The Blessed Virgin Mary
Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Born of the Virgin Mary. [Apostles’ Creed]
St Thomas Aquinas once said that in order to make a point, one sometimes needs to say the opposite. So, here goes.
In the early second century AD there was a heretical preacher called Valentinus (100-160 AD) who taught the erroneous idea that Jesus Christ took nothing from the Blessed Virgin Mary. He spoke of Jesus passing through Mary’s womb like water through a pipe.
Orthodox Christian teaching utterly repudiates such a misguided and indeed offensive suggestion. Valentinus, I should add, came to hold the further heretical view that whilst Jesus was divine, he wasn’t completely human, but only appeared to be human, which of course would mean he cannot understand what we humans experience day by day on planet earth.
Let’s clear all this up by starting afresh at the beginning. There have been two great moments in history. The first was when God made the world and everything in it. The second great moment was when God saw what a mess we humans were making of it, and so He sent His Son into the world to sort it out.
The way God sent His Son into the world was with the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a young girl from Nazareth. God had been at work in Mary’s soul from the first second of her conception – as He is at work inside all human souls from the first second of our conception, fitting us for our life on earth – but in Mary’s case, God was preparing her to be the Mother of His only Son. It is important, though, that we remember that Mary could still have said ‘No.’ She had complete freedom, but she chose to take a leap of faith and said ‘Yes.’ We read that at the Annunciation the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary, greeted her, tried to calm her fears, told her she had found favour with God, and went on:
Behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a Son, and he shall be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David. And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. Then said Mary unto the angel How shall this be, seeing I know not a man? And the angel answered and said unto her, The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the highest shall overshadow thee: therefore that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God … And Mary said, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Why was it necessary to go through all this palaver? Well, following the Fall, we all suffer from what we call Original Sin: the tendency to find sin attractive and to gravitate towards it, so that, as St Paul said, ‘For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.’ I guess we are all familiar with that feeling. If we don’t deal with sin, it can get between us and God, like a fog.
Original Sin, like all the other aspects of being a human person, is passed from generation to generation, so we all share it.
The point about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary is that this intergenerational chain of Original Sin was broken. Christ does not share Original Sin and therefore is sinless. He was tempted like you and me, but unlike you and me he never gave way. Fast-forward 33 years to the Crucifixion: only the sacrifice of the Son of God who had never sinned was big enough to deal with the Fall, evil, sin, suffering and death, once and for all. As St Paul put it: ‘For our sake He made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’
Back to silly, misguided Valentinus and his followers. Jesus did not pass through Mary’s womb like water through a pipe. Jesus was both entirely divine and entirely human – just as human as you and me.
Jesus was born just like any other baby. Let’s hope Mary had someone at Bethlehem to help her in her childbirth, perhaps the innkeeper’s wife. Jesus was sick, and needed changing, and burping, and comforting when he cried. He grew up like anyone else. He had spots when he was a teenager, and colds and sore throats. He was cold in the winter and hot in the summer. He had friends like Mary, Martha and Lazarus, and worked in a carpenter’s workshop like his foster-father St Joseph. In other words, he was just like you and me.
If we could go back in a time machine and find ourselves standing in the market place in Nazareth, around about, let us say, 10 AD, we might have been rewarded with a glimpse of the Blessed Virgin Mary going shopping, with a young Jesus who was there to carry some of the bags. The thing that would immediately have struck us is that mother and son looked very much alike. Jesus, obviously, had no input from a biological human father, so his appearance – bone structure, hair, eyes, etc – would have been much like Mary’s. Everything he had came from Mary.
In order to combat Valentinus and the muddle-headed notion that Jesus passed through Mary’s womb like water through a pipe, the Council of Ephesus which met in 431 AD accorded her the title ‘Theotokos’, which means ‘God-bearer’, or more commonly ‘Mother of God’. Now, clearly Mary is not the Mother of God the Father or God the Holy Spirit, but she is the Mother of the Incarnate Word, God the Son, Second Person of the Holy Trinity.
As I am sure you know, Christians only offer worship – what the theologians call ‘latria’ – to Almighty God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do not worship the saints, the holy men and women of the Bible and of the Christian story, but instead we accord them ‘dulia’, or veneration. And what of St Mary the Virgin? Well, Our Lady is traditionally accorded ‘hyperdulia’, not worship, but uniquely the highest and most sincere form of veneration mankind can manage, because of her central and grace-filled role in the drama of our salvation.
I sometimes point out that Jesus is God the Father’s gift to mankind – but add that that is not quite the whole story. We might say Jesus in 99.9 per cent God the Father’s gift to us, but the Blessed Virgin Mary features in this story too. Jesus is, in a very modest way, Mary’s gift to us, too.
Mary, after all, knew her son Jesus for nine months longer than anyone else.
He was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary.