MARY THE WOMAN TOWARD OTHERS
It was at Pentecost that Mary received an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that enabled her, more than any of the Apostles, to understand the universal love of her Son and Savior for all human beings. By the Spirit of Jesus Christ she burned to surrender herself even more completely to serve His Body than she had done at Nazareth or at the foot of the Cross.
With new awareness of her love for all God’s children, she understood more deeply her universal role as Mother of the regenerated race of mankind. If St. Paul could shout out: “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Ga 2:20), how much more did Mary realize after Pentecost and continue to grow in that realization in her glorified state that she is one with Jesus. His love is her love for all of God’s children. She lives now with ever-increasing grace, i.e. the indwelling, loving, uncreated energies of the Trinity abiding within her and energizing her to be present in loving service to each person in need.
Mary the contemplative becomes the loving servant of the Lord. Love received makes it possible for her to give of that love. Contemplata aliis tradere—to share with others the riches contemplated. From feminine to masculine, a womb that receives rich life opens to release that life, Mary becomes for us the completely realized, integrated human being. The contemplative in action is the virgin-mother of the Word of God, receiving and sharing that Divine life with the whole world.
MARY-MOTHER OF GOD
Christians have always called Mary the Mother of God and this throughout 2,000 years of reflecting upon Holy Scripture as informed by apostolic tradition. The basis for her greatness and our tender love for her is that she freely cooperated to answer “yes” to the Almighty God, the Heavenly Father and Source of all life, who asked her to give herself as virginal earth so that the Divine Seed, His Word, might become enfleshed.
When the third ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) fought bitterly the teaching of Nestorius who insisted that Mary was merely the mother of Christ, the man of Nazareth but not in any way the mother of God, the Church realized that the whole of Christianity was at stake. The mystery of Jesus Christ, the union of the completely perfect divinity and humanity, meant for the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon (451) that both natures were distinct, though not separated, unmixed, indivisible. Mary, the Church knew, gave birth to a person. This person existed from all eternity, “Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father…” as the Nicene Creed (325) expressed the pre-existent Word. It was this Word that fashioned through the power of the Holy Spirit a human nature from Mary virgin.
St. John Damascene, the last in the line of Greek Fathers, insists that the Son of God, the subsisting “Power of the Most High,” who overshadows the Holy Virgin, forms a body for Himself. The coming of the Word preceded the formation of the body.
“The angel did not say that the conception should take place first and then the indwelling of God, but that the conception should be accomplished through the coming and the operation of the Holy Spirit and by the indwelling of the Word of God, so that the overshadowing of the Power of the Most High should take place first, that is, the conception of the Word and then the existence of the flesh subsisting in the Word.
A FREE CONSENT
But Mary was not a mere physical “container” to contain the Uncontainable. She was asked by God, as St. Luke in his first chapter describes God’s message brought to Mary through the angel, to accept God’s request that she allow Him to work His love in her life totally as He would wish to do so. It is in Mary’s free consent to obey God by a total surrender in faith that she becomes great by becoming the mother of the Son of God. By freely surrendering herself to God’s will, Mary bound herself in the most perfect human act of highest freedom to cooperate in God’s saving plan to divinize mankind. By Mary’s continued “yes” to God before and after the Incarnation, she continued to exercise her role as mothering all human beings into the Christic race of children of God. Mary’s motherhood of God cannot be viewed in static terms of a physical mother but must be seen as a consequence of her self-surrender as the handmaid of God’s Word. She receives God’s objective redemption as full of grace, God’s life, and becomes subjectively redeemed and sanctified as the virgin, the surrendering servant, that becomes the mother of God and the mother of all reborn by His Spirit.
~ George A. Maloney, Mary: The Womb of God
