why the Church, like the Gospels, has always called Mary our Mother: because Mom is the best model for training children. The command to call her "Mother" comes, of course, from Jesus Himself. John doesn't record the words "Behold your mother" (Jn 19:27) because he thought his readers might be curious about domestic arrangements for childless Jewish widows. Rather, as with everything else John writes, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name" (Jn 20:31). In other words, he doesn't record everything about Jesus, only those things that have a significant theological meaning. This includes Christ's words to the Beloved Disciple. For the Beloved Disciple is you and not merely John. Mary is your mother and you are her child. And so we are to look to her as mother and imitate her as she imitates Christ.
This brings us to the last two (and intimately related) Marian dogmas. Given that Marian dogma is always a commentary on Christ and His Church, what is the Church saying in its dogmatic teaching that 1) Mary was preserved at the moment of her conception from the stain of all sin, both original and actual; and 2) Mary was assumed bodily into heaven at the end of her earthly existence?
The great crisis that faced the Church in the 19th century (when the Holy Spirit, doing His job of leading the Church into all truth, led the Church to promulgate the dogma of the Immaculate Conception) was the rise of several ideologies — still very much with us — that called into question the origins and dignity of the human person. Darwin said the human person was an unusually clever piece of meat whose origins were as accidental as a pig's nose. Marx said humans were mere ingredients in a vast economic historical process. Laissez-faire capitalism saw people as natural resources to be exploited and thrown away when they lost their value. Eugenics said human dignity rested on "fitness." Much of Protestantism declared humans "totally depraved," while much of the Enlightenment held up the myth of human innocence, the "noble savage," and the notion of human perfectibility through reason. Racial theory advanced the notion that the key to human dignity was the shape of your skull, the color of your skin, and your membership in the Aryan or Teutonic tribe. Freud announced that your illusion of human dignity was just a veil over fathomless depths of unconscious processes largely centering in the groin or emerging out of issues with Mom and Dad.
All these ideologies - and many others - had in common the degrading rejection of human beings as creatures made in the image of God and intended for union with God (and the consequent subjection of the human person to some sort of creature). In contrast to them all, the Church, in holding up the icon of Mary Immaculate, held up an icon of both our true origin and our true dignity. That she was sinless was a teaching as old as the hills in the Church, which had hailed her as Kecharitomene, or "full of grace," since the time of Luke, and saluted her as Panagia, or all-holy, since the early centuries of the Church. So then why did the Holy Spirit move the Church to develop and focus this immemorial teaching more clearly?
Because what needed to be said loud and clear was that we were made in the image of God and that our fallenness, though very real, does not name or define us: Jesus Christ does. We are not mere animals, statistical averages, cogs in a machine, sophisticated primordial ooze, or a jangling set of complexes, appetites, tribal totems, Aryan supermen, naturally virtuous savages, or totally depraved Mr. Hydes. We were made by God, for God. Therefore sin, though normal, is not natural and doesn't constitute our humanity. And the proof of it was Mary, who was preserved from sin and yet was more human than the lot of us. She wasn't autonomously innocent, as though she could make it without God. She was the biggest recipient of grace in the universe, a grace that made her, in a famous phrase, "younger than sin." Because of it, she was free to be what Irenaeus described as "the glory of God": a human being fully alive. And as she is, so can the grace of Christ make us.
The 19th-century ideologies didn't, however, remain in libraries and classrooms. In the 20th century, they were enacted by the powers of state, science, business, entertainment, education, and the military into programs that bore abundant fruit in such enterprises as global and regional wars, the Holocaust, the great famines, the killing fields, the "great leap forward," the sexual revolution, and the culture of death, which is still reaping a rich bounty of spiritual and physical destruction. In short, as the 19th-century philosophies assaulted the dignity and origin of the human person, so the working out of those philosophies on the ground in the 20th century assaulted the dignity and destiny of the human person.
So what did the Holy Spirit do? Once again, in 1950, in the middle of a century that witnessed the biggest assault on the human person and on the family that the world has ever seen, the Church again held up Mary as an icon of who we really are and who we are meant to become by promulgating the dogma of the Assumption of Mary. Just as the Immaculate Conception held Mary up as the icon of the divine dignity of our origins, so the Church, in teaching "that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory" was now holding her up as the icon of the divine dignity of our destiny.
The Church is repeating, in effect, that the God Who loves the world does not will that our fate be the oven, the mass grave, the abortuary, the anonymity of the factory, the brothel, the cubicle, or the street. The proper end of our life is supposed to be for us, as it already is for her, the ecstatic glory of complete union with the Triune God in eternity. Once again, God shows us something vital about our relationship to Himself through her, His greatest saint.
And that, in the end, is the point of Marian devotion and theology. Through our Lady, we see Jesus Christ reflected in the eyes of His greatest saint. But we also see "what are the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of His power in us who believe, according to the working of His great might" (Eph 1:18-19). For what He has already done for her, He will one day do also in us.
Evidently biblewonk believes that discrediting Mormonism has something to do with Roman Catholicism.
"If Mary really points at Jesus why don't you look there instead of at her?"
Just for the record, we do look to Jesus. We ALSO look to Mary because she is one of God's perfect creations. I am only stating this because I feel like non-Catholics think we don't worship God at all because we do love Mary so much.
Yup! They can even desert Him like St. Peter or persecute Him like St. Paul. Those are just for starters. St. Augustine...now there is a piece of work for you!
Frank
Apparently you believe "human and not immune from error" and "following false and unbiblical teachings" are mutually exclusive. I don't. Luther was human and not immune from error and therefore following false and unbiblical teachings.
Later you wrote that "But what interests me most is that the only possible conclusion one can make is that evangelicals ALONE are always correct...they are somehow immune to error". I stated that Luther was not immune from error.
I hold no human to so lofty a position, whether that is Calvin, Luther or Mary. God uses whom He wishes, how He wishes to His glory whether that is Paul carrying the good news or Mary carrying the Son of Man. He uses you and I to carry his message to the world and He uses that message to open spiritual eyes to see His glory.
"took her to his own home" is not in the original. John says, "elaven auten o mathetes eis ta idia", or in Latin, "accepit eam discipulus in sua", -- "took her with his own". Here "home" provides an emphasis on an economic arrangement in error.
You are correct that there is no commandment to seek Mary's intercession in order to gain salvation, merely to "behold" her as mother. Accordingly, one can be a good Catholic and never say a Hail Mary. Marian devotion is something that naturally happens in a Christian heart unfettered by sectarian fears. It is a gift, never an obligation.
---It is not difficult to accept the possibility, there's just no Scriptural evidence for it. Our faith should be based on the Bible.---
YOUR Faith is based solely on the Bible. Mine is based on Holy Scripture, Apostolic Tradition and the Magisterial Teachings of the Church. Not everything is recorded in the Bible. Seems someone actually says that at the end of one of the Gospels!
Frank
***Not everything is recorded in the Bible. Seems someone actually says that at the end of one of the Gospels! ***
Indeed it does. And if the world cannot contian them then surely the Magesterium can't either!
But what do you know about Jesus Christ that you didn't learn from the Bible?
"Our faith should be based on the Bible."
No, our faith is based on the Bible and Traditions passed on for the past 2000 years, just as the Bible teaches.
"If Mary needed to be sinless to bear Jesus then did Mary's mother need to be sinless to bear Mary? And what of Mary's mother's mother - would she not also need to be sinless to bear Mary's mother."
Only Mary needed to be sinless. Why would God need to create all these others sinless? You're trying to make it way too difficult for no reason.
***No, our faith is based on the Bible and Traditions passed on for the past 2000 years, just as the Bible teaches.***
The Bible says it contains everything we need to know to be saved and to live a life pleasing to God.
***Only Mary needed to be sinless.***
Why did Mary need to be sinless?
"I don't come to the same conclusion as you re John."
Well, I guess that sums this entire article up nicely doesn't it. You've come to a different conclusion. Who helped you come to that conclusion? How do you know you are right? Thankfully, we have a teaching authority given to us by Jesus to settle matters like this. I hope you come home soon.
Everthing I learned of Christ was from Scripture. However, not in the context of someone in 1879 who decided they had discovered a "new Truth" but in the Ancient Tradition passed down from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church before the New Testament was even recorded and the canon created. This is the authority invested to the Church by Christ Himself.
Also, of what sense(s) are you speaking? There are several as documented below.
--According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.--
Frank
Mary's spiritual motherhood
The Fathers of the Church, beginning with Justin (died A.D. 165) saw in Mary the antithesis of our natural mother, Eve. In Mary they contemplated the reversal of the drama of the first sin:
Eve listened to Satan under the guise of a serpent--Mary received the visitation of an angel.
Eve believed Satan's lie--Mary believed the truth of God's promise.
Eve disobeyed God's commandment--Mary obeyed God's word.
Eve is the mother of all the living, whom she and Adam involved in disaster and loss--Mary is the Mother of all who live as co-heirs with Christ of eternal life, born from above through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the fruit of Mary's womb.
Mary's spiritual motherhood rests upon John 19:25-27: "Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, 'Woman, behold your son.' Then he said to the disciple, 'Behold your mother.' And from that hour the disciple took her into his home" (NAB).
We believe that in the beloved disciple are prefigured all the disciples of Christ. Thus, by his gift from the cross, Christ makes Mary the spiritual mother of us all. Jesus is her firstborn (Luke 2:7), the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom. 8:29). Mary is the Mother of all those brothers and sisters, ourselves, destined for glory.
The Christian Research Institute (CRI) will have none of this. It begins the attack by presenting Frank Sheed's explanation of our Catholic doctrine: "Calvary was the sacrifice of our race's redemption; everything that [Jesus] did and said on the cross related to that. So with his word to our Lady and John. It was as part of his plan of redemption that he was giving her to be the mother of John--not of John as himself but as man. From this moment she is the mother of us all."(F. J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1981), 131- 132.)
CRI gives this retort: "Protestants contend that only a predisposed ambition to produce a 'spiritual mother' could lead to such a reading of the text. That Jesus had only John, and not all men, in mind is made sufficiently clear by John's comment that from that day on he took Mary into his care [CRI's emphasis]. If the fact that Mary was now to look on John as her son means that she was also to look on all believers as her children, then the fact that Mary was simultaneously entrusted to John's care would have to mean that she was also entrusted to the care of all believers, which is absurd."(Elliott Miller, "The Mary of Roman Catholicism," Christian Research Journal, Fall 1990, 28. The first part of Miller's article appeared in the Summer 1990 issue. In these notes the two parts are referred to as Part 1 and Part 2. The articles represent the position of the Christian Research Institute.)
No Protestant unanimity
CRI is unqualified to pose as a champion for all--even most--Protestants. About Mary's motherhood of us all, the first Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, said: "It is a great joy of which the angel speaks! It is God's consolation and overflowing goodness that man should be honored with such treasure: Mary as his true mother, Christ as his brother, and God as his Father."(Luther's Works (Weimar), 10:71:19-73:2.)
On Christmas Day, 1523 Luther preached, "I believe that there is no one among us who would not leave his own mother to become a son of Mary. And that you can do, all the more because that has been offered as a choice to you, and it is an even greater joy than if you embraced your mother with real embraces."(Ibid, 11:224:8.) Two days later he said, "We are the children of Mary; we are able to hear the song of the angels!"(Ibid.)
At Christmas, 1529 Luther turned to the subject again: "Mary is the mother of Jesus and the mother of us all. If Christ is ours, we must be where he is, and where he is, we must be also, and all that he has must be ours, and his mother therefore also is ours."(Ibid., 29:655:26-656:7.)
The Anglican de Satge writes, "She is the climax of the Old Testament people, the one to whom the cloud of witnesses from the ancient era look as their crowning glory, for it was through her response to grace that their Vindicator came to stand upon the earth. In the order of redemption she is the first fruits of her Son's saving work, the one among her Son's people who has gone all the way. And in the order of her Son's people, she is the mother."( John de Satge, Down to Earth: The New Protestant Vision of the Virgin Mary (Consortium, 1976), 111. The title of de Satge's fourth chapter is "Mary, Mother of Her Son's People.")
Eastern Orthodox Christians, like us Catholics, are firm in their allegiance to Mary as Mother of us all. Nicolas Zernov writes, "The Mother of God is the Mother of all mankind, the friend and protectress of all members of the Church."(Nicolas Zernov, Eastern Christendom (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolean, 1961), 279.)
On this doctrine of Mary's universal motherhood, Orthodox and Catholic Christians are unanimous; Protestants are a house divided. Many Protestants agree with the liturgical churches; some do not, but CRI suggests all do not. This is simply inaccurate.
If CRI is sincere in its concern for ecumenism, it will cease attacking the Catholic Church's understanding of our (common) Mother. It will make every effort to unite Protestants in a devotion to Mary at least as warm as Luther's.
Which position is "absurd"?
CRI characterizes Frank Sheed's Catholic interpretation of John 19:25-27 as "absurd." It objects that if Mary must look on all of us as her children, then she would have to be entrusted to the care of all believers, as she was entrusted to John's care.
This objection collapses when we look to the Greek text of John 19:27: "the disciple took her eis ta idia." CRI follows the Anchor Bible translation of the three Greek words, translating them as "into his care." Other translations, Catholic and non-Catholic, have "into his home" (NAB, NIV, NEB, CCD, Kleist-Lilly) or "to his own home" (RSV) or "chez lui" (Jerusalem) or "en su casa" (BAC).
Such translations do very well for spiritual reading, but they are too free for exegesis. They are, in fact, precise where the Greek is vague. In the phrase eis ta idia, there is no word meaning "care" or "house" or "home." (One may refer by contrast to John 7:53: "They went each to his own house" (RSV), where John wrote oikon [house] in his Greek text.) What does eis ta idia mean, then?
Eis is a preposition with five general meanings, expressing place, time, measure, relationship, and end, purpose, or goal. (The last two meanings--relationship and end, purpose, or goal--frequently converge in a given sentence.)
Ta idia is the neuter plural substantive use of the adjective idios: "private, one's own." John has used the plural, although the singular to idion is often found with no difference of meaning. According to context, the meaning may be "one's own, my own, your own, his own, her own, our own, their own."
But one's own what? There is the rub. John's expression is neuter and therefore, one may say, deliberately noncommittal. Ta idia can mean one's own things, purposes, opinions, property, interests, intentions, business, whatever.
Classical writers' testimony
Consider classical writers. Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis, 1363) writes idia prasson, "doing his own thing." (Paul [1 Thess. 4:11] uses almost the same words: prassein ta idia, "to do your own business.") Again, Euripides (Phoenician Maidens, 555) writes, "Mortals do not possess things as their own [idia]," and (Andromache, 376) he says, "True friends have nothing as their own [idion]." Xenophon (Anabasis 1, 3, 3) writes of "[money] which I did not put away for my own [personal use, eis to idion]"--like John's eis ta idia, except that John uses the plural.
Similar uses of the substantive idion/idia are found in Antiphon, Andocides, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Lucian, Theognis, and other Greek writers of the classical and post-classical periods.
Eis in John 19:27 is used to express end, purpose, or goal, a frequent usage in John's Gospel (1:7, 4:14, 4:36, 6:9, 9:39, 12:7, 13:29, 18:37). In this usage eis translates into English as "for" or "as." That the disciple took Mary eis ta idia means only that he took her as his own.
We teach and believe that John here is a type of all disciples. We all take Christ's Mother by his gift as our own. She is the Mother of us all. This understanding is explained by John Paul II, quoting Augustine:
"Clearly, in the Greek text, the expression eis ta idia goes beyond the mere acceptance of Mary by the disciple in the sense of material lodging and hospitality in his house; it indicates rather a communion of life established between the two as a result of the words of the dying Christ; cf. Saint Augustine, In Joan. Evang. Tract. 119, 3: CCL 36, 659: 'He took her to himself, not into his own property, for he possessed nothing of his own, but among his own duties, which he attended to with dedication.'"(John Paul II, Mother of the Redeemer (Redemptoris Mater), note 130.)
In John 1:11-14, the apostle uses the phrase eis ta idia with eis in its local meaning of to or into: "He came to his own" (neuter). This is followed at once by the masculine hoi idioi--"his own people" (who refused to accept him.)
On his cross the order is reversed. He comes to hoi idioi, his own people, his beloved disciple and his mother, and they willingly accept him, and they do his will. Obedient to his command, they take each other as their own (ta idia). The disciple takes Mary as his Mother, and she takes him as her son.
The two of them on Calvary are types of the Church, paradigms of all Christ's disciples. She is our Mother. We are her sons and daughters. Paul calls Jesus "the firstborn among many brothers and sisters" (Rom. 8:29). Shared humanity and grace makes him our brother, and the Mother of our brother by nature and grace is our Mother too.
Missing the main point
CRI alleges, "Our life is contained in the life of the Son, and Mary is His mother [CRI's emphasis]. But this does not make her our mother in any way. . . . The birth that Jesus had through [sic] Mary was according to the flesh. Jesus derived His physical life through [sic] Mary, but that is not what He came to communicate to us."(Part 2, 28.)
But it is precisely by the human nature which he took from Mary that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). Because of her free cooperation, he has that body in which God became visible to us, and we could see his glory, full of grace and truth. From her he received the Body and Blood which are our Eucharistic food and drink, the pledge and guarantee of our eternal life (John 6:33ff, 50, 53, 57).
Jesus does not communicate himself to us in any other way than by what he is, God and man now inseparably united in one divine Person, Son of God and Mary's son. In and by both his natures, human and divine, the one Person Jesus is our Savior, and his human nature is from Mary.
Mary's motherhood unique
Now, let us ask a further question: Were Mary's birth-giving and motherhood purely physical? Among human beings, motherhood is higher than among other animals because it is a relation of one person, the mother, to another person, the child. Since human persons are free and intelligent beings animated by spiritual, immortal souls, there is a spiritual component in all human motherhood.
But Mary's motherhood is unique in that her child is a divine Person. The union of divine nature and human nature in Mary's womb was supernatural in origin--"the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (Luke 1:35).
Her preparation, too, for motherhood was supernatural, not merely physical. God had filled her utterly with his presence and his grace before the angel approached her (1:28). Her personal response to the angel's message was prompted by the God-given grace moving within her. That response was flawless. She was humble (1:48), full of faith (1:45), and obedient to God's call (1:38). These Bible truths about Mary led Augustine to exclaim that she conceived Christ in her mind and heart before she conceived him in her womb.
Mary can be spiritually our Mother and spiritually the Mother of the beloved disciple because she was spiritually--not merely physically--the Mother of Christ.
CRI anti-biblical
CRI denies that there is a biblical basis for saying that everything Jesus said on the cross has a redemptive significance. I repeat: Jesus' words on the cross to Mary and the disciple, says CRI, have no redemptive significance; therefore, they do not apply to all the redeemed. CRI here falters as a Bible-Christian organization, and many Protestants will have yet another reason for rejecting its article as a "Protestant response" speaking for all Protestants.
Second Timothy 3:15-16 says, "The sacred Scriptures are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All [repeat, all] Scripture is inspired by God and is useful...for training in righteousness."
We know that the writers of all four Gospels were selective in their choice of the materials available to them from oral tradition. John tells us clearly what his own principle of selection was. "Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of [his] disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name" (John 20:30- 31).
What this means is that every detail of John's Gospel has redemptive significance. The biblical basis for that should be abundantly clear--but apparently it is not, at least to CRI.
Ah, yes--but when?
We must now notice the position of the words in John 19:28: "After this, aware that everything was now finished...." What was finished? His redemptive sacrifice, for Jesus' death follows immediately, with his taking the sip of common wine (19:29) and with his last words, "It is finished."
But when was he aware that everything was now finished, that now was the time for him to go? Precisely when he had made provision for his Church in 19:27, by giving us his own Mother. Verses 18-24 portray the crucifixion with its attendant circumstances. Verse 30 records his death.
Between these two events of utmost redemptive significance are verses 25-27. What happens in them? A private little family arrangement? No, a redemptive act: the bestowal of his own Mother to be Mother of the household of God, his Church, and Mother of every disciple-member of his Church.
***You are correct that there is no commandment to seek Mary's intercession in order to gain salvation, merely to "behold" her as mother. Accordingly, one can be a good Catholic and never say a Hail Mary.***
I wish it were so simple, but that is not Catholic teaching...
St. Bonaventure says Mary is called "the Gate of Heaven because no one can enter that blessed Kingdom without passing through her."
St. John Damascene had no hesitancy in addressing our Lady in these words: "Pure and Immaculate Queen, save me, and deliver me from eternal damnation.
St. Bonaventure called Mary the salvation of those who invoke her.
Cassian tells us, without qualification, that "the whole salvation of the human race depends on the great favor and protection of Mary." Whoever is protected by Mary will be saved; whoever is not will be lost.
Richard of St. Lawrence had good reason for saying: " As a stone falls into the abyss when the ground goes from under it, so a person deprived of Mary's help falls first into sin and then into Hell."
St. Bonaventure says: "God will not save us without the intercession of Mary."
And again: " A child cannot live without a nurse to suckle it; neither can a person be saved without the protection of Mary."
And St. Germanus exclaims: "No one, O most holy Mary, can know God but through you. No one can be saved or redeemed but through you, O Mother of God. No one obtains mercy but through you, O full of all grace! . . .
Over against all this speculation we have the clear words of Scripture...
"if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved."
Rom 10
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