We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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The sensation that Evangelicalism flatly contradicted itself in its rush to escape Mary only increased when I noticed that the accounts in John, Mark, and Luke really didn’t support the strange hostility to Mary that we Mariaphobes brought to the text. Mary, for example, is not “rebuked” by Jesus at the Wedding at Cana. Rather, she is challenged by him. He knows what she wants when she says, “They have no wine.” She knows he knows what she wants: for him to reveal himself to Israel in the great sign of messianic bounty brimming with wine (Isaiah 25:6-8) that John will later call the “Marriage Feast of the Lamb” and Jesus himself repeatedly calls a Wedding Feast (cf. Revelation 19:6-9; Matthew 22:1-4). So far from rebuking her, Jesus does as she asks after he challenges her to display just the importunate prayer of trust he desires of his disciples (cf. Luke 18:1-8). She does not back down and Jesus does not expect her to do so. Instead, she tells the servants, as she still tells us, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). That pretty much summarizes the whole of her message to us ever since.
Similarly, despite the Evangelical determination to see Mary somehow joining in the mob that denounced Jesus as “having an unclean spirit” I, in fact, discovered that it is not Mary but “people” who were saying this (cf. Mark 3:21). Nothing in the text substantiates the claim that Mary doubted him, much less called him crazy or demon-possessed. What the text does suggest is that Mary was concerned for his safety and went along with the family to protect him, just as Paul’s disciples were likewise concerned that a mob not lay violent hands on him (Acts 19:30-31). That’s hardly a sin. Nor did Jesus’ response to the mention of his mother show that Jesus denied her honor. How could he, since it was his own Spirit who had commanded Israel via the Law of Moses to “Honor your father and mother” (Exodus 20:12). Indeed, this passage in Mark 3 that so many of us Evangelicals took as yet another swipe at Mary turned out to mean that if you have faith, you are a lot like Mary.
How did I know that? Paradoxically, because of the king of all allegedly anti-Marian passages, “As he said this, a woman in the crowd raised her voice and said to him, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts that you sucked!’ But he said, ‘Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it! (Luke 11:27-28).
Surely here, I had been taught, we have a direct rebuke to the notion that we should honor Jesus’ mother—with that telling word “rather” to emphasize the point. So it would seem. Yet, as I had studied Luke’s gospel I was confronted with the fact that if this passage meant what my Evangelical background insisted it must mean, then what were we to make of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth when she cries out, under the inspiration of the Spirit, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42)? She said exactly what the woman in the crowd had said! Indeed, even Mary herself, speaking under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit says, “Henceforth all generations will call me blessed” (Luke 1:48), not “Henceforth all generations will get chewed out by Jesus for calling me blessed.” Even God—whose angel called her Kecharitomene, Full of Grace, Highly Favored One—had no problem heaping praise on Mary.
Knowing that God cannot contradict himself therefore prompted me to question my Mariaphobic assumptions still more deeply. Is Jesus, the fruit of her womb, saying that the fruit of her womb is not blessed? That can’t be right. Was Jesus saying that Mary is not blessed? God, Gabriel, and Elizabeth certainly thought she was. So, for that matter, did Luke since he is, after all, the one who carefully recorded Gabriel’s, Elizabeth’s, and Mary’s words for future generations to pray and ponder. So what gives?
Jesus’ words to the woman in the crowd only constitute a rebuke of Marian devotion if Mary had not heard the word of God and kept it. But, in fact, Luke has taken great pains, more than any other gospel writer, to carefully detail that Mary did most emphatically hear the word of God and keep it. He knows what Mary’s response to the word of God was: “Let it be to me according to your word!” (Luke 1:38). Luke has already specifically told us that Mary “kept all these things in her heart” (Luke 2:51). In other words, Luke knows that Mary is the exemplar of the disciple who hears the word of God and keeps it. His point in recording Jesus’ remark in chapter 11 of his gospel is the same as his point in recording chapters 1 and 2: he wants us to understand that Mary was not blessed because she gave birth; she gave birth because she was blessed—blessed with the gift of faith to obey God with her “Yes.” In short, Luke is making the same point Jesus did when he said, “A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:18-20).
The fruit that Mary’s faith bore was Jesus Christ himself! Think about that. Paul, in a fit of pique at the thickheaded Galatians, once exhorted the Galatians to get with the program and start acting like disciples saved by faith in Christ and not by their own strength and power. He wrote, “My little children, with whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you!” (Galatians 4:19). That’s an image from pregnancy. He is demanding that the disciples bring the fetal Christ to birth in their lives and nurture him to maturity in their souls.
Now who is our role model for this image of Christ being formed in us by persistent faith and obedience to the word of God? There is only one person in history who could possibly be the template for such an image. In Mary, the Word became, not a metaphor, or an idea, or a spiritual concept, but flesh. It is precisely due to God’s grace working in her and giving her enormous faith and obedience to Jesus’ Father that Mary could do this. Paul’s image and Jesus’ exhortation to the woman in the crowd in Luke 11 both recall what Jesus said in Mark 3: that all who do his Father’s will are his mother. We therefore do well to praise her and the fruit of her womb, that we might imitate her and likewise enflesh the word of God in what we do, say, and think.
It is, therefore, for us to bear good fruit as Mary did by bringing into the world another saint conformed to Christ’s image, blessed to share in the fruit of her womb, Jesus, and through Baptism to enter into the mystery of her spiritual maternity which Jesus inaugurated when he made her our Mother too with the words “Behold your mother” (John 19:27). That saint is you and Mary is your mother and model of discipleship.
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