Fr. Martin Browne OSB
One of the things that critics of Christianity often point out is how divided, argumentative, and sometimes downright horrible Christians can be. Mahatma Gandhi is reputed to have said, ‘I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ’. He had a point. Christians are always squabbling. Within the Catholic Church, the past year has seen much in-fighting, some of it truly vitriolic and nasty, over issues as diverse as climate change, papal authority and the pre-Vatican II Mass.
I’m not quite sure whether it’s a consoling sign or a depressing one – probably a bit of both – but it seems that it was ever thus. From the earliest days of the Church, for example, followers of Jesus disagreed and argued over the precise meaning of the mystery we have been celebrating for the past week: the mystery of God’s ‘Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law’. How could Jesus be both fully God and fully human? Was the Son of God himself truly God also? Great Councils of the Church took place to hammer out answers to these questions and they weren’t always edifying spectacles. There’s even a legend that Saint Nicholas, whom we have come to know as Santa Claus, got so frustrated with the heretical views of the priest Arius about the nature of Christ in debates during the Council of Nicaea in 325 that he slapped him in the face! Christians arguing and letting themselves down by the way they treat each other is certainly not a new phenomenon…
Just over a hundred years later, in 431, another important Council took place, this time at Ephesus. Among other things, it reaffirmed what the Creed said about Jesus – that he was God from God and Light from Light. If follows that if Jesus is not only the Son of God, but is also himself God, then Mary is literally the ‘Mother of God’. The term used at Ephesus wasTheotokos: ‘God-bearer’, or ‘the one who gives birth to God’. Of all the titles given to Mary, and there are thousands, surely this must be the most beautiful and the most important. She is not just the mother of Jesus, or mother of the Christ, but is truly the Mother of God, because through her, the true God became true man.
‘Today a wonderful mystery is announced: natures are made new; God has become human: he remained that which he was and has assumed that which he was not.’
The titles of Theotokos and Mother of God are not just bouquets of honour to be flung in Mary’s direction; they are powerful proclamations of the Incarnation. To reflect in prayer on Mary as Mother of God is as much a meditation on who Jesus is as it is a meditation on who Mary is. Through the birth of Emmanuel from the Blessed Virgin Mary, the path to glory was opened up to humanity.
‘O wonderful exchange! The Creator of human nature took on a human body and was born of the Virgin. He became man without having a human father and has bestowed on us his divine nature.’
Today’s Gospel picks up where we left off at Christmas Midnight Mass. Having heard the angel’s astonishing message, the shepherds went to see for themselves ‘and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger’.
‘In a corner stall of pilgrim strangers,
she falls and heaves, holding a tide of tears.
A red wire of pain feeds through every vein
until night unweaves and the child reaches dawn.
Outside each other now, she sees him first.
Flesh of her flesh, her dreamt son safe on earth.’
‘After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.’ The last few lines of today’s Gospel reading seem almost like an afterthought, but they remind us firstly of his humanity and his parents’ obedience to the Law, but also of his divine and miraculous origins, foretold by the angel, who named him before he was conceived in Mary’s womb. He was named Jesus, because, as the angel told Joseph in another place, ‘he will save his people from their sins’.
Mary’s motherhood brings God fully into the complex, messy and beautiful reality of human existence – she who, as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote:
‘Gave God’s infinity
Dwindled to infancy
Welcome in womb and breast,
Birth, milk, and all the rest’.
And all the rest…. Yes, God truly became one of us. He visited us like the dawn from on high, but he is no spirit or spectre, but is flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. ‘Birth, milk and all the rest…’.
Mary, Joseph, the shepherds, the Magi and his apostles and disciples all knew Jesus in the flesh. We know him now by faith, in the proclamation of his word and the celebration of the sacraments. We too can be bearers of him… can bring him to birth in our lives… Our homes can be new Bethlehems or new Nazareths, where the Word made flesh is revealed to others by our love – if only, unlike the Christians criticised by Gandhi, we would live like Christ.
Let this be our resolution, our hope and our prayer for this New Year.
‘Of her flesh he took flesh:
He does take fresh and fresh,
Though much the mystery how,
Not flesh but spirit now
And makes, O marvellous!
New Nazareths in us,
Where she shall yet conceive
Him, morning, noon, and eve;
New Bethlems, and he born
There, evening, noon, and morn—
Bethlem or Nazareth,
Men here may draw like breath
More Christ and baffle death;
Who, born so, comes to be
New self and nobler me
In each one and each one
More makes, when all is done,
Both God’s and Mary’s Son.’