Mary, Mother of God

The Church marks the first day of the New Year with the feast of Mary, Mother of God.  This is one of the oldest and also most controversial titles of Mary.  Early Christians found it hard to believe that the human Jesus can also have been God.  One idea which was rejected as heresy was that He stopped being God in order to become human and then became divine again after the Ascension.  After all, it was argued, if Jesus remained God while on earth then Mary was not just the mother of Jesus but also the mother of God.  The Council of Ephesus in 431AD decreed that this was indeed true and by giving Mary the title of ‘Theotokos’ (literally ‘the one who gives birth to God’) they were making a statement as much about the nature of Jesus as about the nature of Mary. 

While early generations underplayed how divine Jesus was, many Christians today tend to underplay how human he was.  Our pious Christmas carols and cards suggest that Jesus was some sort of super-baby, who never caused his parents sleepless nights.  But Jesus was fully divine and fully human.  That means that the infant Jesus was like any other baby: crying all night, being sick, needing to be winded, wetting himself. 

If Jesus did not have the normal experiences of a baby then he cannot have had the normal feelings of an adult: love and fear and compassion and doubt.  And His sufferings and death are only pretence if Jesus was not truly human.  Jesus’ later passion and resurrection are already being foreshadowed in the humanity of his infancy.

Jesus’ true humanity means that Mary’s feelings were genuine, the feelings of any other mother – the delights of seeing her new-born child but also the pains of labour, the risk to her own life in giving birth, the anxieties that come with every childhood illness, the fears about what would happen to her child, the torment of seeing him suffer.  It is no coincidence that in many churches stained-glass windows place side-by-side Mary gazing at her child in the manger and on the cross. 

Vatican II reminds us that Mary ‘occupies a place in the Church which is the highest after Christ and yet she is also very close to us’ (LG54).  So we see in her life an example of what our lives can be.  We too can gaze in wonder at the beauty of God’s plan, we too can say yes when God invites us to be part of that plan, and we too will enjoy both consolation and desolation as partners in building God’s kingdom. 

We do not know what the year ahead holds any more than Mary knew what the life of Jesus would hold.  We can be anxious and despairing, or like her we can trust in God’s goodness and say, as she said to the Angel Gabriel: ‘be it done to me according to your word’.