Who Was Mary?
©
Rev. Eamon R. Carroll, O. Carm.
In my half-century of preaching and teaching, I have come to
realize there are two topics Catholic audiences are always eager
to hear. One is the Eucharist, the inexhaustible riches of the
Mass; the other is the Virgin Mary, the holy Mother of Jesus, Son
of God, and our spiritual mother. To my delight and surprise, I find
a similar hunger to hear about the holy Virgin in ecumenical
gatherings. Our inquiry concerns Mary of the New Testament,
specifically the Gospels. All-important for understanding the
Virgin Mary is the meaning of the word "Gospel." The word is
short for "Godspell," God's good news, glad tiding of salvation,
evangels, a type of literature different from all other writings.
No more for Mary than for Jesus, her Son, were the evangelists
concerned to give us complete life stories.
After their master's death and resurrection, his
followers celebrated his memory, especially in liturgy, baptism
and the Eucharist. They focused less on precise biographical
details of our Lord's life and more on his mission and message,
not simply the "life of Jesus," but Jesus as himself the "Word of
life."
Gradually, these first Christians began to write
down their recollections and understanding of who Jesus was and
why he came. This began with the letters of St. Paul in the 50's.
Subsequently, after the year A.D. 70, came the Gospels of Mark,
Matthew, Luke and John.
Given the paucity of details about the life of Mary,
the lack of information about her childhood and old age and the
comparative rarity of her appearances in the public life of
Jesus, is it beside the point to talk about her life and times?
Quite the contrary is true. There is an
extraordinary presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in Christian
memories from the very start. The Gospels say more about the
Virgin Mary than about any other woman, She is part of the "good
news" that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Mary belongs to the Church from the beginning.
From the standpoint of a full story of Mary's life,
there are admittedly big gaps, which pious authors as early as
the second century attempted to fill with fanciful stories of
childhood. What we know for certain is that the maiden of
Nazareth came from a devout Jewish family. Elizabeth, her
cousin, and Zachary were "upright in the sight of God" (Luke
1:6). Her husband, Joseph, was "an upright man" (Matthew 1:19).
Every year the holy family went to Jerusalem for the feast of
Passover (Luke 2:41).
What more does the Bible tell us about the meaning
and mystery of Mary? The oldest reference is St. Paul's letter
to the Christians of Galatia, A.D. 54/55: "When the completion of
time came, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born a subject of
Law, to redeem the subjects of the Law, so that we could receive
adoption as sons."
The pattern was set: Jesus Christ, Son of God,
became the Son of Mary. Some centuries later, A.D. 431, in
Ephesus, where Paul had also preached, a great ecumenical council
would trumpet the title Mother of God, "Theotokos." This was a
magnificent defense of the central truth that the Son of God,
second person in the Holy Trinity, has, indeed, entered our human
world as the true Son of Mary, "for us and for our salvation."
The oldest Gospel, Mark, describes Jesus by his
townsfolk as "the carpenter, the Son of Mary" (Mark 6:3). Unlike
Matthew and Luke, Mark has no nativity story, and virtually no
other reference to Mary, apart from a somewhat offhand mention in
the company of relatives of Jesus (Mark 3:31-35), where her Son
explains that true relationship to himself consists in "doing the
will of God."
If Mark's slight mention of Mary is a "silhouette,"
St. Matthew offers us a "sketch" of the Gospel image of Mary,
Mother of the promised Messiah. The Magi find the "infant king of
the Jews" ... "with Mary his mother."
Advised by the angel of the Lord, Joseph takes "the
child and his mother" to Egypt to escape the murderous soldiers,
and , at Herod's death, takes "the child and his mother" back to
the land of Israel. Mary, of clearly Jewish background, is also a
promise to the Gentiles, believing , as Abraham did, in God's
promise of salvation.
St. Luke gives us a wonderfully full "Gospel
portrait" of the Virgin Mother of Jesus, present at capital
stages in her Son's life--conception, birth, infancy, childhood
and manhood. The Virgin of Nazareth, whose name is Mary,
receives God's invitation through the message of the angel--the
"angelic salutation," which begins the familiar prayer of the
"Hail Mary."
In Mary's visit to her cousin, Elizabeth, who is unexpectedly
pregnant with John the Baptist, we hear
Elizabeth's praise of Mary's motherhood in faith, and her words
are incorporated in our "Hail Mary," known by all the world as
the "Ave Maria" and sung in countless settings.
When Jesus is twelve years old, he strays from the
company of Joseph and Mary on the way home from the Passover
pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Mary expresses their anguish to hear her Son's
mysterious words about being in his Father's house. Then the
certain falls, and Mary shares with Jesus the silence of the long
years in Nazareth until her Son begins his public ministry as he
preaches about the kingdom of God.
At the end of her beloved Son's death, terrible
passion and atrocious death, then his glorious resurrection and
ascension, St. Luke tells us in the Acts of the Apostles that the
Mother of Jesus was in the upper room with fearful apostles
awaiting the outpouring of the Pentecostal Spirit. Hers was an
extraordinarily significant presence to the fledgling Church.
The apostles were new shepherds (pastors) of
Christ's Church.
The Mother of Jesus is in their midst, forgiving and
reconciling the disciples (with Peter at their head) after their
disgraceful desertion of their master in his agony and death.
Last of the Gospels, St. John sees Mary as a
"remembering mother." The "Mother of Jesus" (the only name he
gives her) is found at the start of her Son's ministry, the
wedding feast of Cana, the first sign by which his followers come
to have faith in him.
At the foot of her Son's cross on Calvary, Mary is
present doubly as Mother--Mother of the Crucified One and Mother
of the Beloved Disciple, representing all the followers of
Christ. She is the bearer of tradition, witness before all
others of who Jesus is, how he died and the effects of his
sacrificial death.
In 1995, the University of South Carolina Press
published Mary: Glimpses of the Mother of Jesus, a book written
by the Protestant scripture scholar Beverly Roverts Gaventa,
Ph.D., a professor at Princeton University.
Gaventa uses literary analysis to explore the
picture of Mary. Of New Testament writings she limits herself to
the narratives in Luke, Matthew and John and draws up her
characterization of the Virgin Mary by putting to her sources
such questions as these: What does Mary say and do? How do
others speak to her about her? In what ways does she change as
the story develops?
Gaventa's book is a fascinating harvest of
"glimpses," such as those of Luke's double reference to Mary's
pondering/questioning of the mystery of her Son, the Redeemer as
Messiah and Savior. Further, as Gaventa said at a Princeton
ecumenical meeting, "When poor imperiled Christians turn to Mary
as the Mother of Sorrows, consciously or not, they touch a thread
in Matthew's Gospel." And on that same occasion, following the
lead of St. Luke: "if one can say that Mary is a disciple, then
is it not a Protestant sort of thing to affirm that Mary is ,
symbolically speaking, the Mother of Disciples, even the Mother
of Believers?"
A final note: It strikes me that the most
significant approach to Mary in the Church's current teaching is
the stress on her ordinary life as the woman of faith and the
great model of "obedient faith."
St. Therese of the Child Jesus (d. 1897) was named a
doctor of the universal Church in October 1997. This was based
on her writings, which include her teaching on Mary as walking in
the luminous darkness of faith.
I close with these words from St. Therese, that
obscure, cloistered Carmelite nun in Normandy: "Why say, with
reference to the aged Simeon's prophetic words, that the blessed
Virgin had the passion of Jesus constantly before her mind from
that moment onward? 'And a sword will pierce through your soul
also,' the old man said. It wasn't for the present, you see...it
was a general prediction for the future. She lived by faith just
like ourselves, giving proof of this from the Gospel, where we
read: 'And they did not understand the words which he spoke to
them'."
© Fr. Eamon R. Carroll, O.
Carm., is professor of theology at Loyola University Chicago, a
professor at the International Marian Research Institute, and a
member of the Mariological Society of America.
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