Mary Mother of God
The following is the text of the sermon I preached on New Year's Day. Our parish keeps the Roman Calendar and so we were observing the Solemnity of the Mother of God. Enjoy!
The role and place of Mary in theology and in the Church is something that a lot of people have very passionately held opinions on, and something about which there is a great diversity of opinion.
As children my younger sister and I were looked after by our Grandmother. My Nan (as we called her) is an Irish Roman Catholic and she has had a big role in the early part of my faith. She taught me the basic prayers, told me about the Church and life in Ireland with nuns teaching in schools, working in hospitals and caring for the poor. One of the things she taught me was the prayer “Hail Mary” which I used to faithfully say every night before bed. Devotion to Mary formed an important part of my faith from its very beginning, and except for a more protestant phase (mea culpa) in my late teens, I’ve always had an understanding of the role and place of Mary.
However, in preparing to write this sermon I was made to think more deeply about what it means for Mary to be the Mother of God, and what that might mean for us. I turned to my books on patristic theology which is the development of Christian faith and doctrine in the generations immediately following the apostles (so from about 100 to 450 AD).
In the year 430AD Nestorius, who was Patriarch of Constantinople, preached against the already popular use of the term “mother of God” as a title for the Blessed Virgin. He believed that Mary had borne the man Jesus who was the habitation of the divine Christ. This is an inadequate understanding of the incarnation but he was worried that to say Mary was the Mother of God implied that God the Son was a created , or that the manhood of Jesus Christ was incomplete, he being more God than man.
Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, was charged by the Pope (and, in part, his own initiative) with correcting Nestorius. An Ecumenical Council was called and met at Ephesus to discuss the matter. St Cyril said
“I am amazed that there are some who are extremely doubtful whether the Holy Virgin should be called Mother of God or no. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then surely the Holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother... You may say ‘Was the Virgin the mother of the Godhead?’ My reply is... the Word of God is begotten of... the Father, has his existence outside time, always coexisting with his Father... When he became flesh... he is said to have also been begotten through a woman according to the flesh. What a mother produces is one living being.”
So then, Cyril gives us the rationale behind the title Mother of God, but there is more here that it is worth discovering, about the connotations of “Mother of God” for the person of Christ. Cyril went on to say
“Scripture does not say that the Word united to himself the person of man, but that he became flesh... He made our body his own and came forth a man of a woman, not casting aside his being God, and his having been begotten of God the Father, but even in the assumption of his flesh remaining what he was...
[He was born in time] that he might bless the very first element of our being, and that, a woman having borne him united to the flesh, there might be made to cease theneforward the curse lying upon our whole race, and that the sentence... might be annulled by him: he will swallow up death for ever.”
The doctrine of Nestorius was condemned as a heresy at Ephesus in 431 for seeming to propose that Christ was two different sons: one being the divine Word, the other the human Jesus, when in fact the confession of the Church is one Lord, one Son, one person: Jesus Christ.
The mid fifth-century was a time of major debates about the person of Christ, and these culminated at Ephesus, and shortly after at Chalcedon (from which we get our creed). The Councils also marked the climax of Marian doctrine in the patristic period. It was not the concern of the Fathers though to do honour to Mary, but rather to make clearer definitions of the union of God and man in the incarnation. It became apparent that this could only really be done by recognising Mary as Theotokos, Greek for God-bearer or Mother of God. Thus Mariology (the study of the person of Mary) became firmly integrated with Christology (the study of the person of Christ).
And so we see that immediately as we talk of Mary, we begin to consider the person of Christ, his incarnation and his redeeming work. For me, this began to make sense of why we are celebrating her today. 1st January is always the Solemnity of the Mother of God, and so it always falls exactly a week after Christmas itself. This is not somehow to shift the focus suddenly from the infant Christ to his mother, but is for the deepening of our appreciation of the incarnation and so the reason for its proximity to Christmas becomes apparent.
At Christmas we recall the gracious “yes” of God to humanity which he makes in the incarnation. In thinking of Mary we remember her faithful “yes” to God: her “let it be to me according to your word”, by which it came about. St Paul tells us that all of God’s promises find their “yes” in Jesus Christ. And so, with Mary as our supreme example we offer our “yes” to God, our commitment to his will and purpose for our lives, that we might (as our epistle tells us) become adopted sons and daughters of God and find ourselves filled with his Spirit so that we, like Mary, worship God not just with our lips, but commit ourselves to him entirely that his Son might be made known through us as he came to us from her.
Amen.
The role and place of Mary in theology and in the Church is something that a lot of people have very passionately held opinions on, and something about which there is a great diversity of opinion.
As children my younger sister and I were looked after by our Grandmother. My Nan (as we called her) is an Irish Roman Catholic and she has had a big role in the early part of my faith. She taught me the basic prayers, told me about the Church and life in Ireland with nuns teaching in schools, working in hospitals and caring for the poor. One of the things she taught me was the prayer “Hail Mary” which I used to faithfully say every night before bed. Devotion to Mary formed an important part of my faith from its very beginning, and except for a more protestant phase (mea culpa) in my late teens, I’ve always had an understanding of the role and place of Mary.
However, in preparing to write this sermon I was made to think more deeply about what it means for Mary to be the Mother of God, and what that might mean for us. I turned to my books on patristic theology which is the development of Christian faith and doctrine in the generations immediately following the apostles (so from about 100 to 450 AD).
In the year 430AD Nestorius, who was Patriarch of Constantinople, preached against the already popular use of the term “mother of God” as a title for the Blessed Virgin. He believed that Mary had borne the man Jesus who was the habitation of the divine Christ. This is an inadequate understanding of the incarnation but he was worried that to say Mary was the Mother of God implied that God the Son was a created , or that the manhood of Jesus Christ was incomplete, he being more God than man.
Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, was charged by the Pope (and, in part, his own initiative) with correcting Nestorius. An Ecumenical Council was called and met at Ephesus to discuss the matter. St Cyril said
“I am amazed that there are some who are extremely doubtful whether the Holy Virgin should be called Mother of God or no. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then surely the Holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother... You may say ‘Was the Virgin the mother of the Godhead?’ My reply is... the Word of God is begotten of... the Father, has his existence outside time, always coexisting with his Father... When he became flesh... he is said to have also been begotten through a woman according to the flesh. What a mother produces is one living being.”
So then, Cyril gives us the rationale behind the title Mother of God, but there is more here that it is worth discovering, about the connotations of “Mother of God” for the person of Christ. Cyril went on to say
“Scripture does not say that the Word united to himself the person of man, but that he became flesh... He made our body his own and came forth a man of a woman, not casting aside his being God, and his having been begotten of God the Father, but even in the assumption of his flesh remaining what he was...
[He was born in time] that he might bless the very first element of our being, and that, a woman having borne him united to the flesh, there might be made to cease theneforward the curse lying upon our whole race, and that the sentence... might be annulled by him: he will swallow up death for ever.”
The doctrine of Nestorius was condemned as a heresy at Ephesus in 431 for seeming to propose that Christ was two different sons: one being the divine Word, the other the human Jesus, when in fact the confession of the Church is one Lord, one Son, one person: Jesus Christ.
The mid fifth-century was a time of major debates about the person of Christ, and these culminated at Ephesus, and shortly after at Chalcedon (from which we get our creed). The Councils also marked the climax of Marian doctrine in the patristic period. It was not the concern of the Fathers though to do honour to Mary, but rather to make clearer definitions of the union of God and man in the incarnation. It became apparent that this could only really be done by recognising Mary as Theotokos, Greek for God-bearer or Mother of God. Thus Mariology (the study of the person of Mary) became firmly integrated with Christology (the study of the person of Christ).
And so we see that immediately as we talk of Mary, we begin to consider the person of Christ, his incarnation and his redeeming work. For me, this began to make sense of why we are celebrating her today. 1st January is always the Solemnity of the Mother of God, and so it always falls exactly a week after Christmas itself. This is not somehow to shift the focus suddenly from the infant Christ to his mother, but is for the deepening of our appreciation of the incarnation and so the reason for its proximity to Christmas becomes apparent.
At Christmas we recall the gracious “yes” of God to humanity which he makes in the incarnation. In thinking of Mary we remember her faithful “yes” to God: her “let it be to me according to your word”, by which it came about. St Paul tells us that all of God’s promises find their “yes” in Jesus Christ. And so, with Mary as our supreme example we offer our “yes” to God, our commitment to his will and purpose for our lives, that we might (as our epistle tells us) become adopted sons and daughters of God and find ourselves filled with his Spirit so that we, like Mary, worship God not just with our lips, but commit ourselves to him entirely that his Son might be made known through us as he came to us from her.
Amen.
posted by Credo at 1/13/2006 06:46:00 pm
1 Comments:
This, for me, sums up well the reason for place of Our Lady in the Church and why we celebrate this and her relationship to Christ and his Church in the Kalendar: her Conception, Nativity, Presentation and Dormition/Assumption. However, I still strggle with the question of why the specific Feast of Mary, Mother of God, as I said over on Richard's Ramblings, and I can hardly be accused of downplaying her role. Hmmm.
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