Advent
4 – 20 December 2015 – Year C
Grace to you and peace from our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen
The text for this meditation is
written in the 1st Chapter of the Gospel according to St Luke:
Verses 39 – 56:
Mary Visits Elizabeth
In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill
country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the
house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when
Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And
Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she
exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the
fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that
the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold,
when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for
joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would
be a
fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
Mary’s Song of Praise: The
Magnificat
And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,
for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant.
For behold, from now on all
generations will call me blessed;
for he who is mighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
And his mercy is for those who fear him
from generation to generation.
He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the
thoughts of their hearts;
he has brought down the mighty from their thrones
and exalted
those of humble estate;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and the rich he has sent away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
as he spoke to our fathers,
to Abraham and to his offspring
forever.”
And Mary remained with her about three months and returned
to her home.
Christians down through the centuries have
always debated the level of honour we should give to Mary, the Mother of our
Lord. At one end of the spectrum, we
have those who insist that Mary participated in Jesus’ suffering in that she
was there at the cross, and her suffering as a mother watching her son die contributes
to our salvation. At the other end of
the spectrum, we have those recognise that we need Mary to give birth to Jesus,
but that’s about it.
The church of Rome encourages people to actually
pray to Mary with these words: “Hail Mary
full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou among women and blessed
is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners
now and at the hour of our death.”
This is the prayer that people are talking about when you hear someone
in a Roman Catholic religious context speak of the “Hail Mary.” The first part
of this prayer is a paraphrase of Gabriel’s greeting to Mary when he announced
that she would indeed be the Mother of our Lord. The second part of this prayer is taken from
the Gospel that we just heard where Elizabeth by the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit referred to Mary as the “Mother of my Lord.” (Luke 1:43, ESV) The
last part of this prayer was framed by the Church of Rome itself, and it is
this last part that causes all kinds of confusion.
So, do we toss the entire prayer out because
Rome uses it? Do we keep parts? More importantly, where DOES Mary fit into the life of the church? Today’s Gospel has much to tell us about
that.
Perhaps, one of the most confusing phrases in
this prayer is the title given to Mary … Mother
of God. Perhaps it is our sinful
nature at work thinking that if we call Mary the Mother of God, that we are saying she earned the right to be Jesus’ mother. Perhaps some think it means that Mary herself
must be a little divine if she is to be the Mother
of God. Many people think that
calling Mary the Mother of God is
giving her too much credit. If Mary is
the Mother of God, then there must be
something supernatural or divine about her.
It makes Mary more important than she really is.
While it is very natural to jump to this
conclusion, it is still jumping to a conclusion. We wouldn’t make that leap with the mother of
any other famous person. For example, if
I searched the Internet for the mother of a famous person, I might find a mother
by the name of Deborah Thurston. Now I know
that she has never played on an NRL team.
It’s possible that she has never played a game of football in her
life. Yet, no one in their right mind
would deny her the title Mother of
Johnathon. We don’t expect the
mother of an NRL champion to be any kind of a football player at all. We don’t even expect her to be an athlete of
any kind. In the same way, just because
Mary is the Mother of God, that does
not mean that she herself has any godlike abilities or characteristics.
The second, and more reliable case for giving
Mary the title, Mother of God, is the
response that Elizabeth had under the influence of the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit,
and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is
the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my
Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:41–43, ESV) Elizabeth, under the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit, called Mary the mother of my Lord. So it is that we too can call Mary the mother
of my Lord.
In fact, when we call Mary the Mother of God, we are not so much saying
something unusual about Mary herself.
Instead, we are actually saying something miraculous and astonishing
about her son, Jesus. If we admit that
Mary is the Mother of God, then the
contents of her womb is God. The child
that Mary carried when Elizabeth greeted her is in fact the Lord in human
flesh.
When we say that Mary is the Mother of God, we are simply saying that
Mary is the woman God chose to carry His Son during gestation and to care for
His Son as a human being until He grew to the point where He could care for
Himself. In other words, Mary would do
for God the Son exactly what any good mother would do for any of her children.
So the problem with the last sentence of the
“Hail Mary” is not that it refers to Mary as the Mother of God for that is what she is. The problem is that the last sentence makes
petition to Mary as though she were alive on this earth.
The Law of God is fairly clear. When the Children of Israel were ready to
enter the Land of Canaan and conquer it, Moses said to them, “When you come
into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow
the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you
anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices
divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or
a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does
these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations
the Lord your God is driving them out before you.” (Deuteronomy 18:9–12, ESV)
With these words we learn that one of the reasons God allowed the Children of
Israel to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan is that the inhabitants of the
land were talking to the dead. According
to Moses, inquiring of the dead is an abomination to the Lord.
Since Mary has been dead for almost two thousand
years, talking to her is an abomination to the Lord. So, when someone asks, Mary to “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of
our death,” they are in fact, inquiring of the dead and dabbling in the
occult.
Please understand that this is not to say that
Roman Catholics are not Christian. What
it does say is that the Church of Rome teaches questionable doctrine when it
teaches people to pray the “Hail Mary.”
This is doubly true when the church assigns the “Hail Mary” as penance,
for then they are not only teaching this prayer to their members, but they are
also teaching their members that saying this prayer is a way of working off the
penalty of sin.
So, we see that we should honour Mary. We should give thanks to God for the work
that He did through Mary in bringing our only saviour into this world. Today’s text even teaches us that it is
proper to refer to Mary as the Mother of
God. But we cross the line when we
talk to Mary and ask her to do things for us.
There is much more that we could learn from
today’s Gospel, but the important thing is not so much that Mary is the Mother of God, but that God is the Son
of Mary. When God the Son took up human
flesh, He did not merely put on humanity as you or I would put on a change of
clothing. God the Son went all the way. This includes taking up the nine months of
pregnancy that all of us experienced at the beginning of our lives. In a miracle that we cannot hope to understand,
the Holy Spirit fertilised one of Mary’s eggs into a single living cell … a
single cell that was God the Son … the Christ.
From that moment on, the Christ was, is, and always will be both one
hundred per cent God and one hundred per cent man.
Mary responded to Elizabeth with a poem that is
so elegant that the church has given this poem a name … the Magnificat. Recall that the poem begins this way: “And
Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour,”
(Luke 1:46–47, ESV) With these words, Mary recognises God as her saviour …
her saviour from sin. God took on the
flesh of Mary so that He could save Mary.
He took on the flesh of humanity so that He could save humanity. He became a human being like us so that He
could save us.
The single cell God-man in Mary’s womb did what
all human beings do. He multiplied and
grew. Mary will give birth to her first-born
son. He will grow and become a man … a
man who had an appointment with a cross.
As God stepped down from heaven into the womb of
the Virgin, He took His first step to the cross. The cross is the reason He took up human
flesh in the first place. He came to be
Mary’s saviour, and not only her saviour, but also the saviour of all
mankind. For as He took up human flesh
He also humbled Himself under the Law in order to fulfil the law in our
place. Then as He suffered on the cross,
He took up the wrath of God that we all earned with our sin. This is the way in which He is Mary’s saviour
and the saviour of us all.
Jesus came forth from the womb of the Virgin, and
He also came forth from the depths of the tomb.
Death could not hold one whose sacrifice was so pure and holy. Instead, Jesus rose and gives us the
guarantee that we shall follow Him in His resurrection as our own bodies rise
from the dead to live forever in immortality … bodies that will live forever
because of the work of God the Son who took up our humanity when Mary became
His mother. Amen
The love and peace of our great Triune God that is beyond all human understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen
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