Mary, mother of Jesus, is a name that cannot be spoken without eliciting a response inside the person who hears it. When I consider how important a figure she is in Christianity - and how her goodness is beyond doubt even among non-Christians - I find it strange that some Christians react to her name in ways that are, shall we say, less than enthusiastic.
Like most Gen X Americans, especially those of us who grew up in the southeastern United States, most of my religious rearing took place in what you would call Protestant settings. As the grandson of a Baptist preacher who lived until I was 37, I was no stranger to church talk and biblical interpretation growing up, however anti-Catholicism was not part of the cultural river in which my canoe was rowed. Sure, I heard there were folks out there somewhere who thought Catholics practiced idolatry and relegated Jesus to Mary, but I never encountered them so I assumed they must be a tiny fringe.
Although the very young me didn't know anyone who asked Mary for intercession, the very young me also didn't know anyone who considered it sacrilege for others to do so. I didn't hear songs being sung about her, but I also didn't hear anything less than positive being said about her.
When I got older and finally (is that the right word?) witnessed cat fights between Protestants and Catholics over the subject of Mary, the spectacle struck me as discordant with everything I knew to be true about Christ and his mother... and as someone who is for all intents and purposes a Protestant, at least in the way that term is currently used, I cringed over the fact that these cat fights always seemed to get started by boorish Protestants behaving insufferably.
What brings me to my keyboard now is, in general, a desire to look at Mary without looking through partisan filters... and in particular, a sense of obligation to consider Catholic teachings about her without presupposing they are wrong. This will obviously take more than one post, so for today I'll go with the basics.
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It should go without saying that Mary plays a unique and divinely ordained role in history that warrants heightened regard from us.
Out of all the women he would ever create, God chose her to bear his incarnate self and care for him when he was dependent. Let's not forget that Jesus was mortal when he was on Earth (he did die, after all) and needed food, rest, shelter, etc. just like the rest of us. That Mary was given the role of incubating, nursing, and raising him speaks volumes.
The Bible itself says "all generations will call (Mary) blessed" (Luke 1:48) and depicts that as a good thing, so you can't blame Catholics for feeling put off when Protestants accuse them of downgrading God by honoring her.
Flip backwards and you will see that verse 41 says "when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb," after which verse 44 records Elizabeth telling Mary "when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy."
My bank account would be significantly fatter if I had a dollar for every time I've heard someone claim John the Baptist leaped inside Elizabeth's womb because he felt the presence of Jesus enter the house. That is certainly a reasonable inference to make, however it is not what the text says: Luke is abundantly clear that Mary's voice is what precipitated the rejoicing of pregnant Elizabeth and in utero John.
The Gospel of Matthew informs us that when Jesus was a toddler, his family fled to Egypt to escape the death squads Herod sent to kill "all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or younger." Note that what it actually says is "an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, 'Rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt...And he rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt" (2:13-14).
Glance forward several verses and you read that "when Herod died, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, saying, 'Rise, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who sought the child's life are dead.' And he rose and took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel" (2:19-21).
The instructions from Heaven are explicitly about Jesus and Mary. The angel does not charge Joseph and Mary with transporting and protecting Jesus, but rather charges Joseph with transporting and protecting Jesus and Mary. The child is the savior, not the mother, yet they are presented as a kind of package deal. We shouldn't just shrug this off. After all, the biblical authors came from a culture different than ours and neither they nor their audience were familiar with our proclivity for throwaway words.
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It's unclear whether Augustine really said "the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New," but serious Christians all agree with that concept: It's how we link the Old and New Testaments together as Scripture, how we see Old Testament foreshadowings of Christ, and, let's be honest, it's a foundation stone upon which Christianity itself depends.
With that in mind, consider some of the earliest words in the Bible, spoken by God to the serpent after the latter deceived Adam and Eve into falling: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel" (Genesis 3:15).
Here we see the package deal again. Actually not again, but for the first time and practically right out of the gate. There are many layers of interpretation that can be applied to Genesis 3:15 and it would take ages to go through them all, so I won't tackle it right now, but I will say this: It requires very adventurous reading to fail to perceive the figures of Jesus and Mary in this early antediluvian passage.
Note: The photo at the beginning of this post was taken in front of St. Mary Catholic Church in Tampa, Florida.
