Mary in Different Traditions

Seeing the Mother of Jesus with New Eyes

Thomas G Casey

• Publisher: Messenger Publications
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781788124188
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Catholicism in the Western world today demands real effort to turn to Our Lady in any meaningful way. The author explores the insights of other faiths – Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Islam and Judaism; and also the insights of the 'other' within the Catholic tradition – the Eastern-rite Catholics who, despite their full communion with Rome, have a distinct approach to Mary based on thir unique liturgical and spiritual tradition. Perhaps the novelty of their viewpoints on Mary can bring us to the joy of surprise about her once again, and help us to enjoy the even greater wonder of her son, Jesus.

CHAPTER ONE

MARY in LUTHER and the LUTHERAN TRADITION

She became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man’s understanding. For on this there follows all honour, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a child.

Martin Luther

There has been much constructive dialogue between Anglicans and Roman Catholics about Mary and her role, and both are in agreement on the core principles concerning devotion to the Mother of God. However, this chapter won’t analyse any official pronouncements about Mary. Such pronouncements are certainly important. But the primary (though not exclusive) aim of this book is to help Catholics rediscover Mary, and the real struggle we Catholics have with the figure of Mary is not at the theoretical level, but at the level of our feelings and attitudes. It’s not that we dislike her; it’s more that she has become less and less real for us. We find it difficult to see her as someone to whom we can relate in a genuine and unforced way. Examining a series of doctrinal statements won’t unblock this affective impediment, because theoretical analysis doesn’t speak to the heart. However, Martin Luther, Søren Kierkegaard and Dietrich Bonhoeffer could just stir us up. That’s because they write about Mary with feeling and fervour. Since the Bible plays such a central role in the Reformed Churches, these three passionate Christians concentrate on Mary’s portrayal in Scripture. They challenge us to base our devotion to Mary upon a solidly biblical foundation.

Mary in Martin Luther’s Magnificat

The years 1520 and 1521 marked a turbulent period in the life of Martin Luther. In June 1520, Pope Leo X issued the bull Exsurge Domine (‘Arise, Oh Lord’), declaring that forty-one statements in Luther’s Ninety-five Theses were heretical, and threatening Luther with excommunication if he did not recant his teaching. The bull took four months to get to Luther, only arriving in Wittenberg on 10 October 1520. Luther was given sixty days to decide how to respond. On 10 December 1520 he responded in a public manner that left no room for ambiguity: gathering with supporters in Wittenberg, he threw the papal bull into a blazing bonfire. This led, on 3 January 1521, to the bull that officially excommunicated him, marking his definitive break with Rome.

Yet despite all these tumultuous events, Luther did not neglect writing or study. We know from one of his letters that as early as November 1520, he was already at work writing a commentary on Mary’s canticle of praise, the Magnificat. We can gauge something of the importance of this task for Luther by noting that even being excommunicated didn’t put him off this project so dear to his heart. He only interrupted his writing in April 1521 in order to attend the Diet of Worms. Although this sounds like a particularly unappetising series of meals, it was in fact an assembly (Diet) in a German town (Worms)! Luther had been summoned there either to retract or reassert his new teachings. He arrived on 16 April 1521, and for the next two days bravely defended his views. On his way home from Worms, as he travelled through the Black Forest, he was intercepted by masked horsemen. They pretended to kidnap Luther, but it later emerged that the whole event had been staged by his protector Prince Frederick III, Elector of Saxony, in an effort to save Luther from those who may have been really intent on putting an end to his life.

Luther was kept in hiding in Wartburg Castle for the next ten months or so. He called Wartburg Castle his ‘Patmos’, referring to the island where Saint John the Evangelist is traditionally said to have composed the Book of Revelation. It was while he was in seclusion there that he resumed his commentary on Mary’s Magnificat, completing it in June 1521. When the book was published a few months later, Pope Leo X, the very person who had excommunicated him, declared after reading it: ‘Blessed are the hands that have written this.’

Luther’s commentary on the Magnificat is dedicated to a young nobleman, John Frederick I, the Elector of Saxony. Although only eighteen years of age when the commentary was completed, John Frederick was already in correspondence with Luther and had become one of his most avid supporters. As a mark of gratitude for all the support he received from John Frederick, Luther dedicated this heartfelt commentary to his enthusiastic teenage admirer.

Gratitude is also a theme that stands out in Luther’s study of Mary’s Magnificat, and we Catholics can learn much from Luther’s insights into Mary’s spirit of thankfulness. Luther maintains that Mary did not sing the Magnificat for herself alone, but also for us, in order that we could learn to sing it, and like Mary, to praise and thank God for his goodness. Luther divides the Magnificat into two main parts. In the first part, Mary rejoices in the gifts she has received from God in her own life. In the second part, she gives thanks for what God has done in human history as a whole. As he goes through each part of the Magnificat, Luther comments on Mary’s canticle line by line. Let’s see for ourselves how Luther highlights Mary’s fundamental disposition of gratitude.

The first line of the Magnificat is ‘My soul magnifies the Lord’. Instead of saying ‘I’, Mary uses the words ‘my soul’. Luther notes that in the Bible the words ‘soul’ and ‘life’ are often synonymous. So, when Mary declares that her soul magnifies the Lord, she is effectively saying that all of her life is given over to loving and praising God. Mary is filled with the Holy Spirit, and the joy she feels is a sure sign that God is at work in her. According to Luther, the fact that Mary ‘magnifies’ God, is a clear indication that her hymn is about ‘the great works and deeds of God’. As a grateful person, her attention is not centred on herself, but upon God, towards whom she is filled with gratitude. He contrasts Mary with ‘two kinds of false spirits that cannot sing the Magnificat’ in the right way. First, there are the people who will only thank and praise God when things are going well for them. As soon they encounter any problems, they stop singing and lose all respect for God. The second group is worse still, because instead of thanking God for his gifts, these people want to be honoured as though these gifts were their own possessions. Tragically, God’s gifts end up making them proud and complacent, and they begin to sing a different kind of song: My soul magnifies me! As for Mary, ‘she does not desire herself to be esteemed; she magnifies God alone and gives all glory to him’.

In the second line Mary says, ‘my spirit rejoices in God, my Saviour’. Luther notes that Mary rejoices first of all in God. She calls him God before calling him Saviour. She loves and thanks God because he is God, and therefore he is good. Only after this does she call God her Saviour, and this confession is a confession of faith, because she calls him her Saviour before she sees convincing evidence of his salvation. He contrasts Mary’s pure love with the impure love of those who do not praise God for his goodness, but only for his goodness to them. These people do not rejoice in their Saviour but only in their own salvation. They are fixated on the gift and neglect the Giver. They want God to do their will, but they refuse to do his will. The false gratitude of these people prevents God from giving them abundant gifts, above all the gift of salvation. Mary, however, is free. When she receives good things from God, she does not become attached to them; and when these good things are removed from her, she does not fall away from God. Whatever the circumstances, Mary has a grateful heart. She does not rejoice in the gifts, but in God. She ‘clings only to God’s goodness which she neither sees nor feels, overlooks the good things she does feel, and neither takes pleasure nor seeks her own enjoyment therein. Thus she can truly sing, “My spirit rejoices in God my Saviour”’.

‘For he has looked upon the lowliness of his servant’. Luther remarks that Mary delights ‘solely in the divine regard, which is so exceeding good and gracious that he deigned to look upon such a lowly maiden’. There is nothing trivial about ‘the divine regard’: the fact that God turns his face toward us means that we receive grace and salvation. Luther alludes to the psalms that invoke the radiance of God’s face: Psalm 4 says ‘lift up the light of your face upon us’; Psalm 67 pleads: ‘May God be gracious and bless us, and make his face to shine upon us’. Luther emphasises that Mary does not glory in her virginity or in her humility but only in God’s loving and gracious eyes that are turned toward her. He underlines the fact that Mary is truly humble and that ‘true humility … never knows that it is humble’. This is the reason, he explains, why Mary is troubled at the veneration with which the angel Gabriel salutes her, since ‘she had never expected the like’. She is happy in her lowliness and does not seek to be exalted or honoured. She does not become distracted by the great gifts that God has given her, nor does she boast of them, but instead goes beyond them to rise towards God, ‘cling to him alone and highly esteem his goodness’. By contrast, those who have false humility are only content to speak and act humbly as long as the rich and mighty pay attention to them. But when people stop paying attention to them, they quickly abandon any pretence of lowliness: ‘Men despise themselves, yet so as to be despised by no one else; they fly from honours, yet so as to be pursued by honours … But this holy Virgin points to naught else save her low estate. In it she was content to spend the remainder of her days, never seeking to be honoured or exalted, nor ever becoming aware of her own humility.’

‘From this day forward all generations shall call me blessed’. Luther points out that Mary is clear about the reason she will be called blessed in the future: it is because God has turned his face towards her. ‘Mary confesses that the foremost work God wrought for her was that he regarded her, which is indeed the greatest of his works, on which all the rest depend and from which they all derive. For where it comes to pass that God turns his face toward one to regard him, there is naught but grace and salvation, and all gifts and works must needs follow’. In other words, Mary attributes the source of her blessedness to God, and not to herself. She is not praising herself, but God. In Luther’s view, Mary is ‘the foremost example of the grace of God’. For this reason she is a model for us, encouraging us to trust in God’s grace, to believe that he will look upon us graciously as well, and fill us with knowledge and love of him.

‘For the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.’ Luther equates ‘the great things’ with the stupendous truth ‘that she became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed on her as pass man’s understanding. For on this there follows all honour, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among which she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in heaven, and such a child … Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her or to her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea.’

Underlying this emphasis on Mary as the Mother of God is Luther’s deep gratitude that God has taken on human flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. Who could have imagined that the transcendent Creator of the universe would have decided to enter our world as a weak and vulnerable child? Yet this is precisely what happened. On the one hand, God had to become a human being in order to suffer and die, but on the other hand he had to remain God for his death to become our forgiveness. It is because Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary that he is a true human being; it is because he is begotten of the Father from all eternity that he is true God. As Mother of God, no other creature is Mary’s equal, because she had a child by the heavenly Father, and not just any child, but a divine child. Luther stresses that Mary does not take any credit for giving birth to Jesus: ‘For though she was without sin, yet that grace was too surpassing great for her to deserve it in any way. How should a creature deserve to become the Mother of God?’ This is why, according to Luther, Mary adds the words, ‘holy is his name’: precisely to underscore that it is because of God’s goodness. She recognises that it is all the work of God. Luther puts the following words onto the lips of Our Lady: ‘None, therefore, should praise me or give me the glory for becoming the Mother of God, but God alone and his work are to be honoured and praised in me. It is enough to congratulate me and call me blessed, because God used me and wrought in me his works’.

It is becoming evident that the novelty of Luther’s approach to Mary is that he focuses on what God achieves in her, and not on her own achievements. He highlights what God does in her, and not what she herself does. For Luther, Mary’s response to God models what our response should be, because she opens herself completely to the mystery of God. The greatness of Mary is in her huge and grateful yes of faith, her surrender to God’s loving plan for her. Luther places before our admiring gaze this self-effacing woman from Nazareth, who combines deep humility with complete trust in God. She is small enough and trusting enough to open herself to the unimaginable fullness of God’s grace.

Luther highlights something crucial about Mary: she is not preoccupied with amassing merits, for the simple reason that she is not preoccupied with herself at all. She is not obsessed with doing as many good works as possible, as though she were lodging money in a spiritual bank to become her insurance policy on the Last Day. She simply gives and gives and gives, without attributing much importance to what she does, because her heart is fully focused on God. She doesn’t want God to count up all her good works; instead, she pays constant attention to God’s blessings so that she can give continual thanks to him. She does not seek to accomplish great deeds but instead to trust God completely and at every moment.

Luther emphasises that God’s mercy reaches down to Mary on account of her littleness, precisely because she is poor in spirit. Divine love typically reaches down to those who are humble. ‘O thou blessed Virgin, Mother of God, what great comfort hath God shown us in thee, by so graciously regarding thy unworthiness and low estate. Hereby we are encouraged to believe that he will henceforth not despise us poor and lowly ones, but graciously regard us also, according to thy example.’

In this same spirit, Luther is keen to underline how ordinary and everyday Mary is: ‘To her neighbours and their daughters she was but a simple maiden, tending the cattle and doing the house-work, and doubtless esteemed no more than any poor maidservant today, who does as she is bidden about the house.’ He contrasts Mary’s humility with those who stand out from their fellow human beings through their prowess in prayer, fasting and good works, and so fall into the trap of pride. But sanctity cannot be equated with outward appearances or external works: ‘There is no peace except where men teach that we are made pious, righteous and blessed by no work nor outward thing, but solely by faith, that is, a firm confidence in the unseen grace of God that is promised to us.’ Luther is adamant that God came into our world in order to save human beings within the world, and not to encourage them to adopt sanctimonious airs and graces. He describes this kind of dangerous pride in the following way: ‘Every one strives after that which is above him, after honour, power, wealth, knowledge, a life of ease, and whatever is lofty and great. And where such folk are, there are many hangers-on, all the world gathers round them, gladly yields them service, and would be by their side and share their high estate.’ They equate salvation with upward mobility, whether in terms of money, power, comfort or knowledge. Luther notes by contrast that Mary is so nondescript that the daughter of the high priest Caiaphas would not have even have deigned to employ her as a maid, and he concludes: ‘Thus God’s work and his eyes are in the depths, but man’s only in the height.’

At this point the first part of the Magnificat comes to an end. Having thanked God for everything he has done for her, Mary now moves on in the second part of the Magnificat to celebrate God’s goodness toward humanity in general. In doing this, Mary shows us how to recognise God’s gifts and how to express our gratitude for them. She lists six divine works, beginning with the noblest of all, God’s mercy: ‘and his mercy is from age to age on those who fear him’. Luther says that those who fear God are the poor in spirit; in other words those who are aware of their dependence upon God, and who recognise that everything they have is a gift from God. ‘This, then, is the first work of God – that he is merciful to all who are … willing to be poor in spirit … who truly fear God, who count themselves not worthy of anything … who ascribe whatever they have to his pure grace’. To be poor in spirit is quite a challenge: it means to be willing to stop clinging even to spiritual experiences if they deflect us from God. For instance, people with the gift of healing can become so excited by the fact that they possess this gift that they can stop exercising it for the benefit of others and instead do it in order to win plaudits for themselves.

The second divine work is to scatter the proud-hearted. The proud of heart imagine that it is their power that links them to God, whereas it is in fact the honest admission of neediness that draws God towards us. When people exalt themselves, God ‘withdraws his power from them and lets them puff themselves up in their own power alone. For where man’s strength begins, God’s strength ends.’ Although he firmly criticises the rich and the powerful, Luther reserves his strongest censure for those who take pride in their own wisdom: ‘The rich destroy the truth among themselves; the mighty drive it away from others; but these wise ones utterly extinguish the truth itself.’

The third divine work is casting the mighty from their thrones. Luther remarks that the fall of great empires such as Babylon or Rome is evidence that God sooner or later takes away power if it is not used for good purposes.

The fourth divine work is raising the lowly. Luther makes it clear that raising the lowly does not mean putting them on the seats from which the powerful have been dethroned. If that were to happen, they could very well end up replicating the proud conduct of the mighty. Instead, it is a matter of exalting the lowly in a spiritual way, an exaltation that may have to wait until the Day of Judgement, but which will nonetheless arrive.

The fifth and sixth works are filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. Luther notes that ‘by the hungry are not meant those who have little or nothing to eat, but those who gladly suffer want, especially if they are forcibly compelled by others to do so for God’s sake or the truth’. Suffering want is an invitation to put our trust in God, so that what we do is God’s work; just as being lowly or bereft of human help is an invitation to rely o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE MARY IN LUTHER AND THE LUTHERAN TRADITION
• CHAPTER TWO MARY IN THE ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN WORLD
• CHAPTER THREE MARY IN HER JEWISH MATRIX
• CHAPTER FOUR MARY AND ISLAM
• CHAPTER FIVE UNIVERSAL RELEVANCE AND INDIVIDUAL APPEAL
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY