We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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In the gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel tells Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35).
Some critics of Marian devotion look at this and say, “Notice that it is Jesus, not Mary, whom the angel calls ‘holy’. But Catholics, with their misplaced emphasis, instead pray ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God.’ In their ignorance of scripture, they do not realize the God alone is holy!”
The problem with this sort of statement is that it nicely illustrates Josh Billings’ old saying, “The trouble with people is not that they don’t know, but that they know so much that ain’t so.” The notion that God alone is holy is one of those things that people know that ain’t so.
To be sure, both Catholic and biblical language sometimes seems to suggest that God alone is holy. For instance, in the Gloria we are taught to pray “For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. Amen.”[1] But this does not mean the same thing as “You alone are holy.” It means “You alone are God, the Holy One.” How do we know? Because, scripture is quite emphatic that there are lots of things and people that are “holy to the Lord.” So, for instance, Israel is commanded to keep the Sabbath holy (Exodus 20:8). They themselves are called “holy to the Lord” in Deuteronomy 7:6 and the sundry paraphernalia of their worship, the temple vessels, altars, offerings, and priestly garments, for instance, are likewise called holy. Nor does this cease in the New Testament, for Peter succinctly commands us, “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance, but as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; since it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:14-16)
That’s because to be holy does not mean “to be God” but “to be set apart.” It is, like many sacred things, related to an ordinary human tendency and then exalted by grace. In this case, it is the tendency to set things apart that are precious to us. We don’t use a wedding dress to wrap a fish in, or toss our late father’s watch in the trash even though it’s broken, or treat the sacred space and time of a funeral as an occasion to loudly shoot the breeze about baseball in the back pew. We hallow all sorts of things, places, people, dates, and times. God does it too when he sets apart certain people, places, times and things to reveal himself to us.
It is telling that the command to be holy comes from a book (Leviticus 11:44) that is partly concerned with moral behavior, but primarily concerned with prescriptions for cultic rites and prohibitions against various forms of ritual uncleanness. Here again, we see in Israel’s conflation of moral precepts and ritual rules that very common phenomenon in antiquity to blur the lines or, more precisely, not to have yet created the lines between things that would subsequently get teased apart. So just as pagan thinkers like the Magi have not yet made clear category distinctions between what we will later call “magic,” “science,” “religion,” “astronomy,” and “astrology,” so the book of Leviticus likewise has no sharp distinctions between what we now call “ritual impurity” and what we now call “moral impurity.” The ancient Israelite saw no sharp distinction between eating pork and, say, blaspheming God or robbing an old man. All were regarded as acts that “defile.” But what “defile” meant had not yet been ironed out in the earliest parts of the Old Testament.[2]
Similarly, when things or people are called “holy” in remote antiquity the distinction between the ritual and moral implications of this are not worked out too clearly either. What is emphasized is that the person has been ritually set apart by God for a particular purpose. But it does not necessarily follow that the one ritually set apart is a particularly saintly person (the story of Samson in Judges 13-16 is illustrative of this) and it may even be that the one ritually set apart turns out to be a scoundrel. This, for instance, is what governs the, by modern standards, odd behavior of David when he is pursued by the paranoid and murderous King Saul in 1 Samuel. David has a number of chances to kill his persecutor fair and square but refuses to do so. Why? Because, as he puts it, “I would not harm the Lord’s anointed” (1 Samuel 26:23). The holiness of Saul is due, not to his saintly goodness, but to the fact that he was ritually set apart for the service of God as king and David feels himself bound to honor that despite Saul’s murderous campaign against him.
Eventually, though, the connection of the idea of holiness with that of a heart or spirit set apart for the service of God inexorably wins ground as the Jewish tradition gives birth to the Christian tradition. In Mary, we see an absolute identification of the two. When she gives birth to Jesus, there is no question that she is “set apart” for the most utterly unique task to which God has ever called a mere mortal. But there is also no question in the Catholic tradition that she who was summoned to that task was made utterly worthy to accomplish it in every way. She is “conceived without sin” and is granted the singular gift of being the most saved person who ever lived. She is, in her person, the New Wineskin into whom the New Wine is first poured. (cf. Luke 5:36-39).
Mary is ultimately holy for the same reason that every saint is holy: because the Holy Spirit is upon her. The coming of the Holy Spirit upon Mary in the conception of Jesus was not the first time the Spirit had come upon her. Mary was graced with the help of her Son’s Spirit long before her Son took flesh in her womb. It was he who preserved her from sin from conception onward. It was his grace that did it, not some goodness of her own that owed nothing to the help of God. Mary was readied by grace to be holy. Her holiness made her open to further grace. This is the pattern of the Christian life. Grace enables us to respond to God and our response to God opens us to more grace, so we enter by grace into a life of sowing to the spirit and reaping of the Spirit (cf. Galatians 6:8). Mary herself went from grace to grace, not merely conceiving and bearing the Word Incarnate, but pondering his life in her heart, going with him to the agony of the cross, rejoicing at his Resurrection, welcoming his Spirit yet again at Pentecost, and finally following him to Heaven in her glorious Assumption, becoming the very first person to fully enjoy what we who believe in him will all one day enjoy in the Resurrection.
This is why the early Church dubs her Theotokos or “Mother of God.” That title does not mean Catholics think Mary is the Creator of God. It does not mean she gave birth to an ordinary man who was “adopted” or temporarily “possessed” by the Logos or Second Person of the Trinity becoming two persons, one human and one divine, occupying a single head. Rather, it means Jesus is fully God and fully Man, Son of God and Son of Mary: one person with two natures, divine and human. Mary did not give birth to some abstraction any more than your mother did. We do not introduce our mothers to our friends saying, “This is the mother of my human nature.” We say, “This is my mother.” So did God when he lived in Nazareth with Mary. Mary gave birth to a person who is God and man. Because she did, we have been saved, since salvation means sharing in Christ’s divinized human nature. That is why we honor her and call her “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” She was set apart as no other mortal has ever been by the Holy One who chooses the vessels he will honor according to his own purposes. Holy Mary has been more highly honored than any other creature and it is only fitting that we acknowledge that fact, just as we acknowledge and honor the many other lesser creatures whom God has likewise exalted by his grace.
[1] The text of the Gloria is available on-line at http://www.nccbuscc.org/romanmissal/assembly.shtml as of March 11, 2011.
[2] By the way, before we get too impressed with ourselves about progressing past those silly Old Testament dietary rules about pork and shellfish, let’s stop and ask ourselves when was the last time we had a nice juicy plate of insect larvae or a bowl of worms for dinner? People in other cultures eat such things. Moral: we Americans have just as many dietary taboos as any other culture.
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