Today is the Feast of the Annunciation, which celebrates the life and work of Saint Mary, the Mother of God. Due to some incredible doctrinal developments in the Catholic church in the 19th century and before, many non-Catholics pay little attention to the example of faith Mary established. Thankfully, Leah Easley helps us understand how Mary can be properly honored as a stellar witness to faith in Jesus, in her piece for the Spring edition of the Center for Theology, entitled “Beyond Christmas: Honoring Mary During Lent.“
Leah shows us how Mary’s perspective as the “daughter of her Son” (Dante Alighieri) provides a fresh take on the salvific work of Jesus Christ. We are shown something about the character of God’s love, in which a perfect Jesus is born of an imperfect Mary, revealing God’s willingness to take on our shamed and cursed humanity in order to transform it.
Additionally, Leah reminds us that Mary was one of the few who witnessed the torture and death of Christ from beginning to end. Leah encourages the church to take some time during Lent to “stand with Mary” at the cross, suffering with Jesus so that, like Mary, Jesus will comfort us.
As Leah concludes, she points to Mary’s role in the participatory work of Christ’s salvation. Mary faithfully completed the genealogical line that started with Eve and ran through Abraham, Jacob, and David. As she says:
Mary is rewarded for her faithfulness through Jesus’ passion and death by an eternal dwelling with Jesus in heaven. Through her Son’s death and resurrection, Mary has victory over the dragon that plagued her at her Son’s birth, as described in Revelation 12. Mary participated in the salvation of the human race by completing the line Eve began when she gave birth to Seth: begetting children in anticipation of the coming seed who would crush the head of the serpent. Eve and Mary are saved from Satan’s clutches forever because of their trust in the seed who “makes all things new.” Thus, with Mary, we end our the Lenten journey with cries of “Alleluia! He is risen indeed!”
Please take some time to read Leah’s valuable contribution to our Lenten devotions.
Adam David Rick
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Megan's Musings
I really liked Leah’s piece on Mary, I think it is an excellent example of a helpful non-Roman Catholic exhortation to the benefits of thinking about the Mother of God. I’d just like to highlight a couple passages I found particularly insightful.
Leah’s treatment of the reality of Mary’s sin as a regular daughter of Eve achieves twin profitable ends: 1) lowering Mary to the level of possible emulation and 2) elevating Jesus by deepening the depth of his condescension.
First, to my mind, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception has always seemed to make Mary’s positive response to God to be inapplicable to “regular humans.” If Mary was conceived without sin, doesn’t she have a huge leg up on the rest of us? By reminding us that Mary was like us even to the point of original sin gives us greater courage to stand with her through Lent and at the Cross.
Second, by pointing to Mary’s original sin, Leah reminds us of the infinite depth of Christ’s condescension in the Incarnation. Philippians 2 reveals the great humility that Christ demonstrated in taking on our humanity. Leah pens a great paragraph, part of which bears repeating: “Jesus was not born in an unfallen Eden, but to the ravaged Bethlehem… Mary’s original sin reminds us that Jesus did not merely come to share our humanity but our shamed humanity.”
So let us join with Mary in celebration of this great feast and wait with her in anticipation of the consummation of all feasts!
Thank you James! Because I was thinking primarily of Mary through the lens of her Son’s passion, death, and resurrection, I omitted an excellent quotation from Martin Luther, which further captures Mary’s accessibility to us normal humans at the time of the Annunciation: “Quite possibly Mary was doing the housework when the Angel Gabriel came to her. Angels prefer to come to people as they are fulfilling their calling and discharging their office.” Let us thus be inspired to fulfill our ordinary callings, and so allow God to do perform mighty deeds.