The Mother of God
23 December 2012
Advent 4C
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Said Mass
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
A dear friend of mine in
Hong Kong, the Rev. Will Newman, is a priest at one of the daughter churches of St.
John’s Cathedral. He tells the story of
sharing their very Anglican parish hall with the local Roman Catholic
congregation, in process of renovating their buildings, for their annual
Christmas Bazaar fund raisers: the
Anglicans would hold their event on a Friday evening and the Romans on
Saturday. The local hired laborers were
having a very difficult time keeping the decorations and sale material
separate—the English on the boxes was beyond some of these Cantonese-speaking
laborers, and they had no clear idea of how to keep the Roman and Anglican
materials distinguished, let alone separated.
Will tried to explain when the foreman suddenly got a look of
recognition in his eyes. “Oh,” he said,
“you are the boy church and they are the girl church.” Will, befuddled, asked what he meant. The foreman then confidently pointed to a
small painting of Jesus in the Protestant jumble, and then to a statue of the
Blessed Virgin in the Roman one. “Boy
church, Girl Church, See?” “Yes, yes,”
said Will, sure that the man had understood the distinction between the two traditions, while only dimly aware of
the differences. For the sake of the task at hand, he decided
not to explain that the Romans also had Jesus and the Anglicans, the Blessed
Virgin.
The radical Reformation
was highly critical of Catholic devotion to the Blessed Virgin. They called it worship and prayers rather
than devotion and requests for intercession, and said it was idolatrous. As a result, they removed any ceremonial
honoring of the Mother of Our Lord from their worship. Because of this, many people today think that
only Roman Catholics honor her as the Mother of God. But that just isn’t so.
Today, the fourth Sunday
of Advent and the Last Sunday of Advent before Christmas, is Mary Sunday. The Lectionary Readings are about the
Incarnation of our Lord, and in these stories, Mary plays a leading role.
The early undivided Church
defined the matter clearly for all who desire to follow in the tradition and
fellowship of the early bishops, successors to the apostles. The Councils of Ephesus (431 C.E.) and
Calcedon (451 C.E.) in the early fifth century both recommended referring to
the Mother of Jesus as the Theotokos,
“the one who gave birth to the one who is God,” that is, the One who gave birth
to God Made Flesh, the Incarnate God.
They defined this matter
in this way in reaction to a minority group of bishops who felt it was wrong to
call Mary the God-bearer. They preferred
to call her the Christ-bearer, arguing that God is eternal, outside of time and
space, without parent or origin. But
the vast majority of the bishops determined that understanding Mary as the Mother just of a human part of Jesus rather than of his whole being and person
misunderstood the nature of Christ so profoundly as to be unorthodox and
heretical. Jesus was not a 50%-50%
hybrid of Divinity and Humanity, but was both 100% human and 100% God. Because
these two natures were perfectly united in the one person of Jesus, it was only
right that Mary be referred to not only as Mother of the Man Jesus, but also as
Mother of God Incarnate. They never had any intention of declaring that
Mary was the Mother of God from eternity in the sense that the Father begot the
Son from before all time. Mary was the
Mother of the Son, not of the Father.
But the Son was true God from true God, and so the Blessed Virgin was
the Mother of God. The defeated bishops
separated themselves from the main body of Church, ultimately fled the
territory of the Roman Empire and went East.
Missionaries from the Great Church of the East they founded were those who
took the Gospel to Persia, India, and ultimately, China, in the fifth through the seventh centuries.
But the main body of the
Church remained firm in its devotion to a Jesus who was both true God and true
Man, and to a Mary who was the one who bore God. As a result, Roman Catholic, Eastern
Orthodox, Old Catholic, Eastern Uniate, Lutheran, and Anglican traditions all
retain the usage of the term “Mother of God,” or “God-bearer.”
Such devotion was rooted in scripture: the Gospel of John portrays Jesus on the cross giving charge of his mother to the ideal disciple, and he says that she is our mother. Most of the words of the great Marian devotional prayer of the West, the Ave Maria, come from the New Testament, most of them from the infancy story in the Gospel of Luke.
Such devotion was rooted in scripture: the Gospel of John portrays Jesus on the cross giving charge of his mother to the ideal disciple, and he says that she is our mother. Most of the words of the great Marian devotional prayer of the West, the Ave Maria, come from the New Testament, most of them from the infancy story in the Gospel of Luke.
Listen to the following
snippet of a sermon on the Magnificat by Martin Luther:
"For He that is mighty hath done great things for me, and
Holy is His Name." (Luke 1:49)The "great things" are nothing less than that she became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed upon her as pass [human] understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of [hu]mankind, among whom she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in Heaven, and such a child.She herself is unable to find a name for this work, it is too exceedingly great; all she can do is break out in the fervent cry: "They are great things," impossible to describe or define. Hence [we] have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God.No one can say anything greater of her or to her, [even with] ... as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea. It needs to be pondered in the heart, what it means to be the Mother of God.[Luther's Works, Vol. 21, p. 326, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Concordia Publishing House, 1956.]
Mary is both
representative of our common humanity and an exceptional model surpassing all
others in her election by God and her acceptance of God’s plans.
C.S. Lewis described the
process of God’s salvation history in these terms:
“We [moderns] do not at all like the idea of a "chosen people". Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about [humanity]. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.”
In
the reading from Luke today, we have the Blessed Virgin’s great song of praise
to God, the Magnificat.
It is bold and brave talk, about a God who overturns society, overthrows governments, and turns things on their head.
Mary here is a perfect example for us on how to talk about God at work in our own lives.
Some may balk at this idea, thinking that it is okay for a biblical figure to talk about God active in her life in terms similar to the great saving acts of God in the history of Israel, but a little presumptuous for us to do so today.
But a couple of things in Mary’s song tells us how right it is for us to sing it along with her. They are the reason we regularly recite the Magnificat in our daily Evening Prayer Services.
Mary doesn’t speak about her own experience, importance, and future alone. She talks also about God lifting up “the lowly,” and “the hungry.” She connects her experience of God uplifting her with God’s larger intentions for all. God’s actions are not private treasures that separate us from others. They are great signs of God’s love that connect us together. Likewise, she talks about her experience of God in the broad salvation history of her people, and not in exclusive terms of “God acted here, now, and nowhere else.”
We should avoid and be very suspicious of claims about God’s actions in the present that isolate one person or group and set them apart from others, or that try to tell all the inside story on detailed events in the present and the future. Theology that pretends to tell us what God is doing right here and right now, and that claims definitive knowledge of what will happen in the future is manipulative theology. We have heard a lot of this kind of thing recently: Hurricane Sandy was God’s punishment for abandoning his way, the horrors in Connecticut happened because we do not having organized public prayers in state-funded schools, etc. This is just bad theology.
Acknowledging God’s love and mercy to us in terms that bring us together and do not drive us apart, affirming hope that God will be true to God's promises and love in the future as in the past, this is good theology indeed.
When all is said and done, the Blessed Virgin’s song of praise remains outrageous and bold. It is the ultimate Advent hymn, rejecting the world as it is, hoping for a turning of the tables, and confident that God has made and will make all things new. It says things are going to get better, not worse. It calls us to pray and sing along with this young Hebrew girl at her prayers, this lowly handmaiden chosen to as the Glorious and Blessed Mother of God. Let our souls magnify the Lord, for he has done great things for us.
In the name of Christ, Amen.
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