And Blessed is the Fruit of Thy Womb, Jesus (Part 2)

We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.

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When I was an Evangelical, I began to notice that the biblical arguments supporting our picture of things were varied and not infrequently flatly contradictory, but they tended to agree that Mary was, at best, basically a crummy disciple and somebody we would be well advised not to imitate, let alone venerate. So, for instance, back in my Evangelical days we typically took it for granted that Jesus “rebuked” his mother at the Wedding at Cana (cf. John 2:1-11) for her too-worldly enthusiasm for him as Messiah:

Catholicism says that our Lord’s mother was immaculate, but if this were true she could not have incurred our Lord’s rebuke… Catholicism teaches that Mary’s intercession is recognized by Christ. But this is the only instance on record of such intercession, and though it was addressed to Christ while in the flesh and was concerning a purely temporal matter, it was promptly rebuked….Our Lord’s answer indicates that Mary’s request had in it more than a desire for the gift of wine. What she principally wanted was to have Jesus manifest himself as Messiah.[1]

Here, the charge is that Mary was so bursting with a sort of crass worldly faith in Jesus that she wanted to boss him around and impress the neighbors with “My Son the Messiah.” On this accounting, Jesus had to tell her to pipe down with her fleshly demands for miraculous stunts and distance himself from her, something he was pretty much always trying to do in the Evangelical picture of their relationship.

However, in the next breath, we would also assert that Mary hardly had any faith in Jesus and that Jesus also rebuked her for that. We usually did that by recourse to this famous scene from the gospels:

Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for people were saying, “He is beside himself.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Be-elzebul, and by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” And he called them to him, and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man; then indeed he may plunder his house.

“Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”–for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

And his mother and his brethren came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brethren are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brethren?” And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brethren! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother.” (Mark 3:19-35)

Relying on this scene, I was frequently informed that Mary had virtually no faith in Jesus. As one typical “Bible teacher” puts it:

Mary was not VERY spiritual. She was a believer in God. She did accept God’s will for her life, to be the mother of Jesus on His human side. But she was not the intensely holy and very spiritual person we are often led to believe. For example, here in Mark 3:21 we see her belief about Jesus that led her to take her other sons to go “take charge of Him” and bring Him home….

“He is out of His mind.” Mary believed Jesus to be a bit crazy, and that explained his traveling around the country side preaching, and taking on disciples, etc. Is this a spiritual attitude toward Jesus? I think it rather reveals a certain lack of faith, during these early stages of Jesus’ ministry.[2]

So “during the early stages of Jesus’ ministry”, Mary simultaneously believed in Jesus as the Messiah of God way too much and Jesus “rebuked” her for that, according to the Evangelical reading of the Miracle at Cana, and yet she also rejected Jesus as the Messiah and joined in the crowd and the Pharisees’ jeering at him as a demon-possessed lunatic, (Mark 3:21; 30). So, again, Jesus “rebuked” this (allegedly) well-nigh faithless woman and publicly shamed her by counting any random disciple as more important than her. The one constant in both these Evangelical tellings of the gospel was that Jesus wanted as little to do with Mary as possible and took almost any occasion as a chance to diss her.

This account of things began to look pretty dodgy to me. How could she simultaneously have a too-zealous faith in Jesus as Messiah while also thinking him possessed by an unclean spirit?  I recalled Chesterton’s warning that “If you hear a thing being accused of being too tall and too short, too red and too green, too bad in one way and too bad also in the opposite way, then you may be sure that it is very good.”[3] I again began to realize that “Mary as worldly Jewish stage mother pushing her complaining and reluctant Son on to the stage of history” and “Mary joining in the denunciation of Jesus as a demon-possessed lunatic” were precisely the sort of mutually contradictory charges that, in fact, said much more about Evangelical jitters about and alienation from Mary than they said about the scriptural portrayal of the Blessed Virgin.

[1] Available online at http://christianbookshelf.org/mcgarvey/the_four-fold_gospel/xxii_jesus_works_his_first.htm as of March 8, 2011.

[2] Available online at http://www.waysidechurch.org/mark/mark11.htm as of March 8, 2011.

[3] G.K. Chesterton, “The Macbeths” in The Spice of Life. Available online at http://wikilivres.info/wiki/The_Spice_of_Life_and_Other_Essays/The_Macbeths as of March 8, 2011.