MARY,
THE MOTHER OF JESUS: A LETTER TO AN ENQUIRER
Mary
was the first Christian, the first to believe in Jesus, Son of God.
When the angel came to announce to her that she was to be the
mother of the Saviour, he greeted her as one of who was highly favoured
by God and went on to tell her that she would conceive and bear a son
and she was to name him Jesus. He
would be great and be called Son of the Most High.
The Lord God would give him the throne of his ancestor, David,
and he would reign in the House of Jacob forever.
When Mary asked how she could be a mother as she was a virgin,
the angel told her that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her
and therefore the one who was born of her would be called ‘Son
of God’. All that was an extraordinary thing to be asked to believe,
and Mary accepted it and submitted hersilf totally to God in the words
‘I am the handmaid of the Lord; let what you have said be done to
me’ (Luke 1:26-29). At
that moment she became Mother of Jesus and his first disciple.
She accepted the heart of the Christian Faith when she gave her
consent to the angel’s message. Forty
years later, St. Paul was commissioned by God to preach the gospel and
he tells us what that gospel is. At
the beginning of his letter to the Romans he says that the Good News,
the Gospel, that is the preaching, is about the Son of God who is a
descent of David. He says
it is about Jesus Christ, our Lord, who in the order of the Spirit, the
Spirit of holiness that was in him, was proclaimed Son of God.
That is exactly the message that Mary accepted at the
Annunciation. If Paul says you have to believe this to be a Christian, Mary
believed it at the very moment that she conceived Jesus.
She walked in that faith all through her life. After
the Annunciation Mary went to visit her cousin, Elizabeth.
She went in charity to help an older woman who was expecting a
baby. That baby, as you
know, came to be know as St. John the Baptist.
But our interest now is in the meeting of these two women.
You can read about it in Luke 1:39 ff.
Elizabeth blesses Mary and the child in her womb.
She blesses Mary also for her faith.
Mary, in turn, blesses God for his goodness to her, to the world
and to his people of Israel. Her whole life is full of praise of God and of gratitude to
him. If only we cold follow that example, she would save us from selfish
and self-seeking prayer.
FINDING
GOD’S WILL
There
is a solid basis for our Catholic love of Mary.
She served God totally and gave her whole life to him.
When she made that decision to accept the angel’s message and
become the Mother of God, she stood alone.
There was nobody else there.
You know that when we make big decisions about our lives, we are
often alone. For example,
when a person is in love
and contemplates marriage, nobody can really advise them; they have to
look in themselves and say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.
When a boy wants to become a priest, it is again a decision he
must make alone with God. Mary made her decision and stood by it her
whole life. She accepted
the Word of God and in accepting it, became the Mother of the Saviour. She was faithful to the end.
Mary received only one direct revelation from God.
At the moment of the Annunciation, God spoke to her through his
angel, Gabriel. The rest of
her life she had to live on that. Like
all of us, she had to find God’s will in the signs of the time.
It was a decree of Caesar Augustus that made her go to Bethlehem
where Jesus was born. It
was the intuition of Joseph after his dream that they fly to Egypt.
The statements of Simeon when she presented the child, Jesus, in
the Temple, warned her of suffering.
On many other occasions she learnt the will of God in the
ordinary events of her life. She
always followed the holy will. She
could have not understood what was going on.
Nobody really would be able to understand that the Messiah, the
son of God, would lead the simple life that Jesus led and yet save the
world by suffering and death. Like
her, we must go on in prayer, accepting the will of God and knowing that
it is through the ordinary events of life that God guides us.
It is not good that people constantly seek special revelation
from God. The Church is there to guide us, the Scriptures are there to
guide us and the events of life guide us.
That is how Mary lived. She
listened to the word of God in the Scriptures, her Jewish Faith helped
her and she saw God’s will in the events of life.
We go on living our Catholic Faith prayerfully and do not expect
any special messages from God. God’s
will can be obscure but he has given us his Holy Spirit in the
Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation to guide us and in our prayers we
humbly accept that guidance.
PRAYER
We
don’t know much that Mary said. The ‘Magnificat’ (Luke 1:46-55) is the longest statement
attributed to her in the whole of the Gospels.
For the rest, her first spoken words are a question: ‘But how
can this come about since I am a virgin?’ ( Luke 1:34).
Apart from her few words with Elizabeth and her words to Jesus at
Cana in Galilee where she tells him of the needs of the young married
couple, she remains silent in the Gospels.
But she is an example to all of us to how we should pray. When the shepherds came to honor the Infant Jesus in
Bethlehem, Luke tells us simply that Mary didn’t understand what it
was all about but ‘she treasured all these things and pondered them in
her heart’(Luke 2:19). We
are told exactly the same thing in verse 51 of the same chapter when
Luke tells us that Mary didn’t understand what happened during the
loss the Child of Jesus in the Temple. However, she pondered God’s extraordinary ways.
We would say she prayed about it and asked him to help her to
understand. This is a good
example of prayer for all of us. Prayer
doesn’t have to be stilted and formal. Prayer is meditating on the whole of life, and as we think
about it and commend it to God, we ask him to help us to understand.
We never understand everything about our Faith and anyone may
have questions and difficulties. We don’t see why certain things happen to us in life.
That is why we bring them to God in prayer- so that he may
enlighten our minds and help us. Pondering in the heart in love with God is a very good
prayer. Prayer has been
defined by someone as ‘Thinking lovingly of God.’ We think of God
when we think of the life he has given us and when we commend to him the
things that happen to us.
A
CHALLENGE FOR YOU
Down
the ages, various forms of private prayer have been recommended to us by
saints and spiritual writers. In some ways they always flow from the official liturgical
prayer of the Church. The
Church’s liturgy of the Mass, the Sacraments and the Divine Office are
the great acts of worship offered to God.
But each of us also needs to give time to God in private prayer
as Mary did. We too must
‘ treasure God’s revelation to us and ponder it in our hearts.’
One way of doing this is through the Rosary.
I know Catholics who find it a difficult prayer because their
mind wanders. That should
not stop you from trying to pray it.
Your effort and the time you give to God are very important.
The constant repetition of the Hail Mary can soothe and quiet the
mind and allow you to think of the mysteries celebrated in each decade.
In this way you meditate with Mary on the various incidents in
the life of Christ. She
will help you to deepen you understanding of her Son.
You can , of course, be a good and a holy Christian even if you
never say the Rosary. It is
however foolish for any of us, priest or lay person, to give up the
Rosary unless we put something else in its place in our prayer life.
Keep trying for a little while and then make a decision about the
Rosary that is not motivated by any laziness or selfishness.
SHE
HELPS OUR UNDERSTANDING
Jesus’
love for Mary can never be doubted.
As his mother, she cared for him, taught him his prayers and
guided him as a Jewish child, boy and young man.
The Gospel tells us that he was subject to her and to Joseph.
After his foster father’s death he must have provided for the
house. Mark says quite clearly that Jesus was known as a carpenter
and so followed in the footsteps of Joseph (6.3).
It was his trade until he set out as a preacher of God’s world
at the age of 30. He wished
to provided for Mary even after his death.
He thought of her as he lay dying on the Cross when he asked the
Beloved Disciple to care for her.
But
we cannot expect the relationship of God made man with his mother to be
a simple one. He was like
us in all things except sin’. Yet
he was Christ, Son of the living God while he loved and obeyed his
mother during those years at Nazareth, she could not have understood the
mystery of her son. The
church struggled in the first centuries of Christianity to express its
faith in Jesus. When in the
year 431 the bishops in the Council of Ephesus defined the Church'’
teaching about Jesus as God and man, it did so by declaring Mary to be
theotokos'’ that is Mother of God.
The Church has always realized that to get our teaching right
about Jesus we need also to be right about Mary.
She is one of the keys to the understanding of the Incarnation.
The
closeness, and yet the distance from her son, marked Mary’s life.
We see it in the finding in the Temple when Jesus was twelve
years old. Mary talked
about the distress Joseph and she felt ad said Your father and I have
been anxiously searching for you. Jesus
replied “Did you not know that I had to be busy with my Father’s
affairs?” (Luke 2:49). He
makes it clear that God alone was his Father-family ties are not
paramount. He loved Mary as
his mother but it was her faith that was the tie and the relationship
that bound her above all to Jesus.
Years later when a woman in the crowd cried out “Blessed is the
womb that bore you”, Jesus replied “Still happier are those that
hear the word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:27, 28).
Mary’s
discipleship started at the Annunciation as we have seen and continued
right into the early Church. She is the only character we can follow in the gospels from
the birth of Jesus, through his hidden and public life, his crucifixion,
and after the Resurrection and Ascension, with the Church “Persevering
in prayer” (Acts 1:14) in the upper room at Pentecost.
The faithful virgin! When
Mary makes her one appearance in the public life of Jesus in the
Synoptic gospels the relationship of faith and discipleship is stressed
always. Mark has it in a
rather harsh form. Matthew
is more mellow and Luke has it as unbounded praise of Mary.
In Matthew Jesus says, pointing to his disciples, “Here are my
mother and my brothers. Anyone
who does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, sister and
mother’ (12:49). The
gospels never lose this key idea. Faith
in Jesus is what binds us all, including Mary to him.
Of course her motherhood gives her immense dignity but it is her
faith that makes her soul glorify the Lord.
We too can share in her relationship with Christ if we are people
of faith and have love and trust in God.
WITH
CHRIST IN HEAVEN
Mary,
at the end of her life, was taken body and soul into Heaven.
We know that Christians accepted this from as early as the fourth
century. Nowadays most Christians throughout the world celebrate the
Feast of the Assumption, when Mary was taken body and soul into Heaven.
It seems to be a necessary conclusion to a life that began free
from all taint of sin and then was lived as both mother and disciple of
Jesus Christ, the Savior. The
preface of the Mass for the Assumption gives us the point of God’s
action in doing this. It
says “The Virgin Mother of God was taken up into Heaven to be the
beginning and the pattern of the Church in its perfection.”
It is right that she who first believed in Jesus should be the
first to be brought to perfection.
After all, we who die in the friendship of God will also be taken
body and should into Heaven on the Last Day.
We all believe in “The resurrection of the body and life
everlasting as we express it in the Creed.
Mary, the sinless Mother of God, has gone before us as the first
believer. She too is a
member of the Church redeemed by Christ, but the Father did not allow
decay to touch her body for she gave birth to the Lord of Life.
She is the hope as well as the mother of the Church.
She is the immaculate one conceived without sin.
She is the one who has now attained the fullness of glory with
God. We thank God for these gifts and are happy to tell people
about her. Many of our
ecumenical friends do not resent or reject her.
We have a wonderful tradition of love and respect for Mary that
we wish to share with others. This
devotion to Mary is an enrichment of any Christian life.
-by
Bishop Kevin O’Brien, Bishop of Ard Carna
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