The feast of Mary the Mother of God is one of the great feasts in the Church’s calendar. Unfortunately, at least in North America, it is over shadowed by the secular feast of New Year’s Day. That we pay more attention to New Year’s Day should leave us uncomfortable as a Church. If we truly understood the great mystery and reality of the feast we celebrate, we would be ashamed to give so much attention to such a passing triviality as New Year’s Day. So the world is one year older, what is that in comparison to the role Mary plays in salvation history? To give one context, the truth that we celebrate in this feast is so important that the Church in the 5th century held a council specifically to protect this truth from being cheapen by a heresy that was dividing the Church. We must not take for granted what the Church wishes to teach us here.
To begin with, the great magnificence of this feast is found precisely in the wonderful interplay between God’s great plan of salvation and Mary’s free gift of self to God. The concept and reality of Mary being the Mother of God begins with her yes at the Annunciation. It was at the Annunciation that history would be forever changed. While this is not the feast we are celebrating at present in the Church’s liturgical calendar, one is constantly invited to be drawn into the whole mystery of salvation. History is changed because, first, God desired to save the human person by the participation of the human person in God’s saving act; and secondly, history is changed by Mary’s free gift of herself at the Annunciation. God could have acted apart from our participation, but He desired to work with us, and Mary could have said no, and history remain unchanged, but instead her soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord in her free choice to allow God to act through her. Her genuine freedom allowed her to see the good God had ordained in this moment of salvation history and to choose it. In this moment, God is able to bring about through Mary’s perfect and loving obedience something truly great, the Word Incarnate, the means of our salvation.
Yet, to claim this is the only moment that matters in Mary’s motherhood would be reductive. The reality is that in order to say yes at the Annunciation, Mary had to say yes to God’s plan so many times before, which rather than diminishing her freedom only made it more of a reality. So too, being a mother requires constant sacrifice and a continual yes in the moments of day to day living. This is something that Mary knew very well. Her motherhood did not end at the nativity of Jesus, but was carried all the way to the cross and is lived out now in the beatific vision of heaven. Her yes was required of her just as much before the angel Gabriel as it was before the cross. In this, one can see that Mary’s motherhood is defined by her free gift of self to God.
But is it enough to simply say yes? Every disciple must say yes. What makes Mary’s yes so unique and special in salvation history? Her yes by the work of the Holy Spirit brings about the Incarnation. While she is not the creator of the uncreated one, she gives birth to a person, a person of the Trinity, and she gives form to Jesus’ earthly life. She carried the Word Incarnate in her womb, and she raised Him in the home she made with Joseph. The relationship that Mary would have had with Jesus as he was growing up and living a life in Nazareth would have been so unique that no other could claim to know Jesus in the way Mary knew Jesus. Mothers play a very important role in the lives of their children, and Mary is no exception. In all of this, the important thing that we must remember is that the person who was her child was God. Thus, her yes to God’s plan of salvation is so unique that we can call her the Mother of God. As Catholics we should be proud to herald this feast not only in praise of our great Mother, but as a witness to a world that does not value the sanctity of motherhood, family life, and self-sacrifice.
Isaac Nibourg – St. Joseph Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta.