She is mentioned in six incidents. Peter is involved in hundreds of incidents.
Only two Gospels seem to know what her name is. The second Gospel does not mention her at all except for a negative incident.
She says altogether about 250 words. Paul’s words run to about 100,000.
Scripture gives us no clues as to how old she was, what she looked like, what happened to her eventually, who her parents were.
Yet. If take the #6 up to the Metropolitan museum, you will see her depicted in hundreds of pictures–any unbiased alien would gather from a visit to the museum that she is the most important woman who ever lived.
And. Our Church devotes five festival days to her, compared with two for Peter and Paul–or 1 ˝, since they share a day. Christmas, the Purification, the Annunciation, the Visitation, and today. Roman Catholicism doubles that. Orthodoxy is somewhere in the middle. We even now have the feast of those parents who are never mentioned in Scripture–Anne and Joachim are the names that mysteriously appear a little later.
And. She has had more church communities named for her than for Paul and Peter combined, my guess is she has as many as her son named for her. More persons have addressed prayers to her than to any other saith, probably more than all others combined.
And. Her song–today’s Gospel lesson–is said read and sung every morning in the Eastern Church and every evening in the Western. If you do not know it by heart you are not in the habit of evening prayer, I can assure you of that.
So what she says in that song has come true. All generations have called her blessed. She has indeed been magnified–made great–by God. Everybody knows who she is. She has not merely been called blessed, she has been portrayed in the greatest paintings, honored by the greatest cathedrals, praised in the finest poetry, and addressed in the most loving prayers.
Why? Why is the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Theotokos or God Bearer, the Mother of God, Star of the Sea and Lady of the Snows, to use just a sampling of her titles, why is she so compelling?
You are probably thinking well that’s obvious she is the Virgin Mary, she was the mother of Jesus, that of course makes her powerful.
That is simply saying she is powerful because she is.
There is the secular answer. The one people have reached by standing outside the faith and looking in. To see ourselves as other see us as Robert Burns puts it. Their answer is, people missed the old goddesses. Those female deities, Athena and Demeter and Astarte, people liked these old friends and the Judeo-Christian God supplanted them. Mary was a way of getting this back.
Some Christians have found that very threatening or at least annoying. I respect that but I have to say, I do not feel that way. I believe there is in fact a healthy helping of truth in it.
This reminds us what happens when we do not notice the difference between the teaching of the Church and our habits of imaging the Faith. True Christianity and real Judaism have never taught that God is masculine: God is a spirit, beyond and above gender. We can and must believe that. But we can’t imagine it. And so we have imagined God as male again and again, and this of course limited God who is without limit. It left out parts of the truth that believing in Athena kept intact. God’s beauty and courtesy and fertility and tenderness and many aspects of God’s wisdom and nurture—all those very real strengths God has were very nicely expressed by belief in those goddesses. If you have ever or ever later have the occasion to visit the Parthenon—the temple to the virgin goddess—check the way you respond. Ask yourself if it feels demonic, if you feel evil around you—or if it doesn’t seem strangely familiar, and inviting, and holy. So devotion to Mary was a decent substitute. I have no problem with that at all.
Besides I agree with St Clement who said there is truth in the old myths, that they prepared humankind for Christianity, so it does not seem at all strange to think Athena was a kind of hint toward the Virgin Mary.
Except that this cannot explain those marvelous things we began with—Mary’s universal and eternal honor. Mary isn’t a Goddess. Yet somehow she is more than Minerva. The Virgin Mary is more than the Virgin Goddess in different dress.
Now our Prayer Book implies another answer. By having Mary appear throughout the year, regularly. By setting aside days for thinking about her. By even including her parents, which strikes me as really definitive. We in other words include her more than anyone else in our calendar of saints.
Those beliefs have caused a good deal of ill feeling among Christians in the past. I’m sure the Enemy has thoroughly enjoyed the way Christians have let their attitudes towards the mother of God divide them and distract them from the things they really should be angry about. In fact my guess is the Enemy is behind a lot of that. So let’s make certain right now as a kind of side notice that we all know what these things really are. The truth always sets you free.
1—Immaculate Conception. My guess is there are some people sitting here who think that is the same as, or has something to do with, the Virgin Birth. It does not. The Immaculate Conception is a conclusion, based on Genesis 3:15 and Luke 1:28, and their own logic, that many Christians came to very early. The Virgin Birth means that Jesus was conceived without a human father. The Immaculate Conception means that Mary was conceived without original sin. If you have ever been confused by it do not worry-it was rejected by the great Catholic teachers of the west then made official by Roman Catholicism; it was fervently believed in by the Greek Fathers then rejected by the Greek Orthodox Church. I’ll tell you where I stand—I don’t know. When Thomas Aquinas disagrees with Gregory of Nyssa, I get mighty confused myself. It is wonderful to be an Episcopalian.
2—Perpetual Virginity of Mary. That I have mentioned in a sermon before; all it means is Mary remained a Virgin forever. The Gospel arguments are . The counterarguments are.
3—The Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Assumption literally means “bring to” and it is simply the belief that Mary was brought to heaven as Enoch and Elijah were, rather than through the gateway of death. That belief doesn’t happen so early. It happens 400 years later. It was made official RC teaching even later—in 1950 Pius 12 said it this way, “when the course of her earthly life was complete, she was lifted up body and spirit into the glory of heaven.” Greek koimesis, falling asleep—sometimes therefore called “dormition.” But they do not believe she was taken bodily away. We do not officially endorse the belief, but we do include the traditional date on our calendars. That date is August 15, so here we are.
Seven sorrows, presentation of Mary in the temple, our lady of the snows, our lady of mount Carmel and the Holy Name of Mary.
Orthodox Church—six of these are numbered with the Twelve Great Feasts
The argument against these things, which first excited the Protestants, was that they are not in Scripture. That is true. But the trouble with that argument is so is about 50% of their own Christian theology.
But what all agree is she is a saint. She is Saint Mary. If anyone is, she is. More than any human being. More, says Thomas, than any angel.
What do we mean when we say that?
Why are all those people there in the BCP page fifteen to thirty– the first item in the book? Why anyone besides the Lord himself? They aren’t there just because they are famous, or because we like them a lot, or because they are curious and strange. Not at all. They are there for a very practical reasons-they are patterns, as John Donne put it in the 17th century when our Church was finding its voice. Saints are patterns-blueprints, role models,
What she says is a tissue of Scripture, woven together, every line is a quote, from Psalms, Isaiah, Habukkuk, Samuel, Genesis, and Job. And the whole thing is a new version of an old song, the song of Hannah mother of the prophet Samuel. Hannah, which is the real way to say Mary’s mother’s name.
What she says is a kind of Holy Scripture in a small space, a condensed Bible.
And a portrait of God. What God’s personality is like. Not the abstract God in the Creed, another side of the truth. God the Person.
–thus if ever you feel ordinary, nothing special, humdrum, matter of fact, be ready–you are exactly the kind God likes to work through.
Or rather with. This is the final answer, the traditional one. Why is Mary important? St Justin said it clearly and St Luke suggest it in the Gospel. Mary herself expresses it in the Song. Red the Song to yourself later. When the sun goes down as I said is a very good choice. Read it, and see if it strikes you as a song about obeying God.
It is not. It is a daring and humorous song about meeting God at God’s own level. My soul she says makes him great because he has made me great–using the Greek words for “impregnates me,” she when she says it is literally getting bigger, great with child says the old Authorized Version. It is a taunt song and a boast and it is beautiful.
Long before all those other ways she has been honored–the cathedrals in the MA the Renaissance Madonnas of Leonardo and Raphael, the devotions of the Rosary, the Dormition, the Assumption, the Immaculate Conception, the Star of the Sea, the Apocalypse of Mary there was this reason: because of Mary’s unique power–the most powerful human being on earth.
Because at one moment she was the single most important human being that ever breathed air. At one moment God entrusted it all to her. Here is what that means.
People often speak of Mary’s “obedience.” I suppose that she as obedient, we all should be obedient to God. But when Mary said “I am the handmaiden of the Lord” that was not obedience exactly. What the archangel brought was not a prediction, it was a proposal. When Mary said yes I will yes, it was not obedience. It was cooperation.
As Bede said, it had to be that way. The most important thing about the Virgin Mary is this. Mary is like a balance against that other most powerful woman, that other mother of humankind, Eve, whom the Serpent approached first, just as the Angel came to Mary before he came to Joseph with the news. God did not force Eve to cooperate. She was free to choose.
God did not impregnate Mary–Zeus, not God, does that kind of thing. God sent Gabriel to ask Mary’s cooperation. And she said yes I will yes.
She is mentioned by name nineteen times in the entire Bible. But enter her name on the search engine. Guess? 4,280,000 times she is as “The Virgin Mary” in cyberspace. Peter and Paul combined came in at 3 million.
