Mary: Mother of God? First disciple?

Today we reach the Fourth Sunday of Advent, or in popular lore, "Mary Sunday."

And though the gospel lesson for today, Matthew 1:18-25, is focused on Joseph, I still felt like preaching about Mary. Here is my sermon for today:

* * *

The Blessed Virgin Mary

Grace and peace to you this Holy day.

We’ve officially reached the Fourth Sunday of Advent. In popular lore, today is known as Mary Sunday.

In a little while, we are going to recite the Nicene Creed, and we will say the following line: “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.”

Now I know full well that some of you will be literally or figuratively crossing your fingers when you say that line, or your voices will drop to a mumble.

So I want to spend some time today talking about the Blessed Virgin Mary. To see her, we need to cut through layers and layers of hazy church history and dense theologizing. To see Mary, we need to use a little mental archaeology.

What do we know of Mary? Not a great deal. Her name in Hebrew was Miriam. She was very young, maybe 13 or 14 when she became pregnant out of wedlock.

The Greek of the New Testament uses the word παρθενος, which we translate as “virgin” in English; the word also means “young girl” or “maiden.” The word has everything to do with her age and martial status, not just her biology.

This we also know: Mary was betrothed to Joseph, a Jewish man probably quite a bit older than she, and almost certainly it was an arranged marriage. She no doubt outlived him, for we hear little else about Joseph soon after.

In the Gospel of Matthew, an angel tells Joseph about Mary’s pregnancy and to not be afraid. The angel tells Joseph that a child will come and he is to take care of him and call him “Emmanuel” – God is with us. He has no idea who the father is – the angel doesn’t tell him. All he knows is the maiden he is about to marry is pregnant and not by him.

Jewish law held that Joseph, if he wished, could have had Mary stoned to death for what was an obvious tarnishing of his honor.

He could have dispatched her just like this, and no one would have thought it wrong.

It is a great act of faith on the part of Joseph that he weds Mary anyway and protects her child and takes her child as his own.

We don’t get much of a portrait of Mary in the Gospel of Matthew. She gives birth in a stable but we don’t hear from her in Matthew. She is almost a secondary character in Matthew.

It is to the Gospel of Luke where we must turn to catch a glimpse of Mary’s personality.

In Luke, we hear that an angel came to Mary in a dream, and told her she was with child, and that God was already dwelling within her.

Mary must have been terrified. She knew Joseph could have her put to death, and still she said “yes” to having this child, and she trusted all would be well even when reason was screaming otherwise.

"My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary sings in the Gospel of Luke, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”

The rest of the story of Mary, Joseph and Jesus will unfold in the days and weeks ahead as we walk toward Christmas and the Cross and Easter beyond.

There is another side to the Mary story, and to hear it we need to fast-forward into the fourth century, to that Nicene Creed that we say, and to how early Christians struggled to understand their experience of the Risen Christ.

The church fathers, and they were men, knew there was something miraculous about the birth of Jesus, as indeed there was. But they struggled mightly with the idea that Jesus was both God and man at the same time.

To be God, they reasoned, he must be pure, he must be without sin, and by the fourth century sinfulness was becoming equated with the human body and sexuality. Some influential Greek philosophers saw the human body as revolting, and so all sex, even in the covenant of marriage, became sinful.

For Jesus to be without sin, they reasoned, he must have been born outside of sexual relations. The focus on Mary as a pure “virgin” came into high relief.

A legend even grew that Mary’s own birth must have been to a virgin mother, becoming known as the “immaculate conception” of Mary. Mary needed to be born in purity for Jesus to be born in purity. You can see where this is going.

Maybe all of that is true. But what is so unfortunate is how the human body came to be seen as a sinful vessel. Our current conflicts over sexuality began right here.

The Church began to lose sight of Mary’s humanity and her act of discipleship toward the child she bore. The ancient Church rendered Mary into a perpetual virgin.

The gospels note, by the way, that Mary had many more children after Jesus including his brother Jacob, whom we know as James.

His siblings pop up all over the place in the gospels, and yet the Church began to maintain that Mary was a perpetual virgin. Even in the gospel lesson you hear today, Joseph had marital relations with Mary.

The real miracle of Jesus’ birth is that God chose to walk among us as a human being. By so doing, God showed us that the human body is good, that our creation is divine, and our deepest most intimate and committed relationships with each other are truly ordained by God and should be cherished as sacred.

Something else happened as the centuries unfolded that clouds how we view Mary. The idea grew that Jesus was a mighty warrior, and you can see that reflected in medieval art in depictions of Jesus wearing armor and holding a sword.

With that grew the idea that Jesus was inaccessible, and so a counterbalancing cult of Mary grew. If we could not pray to Jesus, surely he would listen to his mother. So direct your prayers to Mary and she’ll talk to him for you. Call it heavenly triangulating.

Mary acquired a new title in Greek – Τηεοτοκος, the Mother of God.

Centuries later, Protestant reformers railed against the idea that they needed Mary to reach Jesus.

So they sought to rid Christianity of the cult of Mary. The new Protestants banished Mary statues and rosary beads, and mocked apparitions of Mary as superstition.

That reaction was also unfortunate side to it. In so doing, Protestantism lost sight of Mary as the mother of Jesus.

She was there at his birth and at his death; she is the one who ought to be thought of as the first apostle, the first disciple; the one who said “yes” every step of the way; the very blessed one who showed more courage than a legion of Roman warriors.

There is one more level to this that I would commend to you.

I believe the images of Mary are another way for the Holy Spirit to reach us in unexpected ways. The Holy comes to us not just in male imagery – not just as God the Father and God the Son.

The Holy Spirit can come to us as female, as she can and will touch us here in our heart in ways that will comfort us, give us courage and strength, and change us in ways we can scarcely imagine.

The Holy Spirit is like a wind that will blow where she will, and will show her face in ways that speak to us in the depths of our soul, and gives us strength and courage when we most need it most. The question is do we have eyes to see and ears to hear?

To me, this idea of Mary is a reminder that not all of life can be understood by our intellect. Not everything lends itself to neat equations and philosophical categories.

Much of life is inexplicable and only can be experienced as the inexplicable. Sometimes a legend or a poem is more powerful than a dense theological treatise.

The holy can come when we least expect it, coming as a friend who listens, or in the quiet of the night, or as an image of a young mother, or as a newborn child.

And so I bring you back to Mary, the Blessed Maiden Miriam, who rejoiced at hearing she would have her child, and was with him at every step of his life, even to his death and beyond.

She certainly had a mother’s worries, but she moved forward in faith anyway. She was truly the first Christian, and she still has much to teach us about how to say “yes” when it is hardest, and how to be a servant to the lowly, and what it means to face tremendous challenges with courage and even joy.

"My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary sings, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”
Amen

Theotokos icon by Kenneth D. Dowdy.

The cycle of conception, birth and rebirth begins today

Today holds a curious key to understanding the Christian calendar and the deeper meaning within it. Go with me here for a bit.

The march to Christmas (yes, Christmas) begins today with The Feast of the Annunciation. This is the day the Church celebrates the angel Gabriel coming to Mary and telling her she is with child.

Nine months from today will be Christmas. You may have heard that Christmas was selected by the early church to co-opt the Roman's winter solstice celebration.

That is an interesting legend but doesn't really hold up; for one thing, the solstice is December 21. The early Roman church likely set December 25 as Christmas after counting forward nine months from today, the Annunciation.

It gets even more complicated than that. There were great debates for centuries in the Church on when to set the date of Easter. The Feast of the Annunciation in some quarters marked the new year, and was related to the marking of Easter and the Spring equinox. There were some who insisted that Easter should coincide with the Jewish Passover. Others wanted to keep it on a fixed date; Easter began moving around the calendar, but the Annunciation and Christmas remained fixed.

A broader way of thinking of this is that the Annunciation, Easter and Christmas are connected to each other in an eternal cycle. Mary becomes pregnant, giving birth to Jesus nine months later; his life and ministry is marked in the days between Christmas and Easter. The day of her pregnancy is near to the day of his Resurrection, and so the cycle begins anew marking Jesus' conception, birth, life, death and new birth.

That makes the calendar a marker of incarnation. The calendar is a reminder that God dwells with us (or in the Greek, God "tents") with us in the person of Jesus, and he remains with us before and after the historic events of long ago. The calendar therefore becomes not just a keeper of days, but a method of prayer that, like the seasons, marks how new life leads to death that leads to new life.

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. And he came to her and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?" The angel said to her, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God." Then Mary said, "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word." Then the angel departed from her.

Luke 1: 26-38

If you want to know more about the development of the calendar, Thomas J. Talley, S.J., is considered the leading scholar on the topic. His books are a bit turgid but a goldmine of information.

Painting "The Annunciation" by Fra Angelico (1387-1455).

The Priesthood of Mary, and the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple

You may not know this, but this past Tuesday, February 2, was a major feast day of the Church: The Presentation of Our Lord in the Temple. The Rev. Dr. Ann Willms, associate rector, preached a terrific homily at our regular 12:15 pm Tuesday Eucharist, and it is well worth reading.

As long as we are on the topic, please let me urge you to come on a Tuesday if you are in the area; it is a short, contemplative Eucharist, and there is time left over for lunch; think of it as a sabbath in your week.

Ann's homily is below, and the readings that go with it are Malachi 3:1-4 , Hebrews 2:14-18 , Luke 2:22-40

The Priesthood of Mary

We have been basking in the light of our visit from the Presiding Bishop, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori. But today offers us a feast day in which to recognize another shining light: the Mother of Our Lord.

Let us put today’s gospel in context. The infant Jesus, in accordance with Jewish law, was circumcised and named eight days after his birth. Following the birth of a child, women were to refrain from conjugal relations for seven days. They were then restricted from entering holy places or touching sacred objects for 33 days (if the child was male) or 66 days (if the child was female). Since blood was synonymous with life force, any loss of blood was seen as symbolic of death and held the aura of uncleanness. Time and ritual allowed the uncleanness to dissipate and life force to be restored to its proper place. (Leviticus 12)

At the end of this time period, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the Temple to present him as their firstborn son, dedicated as holy to the Lord, again in keeping with the law. In conjunction with the presentation, Mary was reintegrated into the Jewish societal structure after her period of purification by bringing an offering of a pigeon or turtledoves. This had nothing to do with purification from sin, as conception and birth held no such taint.

In the Malachi reading for today, we hear that God will come to his Temple suddenly, and that there will come a time when the priests’ offerings are made in righteousness. In Hebrews, we hear that Jesus himself becomes the pure offering, the “once for all” atoning sacrifice which allows us to appear righteous before God.

I would like to suggest that Mary, his mother, is the “priest” who presents Jesus to God as this perfect offering, an offering borne in and from her own flesh. Unlike the priests of the levitical line who were such by tribal lineage, Mary has chosen to align her life with God’s purpose and become the priest who will bear Jesus in her own body. Her “ordination” occurred with the annunciation – her whole person was set aside as holy by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that she might be the Theotokos – the God-bearer.

Being a levitical priest entailed sacrificing animals with a knife – being a priest of the flesh like Mary entails that “a sword will pierce your own soul also.” Bearing Jesus to the world, presenting him as the priests that we are will indeed entail a sword – some will hear, some will scoff, some will accept, many will reject him. But we are priests and so we keep bearing him, the Incarnate Word, the one true offering we can make, to the world.

Mary as priest brings Jesus to the world. Jesus our great high priest will present us before God, clothed in righteousness. In the meantime, our priestly vocation is to bear, to “present” Jesus to the world, to incarnate him in our own flesh, and to be ready for the sword that will pierce our own soul for sorrow and for joy.

Ann Willms

The Blessed Maiden Miriam

Today's sermon is from Luke 1:39-45, (46-55)

"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.”

My father was, to use an old-fashioned term, a churchman. He served on the Vestry, he enjoyed being an usher, and he led more stewardship campaigns than I can count. My dad took his faith very seriously, and I truly learned most of what I know about the church at my daddy’s knee.

But there was one thing he always had a problem with – and it was this: the idea of the Blessed “Virgin” Mary. Besides the fact that he just didn’t believe the biology that is suggested in that, the whole concept did not seem, well, very Protestant to him.

I suspect many of you would agree with him.

And yet, in a little while, we are going to recite the Nicene Creed, and we will say the following line: “by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary and was made man.”

Now I know full well that some of you will be crossing your fingers when you say that, or your voices will drop to a mumble.

So I want to spend some time today talking about Mary, the mother of Jesus; the one who was there at his birth and at his death; the one who really should be thought of as the first apostle, the first disciple; the one who said “yes” every step of the way; the very blessed one who showed more courage than an entire legion of Roman warriors.

To get there we need to cut through layers and layers of hazy church history and dense theologizing. To see Mary, we need to use a little mental archaeology.

What do we know of Mary? Her name in Hebrew was Miriam. She was very young, maybe 13 or 14 when she became pregnant out of wedlock.

The Greek of the New Testament uses the word παρθενος (parthenos), which we translate as “virgin” in English; it also means “young girl” or “maiden.” The word has everything to do with her age and martial status.

This we also know: Mary was betrothed to Joseph, a Jewish man probably quite a bit older than she, and almost certainly it was an arranged marriage. She no doubt outlived him, for we hear little else about Joseph soon after.

In the gospel of Luke today, we hear that an angel – a spirit – came to Mary in a dream, and told her she was with child, and that God was already dwelling within her.

That an angel told her she was pregnant I find easy to believe, for I have heard from mothers who tell me they had a similar dream before a medical test confirmed it for them.

Mary, though, must have been quite terrified, for Jewish law held that Joseph, if he wished, could have her stoned to death for what was an obvious indiscrection. He could have dispatched her just like this, and no one would have thought it wrong.

An angel, though, told Joseph not to do that. And so he took young Mary as his wife, and they left town, probably in shame, and she had her child naming him “Yesous,” or Joshua. In our badly translated Germanic language Bibles, our Reformation ancestors rendered his name “Jesus.”

The rest of the story of Yesous, or Jesus, will unfold in the weeks and months ahead as we walk toward the Cross and Easter beyond.

But for now, I want to fast-forward into the fourth century, to that creed that we say, and to how it came to be as the early Christians struggled to understand the life and death and their experience of the risen Christ.

The church fathers, and they were men, struggled over the question of how Jesus could be both God and man at the same time. They knew there was something miraculous about his birth, as indeed there was.

To be God, they reasoned, he must be pure, he must be without sin, and by the fourth century sinfulness was becoming equated with sexuality. Some influential Greek philosophers saw the human body as revolting, and so all sex, even in the covenant of marriage, became suspect.

And so it was that the focus came upon Mary; for Jesus to be without sin, they figured, he must have been born outside of sexual relations. A legend even grew that Mary’s own birth must have been to a virgin mother.

Maybe all of that is true. But what is so unfortunate is how the human body came to be seen as a sinful vessel, and so the Church rendered Mary into a perpetual virgin. The gospels note, by the way, that Mary had many more children after Jesus including his brother Jacob, whom we know as James.

Was Jesus born to a virgin? I don’t think it matters. But what is important is his birth, and what that birth represents to all of humanity, and the “yes” that his mother gave over and over.
The real miracle of Jesus’ birth is that God chose to walk among us as a human being, and by so doing, God showed us that the human body is good, that our creation is divine, and our deepest most intimate relationships with each other are truly ordained by God and should be cherished as sacred.

Something else happened as the centuries unfolded that clouds how we view Mary. The idea grew that Jesus was a mighty warrior, and you will see that in medieval art in depictions of Jesus wearing armor and holding a sword.

With that grew the idea that Jesus was inaccessible, and so a counterbalancing cult of Mary grew. If we could not pray to Jesus, surely he would listen to his mother. So direct your prayers to Mary and she’ll talk to him for you. Call it heavenly triangulating.

Mary acquired a new title in Greek – Τηεοτοκοσ (theotokos), the Mother of God.

Centuries later, Protestant reformers railed against the idea that they needed Mary to reach Jesus, and so they sought to rid Christianity of the cult of Mary; and people like my father grew up highly suspicious of Mary statues and rosary beads.

That, too, is unfortunate, for we may have lost sight of the real Mary in the process.

And so I bring you back to Mary, the Blessed Maiden Miriam, who rejoiced at hearing she would have her child, and was with him at every step of his life, even to his death and beyond. She certainly had a mother’s worries, but she moved forward in faith anyway.

She was truly the first Christian, and she still has much to teach us about how to say “yes” when it is hardest, and how to be a servant to the lowly, and what it means to face tremendous challenges with courage and even joy. Amen.

"My soul magnifies the Lord,

and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,

for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;

for the Mighty One has done great things for me,

and holy is his name.

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 powerful from their thrones,

and lifted up the lowly;

he has filled the hungry with good things,

and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel,

in remembrance of his mercy,

according to the promise he made to our ancestors,

to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

* * *

Painting of the Virgin and Child by Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520)

The Saints of Summer: Mary, Mother of Jesus and how we think of her

Today is one of the official feast days for The Blessed Virgin Mary. She has more feasts than any saint on the calendar. There are three such days on the Anglican and Episcopal calendar; the Roman Catholic calendar has 15 days devoted to Mary.

This veneration of Mary was not always so. The Council of Ephesus in 431 sanctioned devotion to the Theotokos -- "the Mother of God" -- only after considerable controversy. The theology that developed was Jesus was unapproachable, the royal son of God, clad in armor with a sword. It was becoming disrespectful to directly pray to Jesus; but surely he would listen to his mother.

Among the innovations of the Protestant Reformation was to attempt seeing Jesus as the approachable Christ of prayer. Marion devotion was discouraged, even banned in places.

Yet Mary lingers in popularity, and not just among Catholics. She is central to devotion in Eastern Orthodox churches, and many Episcopalians have Mary and the Rosary central in their prayer life. We may scoff at her apparitions on slices of toast, but Mary remains central to the piety of millions. She appears to people in dreams and in moments of extreme crisis.

I must admit to being puzzled by this, until a few years ago on this feast day we celebrate today.

We were traveling with our choir in Canterbury, and we were definitely pilgrims. I got up early on this particular feast day, and I went alone to the Cathedral. But instead of Eucharist at one of the magnificent altars, we were invited that morning into the catacombs and to a chamber barely lit by candles. There we celebrated our Eucharist, and our preacher was a Palestinian woman who was an Anglican priest.

I don't remember all that she said, but she talked of opening herself to all that God asked of her, devoting her life to service that others might live, and doing so under circumstances that are difficult, even dangerous.

That is when I got it about Mary.

Here are the words to the Magnificat, the words Mary is said to have prayed when the angel came to her in a dream and told her of the child she would bear (Luke 1:46-55):

"My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is his name.
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 powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
in remembrance of his mercy,
according to the promise he made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and to his descendants forever."

The photo is of a Palestinian woman and child at the Ain al-Hehweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon; photo credit to Ya Libnan.

Guadalupe, bells, pageants

A lot is going on at St. Paul's this weekend. We have the Christmas Pageant by our kids at the 10 a.m. worship on Sunday. And no sermon! But before you get to Sunday, here's what is happening Friday and Saturday:

On Friday at 5:30 pm we are doing a special service marking the feast day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, followed by a Mexican dinner at 6:15 pm in the parish hall as a fund-raiser for PACEM, our homeless ministry. The feast day of Guadalupe is the major Mary feast in Mexico. Guadalupe is particularly iconic for the poor and destitute in our world, so it is especially appropriate that we donate to PACEM this time of year on this day. Our suggested donation is $15, and Lori is making tortilla soup.

And on Saturday at 10 am, our Green Team is leading us in ringing the St. Paul's bell 350 times to sound the alarm on global warming, and joining other faith communities across the nation in a campaign called “Sound of Hope and Spirit.” The idea is to ring each church bell 350 times to spread the call to action, in conjunction with 350.org founded by environmentalist and author Bill McKibben. 

350.org is a coalition pushing for effective action to address the global warming crisis and encouraging action that will result in recognition of the goal of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide from 385 parts per million to 350 ppm.

The bell at St. Paul's Memorial Church was installed in 1957 and has been rung every Sunday morning since to call the faithful to worship – and has also been rung to celebrate joyful occasions such as weddings or to signal attention during times of national crisis such as 9/11. “Such a crisis is now upon on us, threatening devastation of our environment, economy and creation as we know it,” said Gwynn Crichton, organizer of the event for parishioners at St. Paul’s.

While ringing the bell on Dec. 13, parishioners will be served hot drinks and cookies and will also be encouraged to write Congressional representatives and the White House to urge support for reductions that will meet the target goal for 350 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

St. Paul's is a member of Virginia Interfaith Power & Light, a non-profit initiative working for a more just, sustainable and healthier creation by reducing global warming. Those of you from California will recognize it as part of the network of Interfaith Power & Light, founded by the Rev. Sally Bingham of the Diocese of California, offering concrete opportunities for congregations and individuals to protect the planet.

I hope you can join us for some or all of these events this weekend.

What is it about Mary?

This is the time of Mary, the time we remember a young peasant woman long ago who broke every tribal rule to say "yes" to God. Below is a brief mediation on Mary by Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury who wrote this two years ago. Enjoy:

What Matters About Mary?

A message from Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

for the Second Sunday of Advent

If all we ever see is a rather sentimental picture of a passive young girl as a decorative centrepiece for the Nativity scene, it may not be clear why Christians should be concerned to honour and remember her as they do. Here are two things that might make us think about her more seriously.
The first is something we easily forget. When we meet Mary for the first time in the Bible, she is a person who, in the society of her day, doesn't matter in her own right - a single woman who will only become really significant when she gets married and continues the tribal line. God comes to her and calls her to take a massive risk. She is to step right outside the business of 'tribal lines', the male world of inheritance and power. By saying yes to God and letting God create a new world within her very body, she is saying no to some of the most dominant things in her world. She is risking rejection, perhaps destitution (as Matthew's gospel hints). She is putting herself, spirit and body, at God's service, with practically no idea of how deep the cost may be. Say what you like about that, but it isn't the story of a passive person. This is someone who, at least as much as any great artist or scientist, is taking the risk of making the world different - breathing deeply and facing the price they'll have to pay whatever it may be.
The second thing is this. Jesus is a real human being, so he has a real human psychology. He learns how to be human as we do, from the people around him. Just as for all of us, the first faces and voices he sees will shape who he will be. So the mother of Jesus is central to Jesus' humanity - not in an abstract sense, but in a very concrete one. He learns how to be human from her. He learns from her how to respond to the terrible, risky calling of the Father. And as he learns how to be human, he acts out more and more fully on earth the eternal life of God that he was born to live among us. Mary's human discipleship is one of the conditions for Jesus' humanity to grow up and reveal that perfect fusion between divine love and human response that is his unique gift to the world. He is who he is because she was who she was.

She is not the final and perfect form of renewed humanity - that belongs to her son alone. But she is part of what makes his perfection possible. So - passive? Once again, no. In one of the great images often used of her, she is the open door of the Temple, through which the streams of living water flow to heal the earth. Her freedom to respond to her Lord turns the wheel of history and begins the story of our salvation. She is someone who deeply deserves our celebration and gratitude.