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Thought
for the Week Sunday 6 September – Birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary
For
those of us living in a country where the majority of the Christians are
Roman Catholic, who exactly Mary is, and what her place is in our salvation,
are both pretty crucial. Two thirds of
all Christians are either Orthodox or Roman Catholic, while we Anglicans make
up less than 4% of the total, so it is doubly important to understand first
what we believe about Mary, and second, what our much larger sister churches
believe about her. Considering
her importance, the Bible tells us surprisingly little about Mary: ·
She gave birth to Jesus while still a virgin ·
Jesus had other brothers and sisters ·
She was present on several occasions during Jesus’ ministry ·
From the Cross, Jesus gave her the “beloved disciple” to be her son. As
well as the Council of Jerusalem, which took place around 50AD, and is
mentioned in the New Testament1, almost all Christians
accept the first seven Oecumenical councils as defining our common
faith. They
are : Nicea I 325 Constantinople
I 381 Ephesus 431 Chalcedon
451 Constantinople
II
553 Constantinople
III 680-1 Nicea
II 787 Each
council produced a summary of Christian belief, which we call a creed. The one we say at Eucharists is called the
Nicene Creed, because it mostly derives from that 1st council, but
our version was refined several times over the centuries. The
interesting Council, from the point of view of Mary, is the Third, held at
Ephesus. The Council of Ephesus was
mainly concerned with opposing Nestorius, who became Archbishop of
Constantinople 3 years earlier in 428.
He tried to find a middle way to unite both those who claimed that
Jesus was God, and those who claimed that Jesus was a created being. He taught that in Jesus, the two natures,
human and divine remained separate and that the popular title for Mary,
“Theotokos” or “God-bearer”, was not proper.
He suggested instead that we call Mary “Christotokos” or “Christ-bearer”. Nestorius no doubt meant well, but the
council went completely against him, and he was deposed, and banished to a
monastery in the Egyptian desert. At
Ephesus, the term Theotokos was adopted, but a small number of Bishops who
tried to claim that Mary was co-equal with Jesus as our Saviour, were also
firmly squashed. Mary was affirmed as
the one who gave birth to God, but was not to be considered as God herself;
that’s what they agreed then, and that’s what we believe today. You
may have noticed that the 15th of August was a bank holiday in
France, and although France has been a secular state since 1905, the reason
for the holiday is the Assumption.
Not, as perhaps you might think, the Assumption of our Lord, but the
assumption of his mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. In fact, our Lord was not assumed into
heaven, he ascended there in glory.
Only two people are recorded in the Bible as having been assumed into
heaven, Enoch2 and Elijah3. You might have thought that
Moses, who talked face-to-face with God, would also have been assumed into
heaven. Surprisingly, he was not. We are told firmly4 that he died and was
buried in the land of Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but nobody
knows exactly where his tomb is to this day.
Perhaps the Jewish religious leaders at that time concealed his grave,
wanting to avoid any risk of Moses being worshipped as though he was a
God. Some Rabbis have taught that
Moses was assumed into heaven, which plainly contradicts the Bible. As
with Moses, there is nothing in the Bible to suggest that Mary was assumed
into heaven. The official Roman
Catholic position is that this is because most of the New Testament was
written before the end of Mary’s life, so you would not expect her assumption
into heaven to be recorded. It is
possible that Saint Luke’s two-volume work, the Gospel, and the Acts of the
Apostles, was written before Mary died, but Luke cannot have been writing
much before 70AD, when our Lady, if she had still been alive, would have been
at least in her mid-eighties, very old indeed for those days. Most scholars
agree that the fourth Gospel was not written before about 90 AD, and it is
most unlikely that Mary would still have been alive then. We cannot know whether the writer of the
fourth Gospel would have recorded her death, although he does record Jesus
giving her the beloved disciple to be her son at the crucifixion. In
fact, writing in 377, Epiphanius of Salamis says nobody knows what became of
the Blessed Virgin Mary, neither how she died, nor where she is buried. The earliest accounts of Mary’s death are
in documents of the 5th Century.
Until then there is a resounding silence about the death of Mary. Most
of the 5th Century writers agree that Mary died in Jerusalem, in
the usual way, at the end of her life.
They then go on to claim that her body was taken up into heaven by her
Son, Jesus Christ. By the 7th
Century, this has grown into a beautiful story. Eleven of the twelve disciples are
miraculously transported from the towns where they were preaching to be at
Mary’s bedside as she dies. Thomas,
typically, arrives three days late, and asks to see her body. When the tomb is opened, her body is gone;
just the grave clothes and a lingering sent of flowers are left. In a vision, in which she lowers down to
them her girdle from heaven, Mary explains that Jesus has carried her body up
to heaven to be with Him. This is the
official teaching of the Orthodox Church.
Of course, the Orthodox Church was operating in an area where most
people believed that the Prophet Mohamed had undergone the “Night Journey”5. As Mohamed meditated in Mecca, in 621, the
Archangel Gabriel brought him a winged horse and took him first to lead the
earlier prophets, that is Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah and Jesus, in
prayer, at the “furthest holy building”, probably the Temple Mount in
Jerusalem. From there, Gabriel takes
Mohamed up to heaven to talk to God. If
the Apostles were all at Mary’s deathbed, she must have died before 44 AD,
because we know that James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, was
executed by Herod Agrippa, in 44AD.
This is before most of the letters of Paul, and well before all four
Gospels were written. Some
of the writers from the 5th Century and later, take the view that
Mary did not die at all, but was assumed into heaven like Enoch and
Elijah. By
the 4th century, all Christians believed not just in the Virgin
Birth of Jesus, but also that Mary was a Perpetual Virgin, and this was not
questioned until the Reformation. The
New Testament tells us that Joseph had no relations with Mary before Jesus
was born, and it tells us that Jesus had brothers and sisters. Indeed, James, who is described as the
Brother of the Lord, seems to have been senior even to Saint Peter6. It is hard to see how he could have been
accorded this seniority unless he was actually the brother of Jesus. Those who maintain the Perpetual Virginity
of Mary regard these brothers and sisters as near relatives, perhaps children
from a previous marriage of Joseph, and point out that it doesn’t say that
Joseph and Mary had relations after Jesus was born, though you would hardly
expect the Bible to give such prurient detail. Pope
Pius the Ninth (1846 – 78) had a crucial role in developing, or at least
writing down, Roman Catholic understanding of who Mary is, and what her role
in salvation is. He gets a bad
non-Roman Catholic press, but he was born at the height of the French
Revolution, which was as much an attack on the Church as on the King and
nobles, and he became Pope just before the revolutions of 1848. A liberal at heart, in defence of the
Church, under serious attack as he saw it, he became one of the most
conservative popes, appealing to the general mass of Catholics, and setting
aside cautious and radical scholarship. In
1854, he declared as dogma that the Blessed Virgin Mary, like Jesus, was
conceived without sin. In Mary’s case,
her mother was not a virgin, but Mary was filled with divine grace from her
conception, so that she never sinned.
This was not a new idea – many ordinary Christians had believed this
from at least the Ninth Century, but the Roman Catholic Church had shrunk
from making it official, and many
leading Theologians, including Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure and Thomas
Aquinas, opposed the idea. The First
Council of Trent (1545 – 1643) left the question open, merely affirming that
you were not a heretic whether you believed in Mary’s Immaculate Conception,
or whether you did not. In
1870, Pius IX declared the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. As long as it did not contradict the Bible
or the teaching of the Church, whatever the Pope said about doctrine could
not be wrong. Papal
Infallibility has only been invoked once, in 1950, by Pope Pius the
Twelfth. He declared that Mary had
been assumed into Heaven, but left open the question of whether like Jesus,
she had died first, or like Enoch and Elijah, had never died at all. Pius XII was not saying anything new;
again, virtually all Christians had believed this from the beginning of the
Fifth Century until the Reformation. Martin
Luther always believed in the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, but he also
condemned the Roman Catholic veneration of Mary as “extreme and pagan”. He did not accept that Mary, or any of the
saints, could pray for us any better than we could ourselves. Perhaps in this, Luther was like Joshua and
the leaders of the Children of Israel when Moses died; they wanted to avoid
at all costs anybody worshipping Moses.
It is God whom we worship, and nobody else. So
what then is the Anglican position?
Well, we believe in the Virgin Birth, and we believe that Mary is the
Theotokos, who gave birth to Jesus the Son of God, the second person of the
Trinity. If you like, you are allowed
also believe in the Perpetual Virginity of Mary, and in her Assumption into
Heaven, and that asking Mary and the Saints to pray for you will work better
than praying directly to God yourself, but you are not required to believe
any of these things. The
other important thing about Mary is the example she gives us. She gave her whole life and being to God,
to use as He wished. She risked her
reputation, and her forthcoming marriage.
Then she had to suffer the agony at the foot of the cross, watching
her first-born son, the Son of God, dying a terrible death. Despite
all of this, she is credited with writing one of the most simple, beautiful,
and trusting hymns of all time, the Magnificat. Let us hear it again, in the knowledge,
that because she obeyed God, and gave birth to Jesus, our souls magnify the
Lord with her, and we rejoice in God, her Son, our Saviour. 1Acts 15, 6 – 21 & Galatians 2, 1 – 5; 2Genesis
5, 24; 32
Kings 2, 11; 4Deuteronomy
34, 5 - 6; 5Koran,
Surah 17, 1-60; 6Acts
15, 13 – 19 & Galatians 1, 19 Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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