Lenten Programme 2019: Thinking Sacramentally III
Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.
This text speaks profoundly to our Lenten theme of thinking sacramentally. It embodies, I use the term intentionally, the harmony of intellect and sense that lies at the heart of our thinking sacramentally. A text familiar from the Advent and Christian pageants and seasons, it belongs primarily and essentially to the Feast of the Annunciation which marks the very beginning of the Incarnation. The Annunciation is the conception of Christ in the womb of Mary, not biologically through sexual intercourse but intellectually and spiritually, and not by the denial of nature but by virtue of the grace which does not destroy but perfects nature.
“Those who are not good Marians are often Arians”, as a 17th century maxim notes, suggesting something about the essential role of Mary in the understanding of orthodox Christianity. Arianism, named after Arius, denies the essential and absolute divinity of Christ, treating Jesus as something less and other than “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God”, as we say in the Nicene Creed. She is the theotokos, the God-bearer; in short, the mother of God. A celebrated (and contested) term, it belongs utterly and entirely to the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, to the doctrine of God as Trinity, to the hypostatic union of God and Man in the Incarnation of Christ Jesus, and to the doctrine of human redemption; or perhaps should I say, the central dogmas of the Christian Faith. This means that they are the essential and fundamental features of Christianity which embrace a number of different though not necessarily opposed doctrines, meaning ways of thinking about these essential principles of the Christian faith, and which are central to any form of principled engagement with other religions. Mary is therefore not an extra, not a sentimental add-on. She is altogether essential to the understanding and life of the Christian faith and in its engagement with other religions, to boot.
With Mary we are obliged to look back to the Jewish Scriptures to Hannah and Miriam and others even as we can also look ahead to the Islamic Qur’an. Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the Qur’an puts it, is mentioned more times there than in the New Testament. But the number of mentions of her name is altogether secondary to the essential role Mary plays in the economy of salvation. In the New Testament, for instance, Mary appears at all the essential moments in the story of Christ and is always to be understood in relation to Christ.
What is that relation? She is the source of Christ’s pure and true humanity. As such she is inescapably an important part of the Chalcedonian definition which argues for the full and perfect humanity and divinity of Christ united in the one person of Christ. Mary embodies the fullest truth of our humanity qua human. She shows us something of what it truly means to be human. She embodies the very idea of one who having heard the Word of God keeps it in her heart and gives birth to the Incarnate Word. At once unique – none of us are without sin and as Augustine and others after him have thought, there is something special about Mary on this score – yet she is totally and perfectly human, fully human we might say.