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ANSWERING COMMON
OBJECTIONS MARY, HOLY
MOTHER
There is
probably nothing more disturbing to Protestants than the profound devotion
which Catholics have for the Blessed Virgin Mary. In this program Scott
begins to explain the Marian doctrines by turning to the Bible. He spends a
considerable amount of time looking at the Book of Genesis and the Prophet
Isaiah to show how the role of Mary in salvation history was foreshadowed in
the Old Testament. He then takes these Old Testament insights and shows how
the writers of the New Testament see in Mary the Mother of Christ - the new
Eve and the new Mother of humanity. As you probably
know, this is our third installment in a series of five sessions that we are
spending together discussing how to answer common objections, questions
regarding key tenets that are distinctive to the Catholic Church. We have
focused upon the Pope and yesterday we looked at purgatory. This morning we
want to focus on Mary and the Marian doctrines and devotions of the Catholic
Church to see where in scripture do we see, not necessarily logical
demonstrations that are brought forth from proof texts that kind of force the
mind against the will to give in and to acquiesce in these beliefs, but where
do we find in scripture the reflections and the illustrations and the
assumptions and the conclusions that the Catholic Church affirms with regard
to the Blessed Virgin Mary? We are also
going to be able to touch lightly and briefly upon some historical data, but
our focus this morning will be primarily scriptural. Now non-Catholics also
are concerned with historical evidences for Marian doctrines and devotions.
But I would say the vast majority of non-Catholic questions and objections
stem from scripture and the seeming silence from the holy writ. So that's
what we are going to be focusing our attention, our energy and our time upon
this morning. Before I go on,
I want to make the same admission that I do at every point and that is, we
don't have time to cover everything. We don't have time to cover even half of
what we need to cover. I'll do my best and you know how fast I can get going
and you know how long I can go. I have to candidly concede the fact that you
need to be reading scripture. You need to be asking our Lord for extra time
to study, to ponder and to pray. Let me recommend some books to you, some
secondary sources. One of my
favorites is by one of the top biblical scholars in France, Andre Foulier.
It's entitled Jesus and His Mother, the Role of the Virgin Mary in Salvation
History and the Place of Women in the Church. This, I believe, is a
masterpiece, and it's published by St. Bede, and it's only about two or three
years old. The other book I want to recommend, and I am not sure is in print.
In fact, I suspect it might be out of print, but you can find it in
libraries, and I have found it in used book stores because that's my favorite
haunting place, to travel to used book stores. But this is by Max Durien who
is a reformed brother in the Taesec community over in Europe. It's entitled,
Mary, Mother of All Christians. What makes this
distinctive is that when he wrote this, he was a Reformed Calvinist
Christians. You don't find Christians much more non-Catholic than that! I
know. I was one! Now, rumor has it, and I have only heard it from two or
three persons, and I've not confirmed this, that Brother Max Durien has
converted. He is considered to be one of the wisest Reformed Protestant
theological sages of this century, not only for his theological depth and his
scriptural understanding, but especially for his spirituality in guiding the
Taesic community in worship and community and in ecumenical environment. Another
classic, Joseph Duer, a Jesuit by the name of Joseph Duer. I believe it was
originally written in German. It's entitled, The Glorious Assumption of the
Mother of God. This goes through the biblical and the historical, the
patristic and the magisterial data and evidences for the doctrine, or the
dogma, I guess we could say, of the bodily assumption of our Lady. Now this
is an old copy, but I was just recently informed that the book is back in
print. I'm not sure who publishes it, but my suspicion is Christian Classics.
Here's another
book, and I'll tell you the story behind this a little later. Remind me; I
might forget. It's entitled The Assumption of Mary by Father Killiam Healey,
a Carmelite theologian up in New England, in Massachusetts. This is published
by Michael Glazier. I'm not sure if you can get it from them, but if you want
to try, you have to contact Liturgical Press, because Glazier and Liturgical
Press just merged up in Collegeville, Minnesota, which is their new address.
But this is superb. This is for popular consumption. This could be like a
primer, a first reader in Marian Doctrine and Devotion. He is very fair and
even handed. And I might add, he's a marvelous priest. I heard him preach,
right after I joined the Church, but I'll tell that story later on. It was a
delight in my own life. The real magnum
opus on the subject was written by one of Great Britain's top Biblical
scholars, Father John McHugh entitled, The Mother of Jesus in the New
Testament, published by Doubleday, and it's in many public libraries that I
have seen as well as college or high school or seminary libraries. I don't
believe it's in print, but it is all around, so you could find it if you
looked hard enough. This is just a copious study of all of the relevant
passages in the New Testament, and McHugh looks at these from the perspective
of the writers of scripture themselves, how the Fathers of the Church
interpreted it, how Jewish and Rabbinic interpreters and commentators
understood certain passages from the Old that were fulfilled by the New, all
the way up until the present day. It's very thorough but readable, very
readable. I think anybody named McHugh has something good to say. I'm
buttering up my host and hostess here. Scriptural View of
Mary Well, here we
go. What I would like to do now is to begin to change our focus to scripture
itself. Of course, the place we have to begin in order to see what the
scripture says about the Blessed Virgin Mary is found all the way in the
beginning of the Bible. Let's turn to Genesis, chapter 3. There we see the
first Eve having been seduced and, I believe, brutally intimidated into a
kind of disobedient submission. You can go back and listen to this tape that
I think we made two or two-and-a-half days ago about how often we distort
what really happened in the temptation narrative, because we don't know how
to read Hebrew narrative. There is a literary artistry there at work that's
very hard for the Western mind to grasp, understand and appreciate. But I
believe, just to sum it up, that Adam was called to be a faithful covenant
head in a marital covenant, and he was called to show forth, as the
representative of the covenant, the love, the hessed, the loyalty of the
covenant to the fullest degree. And, as our Lord says, "Greater love
hath no man than to lay down his life for his beloved." So, if he is
truly going to love his covenant partner in marriage, he has to be willing to
lay his life down. Now, how does God, the Father, test his son's loyalty and
love? Well, that's what the serpent is there for. The serpent, nahash in
Hebrew is, I believe, misunderstood to be a snake. Medieval art work, and
this has been carried on into the modern tradition where you have Eve
depicted as some dumb, perhaps blonde, but some dumb air-head who just
basically is tricked by some little snake, hanging from a branch in a tree,
to eat the apple. All right, and so all men just kind of sit back and say,
"Yeah, it's still the same way." And they congratulate themselves
on being so worldly wise that they wouldn't be so dumb as this air- head. Total
misreading, I believe. This is my own hypothesis. This is my own
interpretation. You don't have to abide by it, but my view is that the
nahash, the serpent is deliberately depicted as a kind of, I'd say mythical
figure but I don't want to deny the historicity of this text. It's just that
Hebrew historical narrative can often use mythical imagery to communicate
historical truth. In Daniel 7, I mentioned four gentile kingdoms are
described as being "four beasts." So, I believe, here we have the
serpent as a kind of dragon. The word is used and used and used in Hebrew to
connote or denotes a dragon figure like Leviathan or Banmuth or Rehab, the
monster later than Isaiah and elsewhere in the Old Testament. In Revelation
12:9 in the New Testament confirms this translation of nahash, not as
serpent/snake, but as serpent/dragon, because there Satan is described as the
"ancient serpent" and then it goes on to describe a seven-headed
dragon. So she is being
confronted and brutally intimidated by a dragon who is intent upon producing
disobedience, come hell or high water. So in the cross-examination, in the
interrogation that goes back and forth, Satan uses the truth in a clever,
deceptive, but intimidating way to kind of force this woman to see, in
effect, that if she doesn't eat that fruit, she will die, at least in the
biological, physical sense because Satan will see to it. The question,
then, as you read through this narrative is not based upon anything that is
explicitly stated, but rather that which is so conspicuously unstated, and
that is, where the heck is Adam in all this? By the end of the narrative you
discover that he's right by the woman because she just turns and gives him
the fruit to eat; but the question is, where was he all along? This loving
covenant head, this loving covenant partner who is to show the great love
that he's willing to lay down his life for his beloved? Well, he was probably
rationalizing his silence by saying, "Well, if I oppose such a
serpentile monster as this, I stand no chance." So in Hebrews
2:14-16, the New Testament tells us that Christ had to take on our flesh and
blood to free us from the devil, from Satan, who held us in life-long bondage
because of the fear of death and suffering we all have. So it seems as though
Adam's response, or lack of response, is due to his fear of suffering and
death, which in turn subjects all of A-dam, humanity, to life-long bondage to
he who holds the power of death, Satan, in this sense. So the first
Eve, then, is abandoned by her covenant partner and husband who was
presumably to tell that dragon where to go, and then, in a sense, stand up
for his convictions and possibly even suffer martyrdom and to lay down his
life for his beloved and trust that God, his Creator, to whom he is loyal in
love would raise him and vindicate him in proper covenant judgment. Which is
exactly what the second Adam does on behalf of the second Eve, the Church,
which is the whole dramatic encounter we read about in Revelations 12. I'm
going to have to talk about that later on this day, so I'm not going to get
into it too much this morning. You're all invited to that. It's at 1:30.
We're going to be talking about Mary, Ark of the Covenant, focusing upon the
woman of the Apocalypse who is clothed with the sun, a crown of 12 stars, and
the world under her feet. I think it's the deliberate symbol of the second
Eve for whom the second Adam lay down his life. Mary, the Church, Israel, and
all New Testament believers in a sense. But having
sinned, Adam and Eve were now confronted by God. You can go all the way back,
I believe, to verse 8, Genesis 3:8, "They heard the sound of the Lord
God walking in the garden in the cool of the day and the man and his wife hid
themselves." Now, this is, I think, perhaps somewhat of a mistranslation.
We often have this kind of romantic, bucolic picture here of God kind of
walking through the woods. You can hear the crushing of the leaves and the
snapping of the twigs as he says, you know, "Adam, Eve, where are
you?" Poor God, just doesn't really know what's going on! But when you
actually look at the Hebrew, what the people hear, verse 8, it says,
"Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God." We're
tempted to hear that as the crushing leaves and snapping twigs, this poor
unwitting God is saying, "where... weren't we supposed to meet, you
know. Isn't this the time? Isn't this the place?" But no. The word in
Hebrew for sound is qol. Now, what kind of noise does the qol of the Lord
make? Well you can find out by reading Psalm 29. Keep your finger on Genesis
3 and take a look at Psalm 29 because there we discover an entire psalm
devoted to describing what Adam and Eve must have heard when they heard the
qol of the Lord, the sound of the Lord. Verse 1 of
Psalm 29, "Ascribe to the Lord, O heavenly beings or sons of God.
Ascribe to the Lord glory and strength. Ascribe to the Lord the glory of his
name and worship the Lord in holy array. The qol of the Lord is upon the
waters. The God of glory thunders. The Lord upon many waters. The qol of the
Lord is powerful. The qol of the Lord is full of majesty." Verse 5,
"The qol of the Lord breaks the cedars. The Lord breaks the cedars of
Lebanon. He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf in Sirion, like a young wild
ox. The qol of the Lord flashes forth flames of fire. The qol of the Lord
shakes the wilderness. The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. The qol of
the Lord makes the oak trees to whirl and strips the forest bare and all in
his temple cry, 'glory'!" What do you
think they heard? It wasn't the snapping of little twigs and the crunching,
you know, of leaves. They heard a thunder and shattering roar, and they hid
themselves. Quite understandably. Goes on, "They heard the qol of the
Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day." That
word in Hebrew, cool, is ruah, normally translated spirit or wind, and that
phrase could easily be translated as scholars have argued, "They heard
the thundering, shattering roar of Yahweh Eloheim as he was coming into the
garden as the spirit of the day!" What day? The day of judgment. We've
got a primo parousia on our hands. The second coming in advance in a sense. So they flee
from the sound that they hear. They hide from the Lord God among the trees in
the garden. "But the Lord God called to the man, 'Where are you?'"
Now he doesn't talk about geographical location. The deity here, in order to
meet the job description of the divinity is omniscient. He knows where they
are. He's asking, "Where are you in terms of your covenant standing
before me. Where are you? "He answered, ' I heard you in the garden, but
I was afraid because I was naked and so I hid. Who told you that you were
naked?" What does the man say? "The woman! Have you eaten of the
fruit that I told you not to eat?" And what does he say? He immediately
starts passing the buck. Verse 12, "The man said, 'The woman.'" But
it gets worse, "The woman you gave me." Not so subtle,
huh? He's not just faulting her. Who's he really faulting? Some help, some
assistant you gave me! He's not just blaming her. He's implicitly blaming
God. And the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you've
done?" The woman said, "The nahash deceived me and I ate."
Now, if you go back, the serpent never actually told a lie, but what the
serpent did was to use a kind of blunt, brutal intimidation to get her to
submit to the evil. "So the Lord said to the serpent, 'Because you have
done this cursed you above all the livestock, etc." But here we look at
verse 15, "And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between
your seed and her seed. He will crush your head and you will strike his
heel." Now some other
translations render, "She will crush your head." And so we have
statues of our Lady crushing the head of the serpent. That's an interesting
but kind of tangential issue for us right now. At any rate, we see here the
woman. "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your
seed and her seed." Now you don't have to be a scientist to wonder what
they're talking about here. The serpent's seed, okay. But her seed? The Greek
Old Testament translates this spermatos, that's the term for seed. Now so
far, so good, but wait a second. What is it doing in connection with the
woman? The woman's seed? Nowhere else in the Old Testament do you ever come
across an expression like that. It's always the man's seed, the husband's
seed, the father's seed. This is weird. The woman's seed? Yeah, God's going
to elevate that woman and give to her in some unique sense perhaps a seed
through which the serpent's head will be crushed. Keep that in the back of
your mind because that is going to be crucial. Isaiah 7:14 We're going to
move on now to, of course, what is probably the second most famous Old
Testament passage for understanding our Lady, Isaiah 7, verse 14. Isaiah 7,
verse 14: here we have an interesting episode between Isaiah and King Ahas
who is king of Judah, and he's worrying about the national stability of his
people in his country of Judah, his kingdom, because he is surrounded by stronger
neighbors and so he's toying with the idea of entering into all kinds of
wrong- headed alliances. So, through Isaiah the Lord says to King Ahas who's
always beginning to kind of stumble with doubts, he's beginning to wonder
with fear who he should rely upon, Verse 3, "Then the Lord said to
Isaiah, 'go out'" and it goes on in verses 3 through 10, where the Lord
speaks to Ahas through Isaiah and says, "Ask of me and I will give you a
sign." In other words,
let's admit it. Your faith is weak. You need to have it shored up and
strengthened. That's what signs are for. Go ahead and ask me for a sign.
Verse 12, with false modesty Ahas says, "Oh, I won't ask. I will not put
the Lord to the test." Give me a break! Isaiah said, "Hear now, you
House of David, is it not enough to try the patience of men. Will you try the
patience of my God also?" He sees your need. He's got the gift that you
need. Now don't play strong. You're weak, admit it and receive the gift that
he's got in this sign." "Therefore, the Lord himself will give you
a sign. The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son and will
call him Emmanuel." That word,
almah in Hebrew translated by the Greek Septuagint parthenos has been the
subject of incredible debate. Is it young woman or is it virgin? You could
stack up scholars who advocate either position, but I am persuaded, not only
by the targums, that is the ancient Jewish interpretation of this was
decidedly in favor of "virgin." They saw it as some kind of
Messianic prophecy in the targums, these ancient Aramaic paraphrases of the
Old Testament. Now there are a
lot of scholars who debate, "Well, are the targums before Christ or
after Christ or whatever?" But I think there's a lot of evidence for
them being before Christ, but even if they were a little bit after Christ,
the fact remains that Jews from earliest times saw a Messianic reference with
regard to parthenos, a virgin. A recent scholar whose article I just read by
the name of Professor Wyatt argues that the Alexandrian Jews who rendered
almah by parthenos were being entirely faithful to the Herogamic tradition.
He goes on to talk about how Isaiah borrows all his pagan mythical imagery,
only then historicizes it with reference to the coming Messiah, as the ritual
technical term for an embodiment of a divine mother, who is both a fecund
mother, a fruitful mother, as well as a perpetual virgin. In other words,
Isaiah in using this language is tapping into a well-known ancient outlook on
what humanity needs for deliverance, that is, God is going to have to send an
incredible figure, the likes of which humans have never seen, a creature, a
human but in a sense possessed by God in an absolutely unique way. And this,
by the way, is not unique to the Hebrew tradition. It's shared throughout.
Now maybe it's because Genesis 3:15 was channeled out throughout the world as
the human race spread, whatever you want to believe. There are other
ways to explain it, but the fact remains that this translation, this
rendering of almah as virgin is strong and sure and is very reliable. At any
rate, we know one thing for sure, the New Testament applies it to Mary and
the virginal birth of Jesus. So in terms of the inspired narrative, what do
we have? In Matthew, we have in a sense, the answer in the back of the book
really, or at least we can treat it that way for this morning's time
together. What is going
on here? The Davidic line is almost at an end and the only way out for King
Ahas in his own mind is to begin to move away from Yahweh and to begin to trust
in all of these pagan neighbors who want to form alliances with him. Only, in
order to form those alliances he's going to have to submit as a kind of
vassal. So Isaiah says, "Don't do it. If you are weakening in your
faith, ask him for a sign. He has one ready." The problem is the Davidic
line could be crushed. Well, the faithful were saying, "But God has
sworn an oath: there will always be an heir on the Davidic throne." But now what
happens if the king is deposed and if the royal family is murdered? Well, God
will take a virgin and produce a son of David. In other words, we're not
dependent exclusively upon human resources, political power, economic wealth
and all of the rest. So Isaiah 7:14 stands in line with Genesis 3:15 as in a
sense the second key text with regards to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary as Ark of the
Covenant Now I might add
that later on today at 1:30 in this talk on "Mary, Ark of the
Covenant," we're going to be focusing upon another set of Old Testament
passages related to the Ark of the Covenant, which was, in a sense, the most
sacred object in all of ancient Israel on the one hand. It's what made the
temple holy, it's what made the Holy of Holies the holiest thing around for
that's what the Ark was, but it also, in a sense, was the most strategically
powerful weapon that Israel possessed because whenever they went into battle,
they had the Ark lead the way. When they encircled Jericho for six days and
on the seventh day they blew this trumpet seven times, it was the Ark of the
Covenant that led the priests and the soldiers. So the Ark of
the Covenant is very significant and most scholars say that what it is, is a
kind of throne because many other cultures had temples with arks. The only
thing weird about Israel's Ark is that it was empty. It was a throne with two
cherubim over the top, but nobody sat on it. In fact, you can actually
discover, and I'm going to unpack this a little bit more later on, that in
the Ancient world, it was usually the throne for the Queen Mother. For
instance, one of the greatest German scholars in his book, Symbolism in the
Biblical World, speaks about the great popularity of cherubim thrones, box
thrones with cherubim angels over top. It goes on, in Canaan and in Phoenicia
during the late Bronze and early Iron Ages, excavators describe it "as a
female figure sitting in a square armchair." Odd? Why would these
ancient cultures have an ark on which sat this female figure on kind of a
throne posture? And why did they also just like Israel often lead that ark
out into battle ahead of the troops? Because it was a kind of Queen Mother
figure perhaps. I mean, let's
face it, ladies and gentlemen, if your mother was out in the front lines,
would you be tempted to fight a little bit harder? Yeah. So consistently, the
Ark of the Covenant was what produced all of these miracle victories.
Jericho, which was sort of like the Moscow of the ancient world -- it was the
central stronghold of the Promised Land and it went down like a house of
cards, with the Ark going around it seven times and the seven trumpets of the
priests blowing. So there is
clear evidence that Protestant, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Anglican, as well as
Catholic scholars acknowledge that the New Testament deliberately depicts
Mary in terms related to the Ark of the Covenant. And we'll discover in
Revelation after 580 years without an Ark, Jewish Christians look up and see
a sign. It's the Ark of the Covenant in heaven which had not been seen in 580
years approximately. This is where "Raiders of the Lost Ark" comes
from. It's been lost for that long. John sees it in Revelation up in heaven
and the very next thing he sees is a woman clothed with the sun and the moon
under her feet and a crown of twelve stars, a Queen Mother. The Ark is no
longer an empty throne. Mary as Queen Mother So I just want
to throw this out to tantalize and perhaps tease a little bit because we
don't have the time to go through all the Ark of the Covenant passages, but
there's a great deal of exciting and, I think, impressive evidence from the
literary artistry of Hebrew narrative as it prepared the way for the Davidic
kingdom being fulfilled with the Son of David, Jesus Christ, and his Queen
Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary. What do I mean
by this Queen Mother stuff? Now we will take a look at a key passage. Let's
turn now to 1st Kings, chapter 1. This, I believe, is the missing link. I
really am convinced that this is the most important exegetical Biblical piece
of evidence that we have to go on. It was one of the best-known institutions
in ancient Israel's monarchy or after the Civil War ancient Juda's monarchy
and in fact, the idea of the Queen Mother was ubiquitous. You don't find
ancient monarchies in the Near East or the Middle East that don't have Queen
Mothers. I'll refer you to a key article written by N.A. Andrieson in
Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1983, pages 179 through 194. It's entitled,
"The Role of the Queen Mother in Israelite Society." This note
card, incidentally, comes from about six years ago because it was right after
the article came out that I was beginning to do some Old Testament research
and opening my mind up to some Catholic ideas. Even though I had been very
anti-Catholic I had already begun to accumulate some evidence for this Queen
Mother tradition, but it was all piece- meal and scattered. When I read
this article, it was like a thunderclap striking me. I knew I had to really
pay close attention to the evidence. What evidence? Well, this is known as
the gebirah. The gebirah is the Hebrew term for the Queen Mother. I found in
another book, The Graphic History of the Jewish Heritage, that the gebirah,
the Queen Mother "occupied a unique and powerful position"
throughout the history of ancient Israel's monarchy. He gives as an example
Bathsheba, Solomon's mother, who was enthroned, which we will look at in just
a moment. Also, another
example, Maacah, in 1st Kings 15:13; Jezebel, who is the only Queen Mother in
the rebellious northern kingdom of Israel. In fact, the northern kingdom of
Israel is conspicuous because it lacked the Queen Mother. Father DeVoe, one
of the greatest Old Testament scholars of the century said, "This was due
to a lack of dynastic stability." They kept getting overthrown up north.
They didn't have the Davidic covenant to anchor the claims of these potential
kings. That's in 2nd Kings 10:13. And then Athaliah, the very cruel and
wicked queen who ruled for six years, trying to suppress the cult of Yahweh
in the Temple. Mehushta over Johoachin in Jeremiah 13:18. Another scholar in
Scandinavia, Ostrum says, "The Queen Mother's position was essentially
cultic in nature," that is she actually had a position or a role to play
in worship. It wasn't priestly but it was important and it was cultic. It's
still left undefined. In the ancient
Near East it goes on talking about how, "The Queen Mother throughout all
these ancient Near Eastern monarchies sat beside the king on a throne,
survived the death without being deposed. If the king died, the Queen Mother
continued to reign without being deposed. There was a cultic role for her in
leading the songs and so on in worship but also she had an essential role in
political, military and economic affairs of court. In fact there are records
of where the Queen Mother could oppose the king on issues of state. This is
found in the Eplah tablets and Uhr Hittite records, Egypt Marri tablets,
Assyria and other Arabian documents, as well. And the Queen Mother usually
began her reign, just as an interesting incidental detail, after menopause. What's really
interesting from Andreason's perspective is that even after the prophets are
sent by God to purify the Jerusalem cult and the kingdom of all of these
pagan encrustations, the institution of the gebirah continues with reforms by
Hezekiah and Josiah. The fertility cults are suppressed and these ashora
poles and so on are torn down, including sacred snakes, you know the nahushta
and so on, but never the Queen Mother, that's allowed to remain. The central
role for Andreason's research is that she was to be the king's wisdom
counselor. Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs is sort of like a
personification of the Queen Mother, or visa versa. It goes on
listing several other examples. I won't bother you with all these examples
but of the sixteen Queen Mothers named, seven explicitly seem to be
Jerusalemites. It just runs throughout the whole gamut, the whole historical
span of the monarchy and actually, the only chapter of the Bible that we know
was written by a woman, Proverbs 31, was written by a Queen Mother as
instruction for her son before he accedes to the throne and finds himself a
wife, she says, "This is the kind you've got to find." Andreason
concludes that "This is the theological paradigm for Mary's Queenship.
Jesus is the Son of David and the genealogy in Matthew links Mary to the
Davidic line. Being the Son of David makes her the Queen Mother." There
are some other works too, The Nature of the Queenship of Mary, published in
1973, The Royal Son of God, published in 1979 and so on. But I can share
these sources with you , if you are interested, afterwards. Let's take a
look at an example of the function and authority of the Queen Mother in 1st
Kings. In chapter 1 there is an intense fraternal rivalry between Solomon or
Jedidiah, whose throne name is Peace, Solomon, and his half-brother,
Adonijah, who by the way is older and was born to one of David's wives whom
he had married before Bathsheba. So Adonijah seemed to have a kind of prima
facia claim to the throne before Solomon, except that Bathsheba had exacted
from David an oath to the effect that her son would get the throne. You can
get it in Psalm 110 especially. So, anyway, Adonijah approaches Bathsheba in
order to approach Solomon. We're going to see how this goes. But first of all
we see King David asking Bathsheba, verse 17, " What is it you want the
king asked? She said to him, 'My Lord, you yourself swore to me your servant
by the Lord your God, Solomon your son shall be king after me and he will sit
on my throne. But now Adonijah has become king and you my Lord, the king, do
not know about it.'" And it goes on talking about this palace coup
attempt. Then King David
says over in verse 28 and 29 calling Bathsheba. "So she came into the
king's presence and stood before him. The king then took an oath, 'as surely
as the Lord lives,'" and he goes on promising and swearing that
"Solomon, your son, shall be king after me and he will sit on my throne
in my place," even though the majority of the people were going after
Adonijah at the time, several key priests, as well. And so she rejoices. Now turn over
to 1st Kings 2. There's where David gives his royal charge to Solomon and
Solomon asks for wisdom, but just browse and just go through that as quickly
as you can and just see what is going on here because it is very unusual.
Let's take a look in particular at verse 13. "Now Adonijah, the son of
Haggith, went to Bathsheba, Solomon's mother. Bathsheba asked him, 'Do you
come peacefully?' He answered, 'Yes, peacefully,' then he added, 'I have
something to say to you.' 'You may say it, she replied.' 'As you know,' he
said, 'the kingdom was mine. All Israel looked to me as their king. But then
things changed and the kingdom has gone to my brother for it has come to him
from the Lord. Now I have just one request to make of you. Do not refuse me.'
'You may make it she said. So he continued, 'Please ask King Solomon, he
won't refuse you, to give me Abishag, the Shunamite as my wife.'" If you
understood palace politics, you'd see what this was. "Very well,"
Bathsheba replied. "I will speak to the king for you." Abishag
happened to be David's last lover and wife. She was the one young woman who
kept him warm in his old age, sleeping next to him at all times. To have
David's last wife would be to have official claim to the throne. This is why
Absolom publicly slept with David's concubines after he threw his father out
of Jerusalem, because if I have the Queen Mothers, if I have the king's
wives, who do you see as your king? Solomon is no fool. When Bathsheba went
to King Solomon to speak to him for Adonijah, look what happens. The king of
Israel, the son of David, the supreme head of God's covenant people in the
whole world, according to Psalm 2 stood up to meet her, bowed down to her and
sat down on his throne and he had a throne brought for the king's mother and
she sat down at his right hand. "Sit at my right hand," Psalm 110.
That's the position of authority. I have one small request to make of you.
She goes on and makes the request. Solomon sees through it. Says no, of
course, and executes Adonijah. But look at the
beginning of the institution of the gebirah. It's something that continues.
When the Queen Mother walks in, the king, because he is her son, pays filial
homage to her and establishes her at his right hand, upon a throne as Queen
Mother. If I am the father of the family of this kingdom, if I am the
shepherd of this flock, that makes you the mother. Not only my mother but the
grandmother of us all. That institution persisted down through the ages of
the Judaite monarchy. There is no evidence of it ever being suppressed by the
prophets or criticized by Yahweh or ever falling into hard times and being
replaced because it was seen as something that was meaningless. So what? So the
Jews who had been waiting and waiting and waiting for five hundred years for
the Davidic line to be reestablished at the time of Christ's coming knew all
this. They knew it like the back of their hand. We don't. Many Biblical
scholars aren't even aware of it. But every Jew did. I mean Joe Six-pack or
Joe Sixpackstein, they all knew it. They all knew that God had sworn an oath
that there would always be a Davidic king and that the kingdom of David would
be restored in its former glory, and in fact, greater glory. But the last
time we hear about the Davidic kingdom, it's fallen upon hard times. We won't
go through all the passages in Chronicles and Kings but when the Babylonians
conquered Jerusalem in 586 and even prior to that, they had captured the
king. They had killed all of his sons before his eyes, they drilled out his
eyes and they sent him into captivity in chains. From there on the fortunes
of the Davidic dynasty only went down and for hundreds and hundreds of years,
for decades at a time, the Jews wondered, "Is there even a Davidic
descendent?" I mean sure the Hasmonians claim some Davidic dynastic
relations and so on, but never was it sure and whenever any claimant to
Davidic authority would rise up, what would happen? Like Jerubabaal in coming
back from Babylonian captivity, he went straight to Jerusalem and the High
Priest is there and all the people were saying, "At last the Davidic
throne is going to be restored." Only what happens? He's recalled to
Persia and we never hear from him again. The Davidic kingdom is not restored.
So for
centuries and centuries the Jewish people keep reading Psalm 2, keep reading
Psalm 89, keep reading Psalm 110, keep reading Psalm 132 and all these other
Davidic Messianic psalms that promised an ongoing, unbroken line of Davidic
succession and glorious, glorious power. It would be sort of like if all of
us took a refresher course on the promise that Jesus gave to Peter about the
rock and the keys and the gates of Hades not prevailing and we reminded
ourselves and we reinforced our conviction that the papal line would always
be unbroken. Then all of a sudden we hear that the Pope has been assassinated
and all the Bishops have been rounded up and assassinated as well. What would
happen? I'll bet you some people's faith would be shaken. I'll bet you mine
would be, and if yours isn't, I don't understand. I mean that's an oath that
Jesus swore, in effect. It was an oath that God swore in effect. Is there a
Davidic line? Has God forgotten? Has he fallen asleep at the wheel? What is
going on? Turn with me now to Matthew 1. Matthew 1 Now all of a
sudden, it gets really exciting, maybe not for us but for those Jews who were
expecting the Messiah, the poor, the humble, the faithful who were no longer
out for political power or economic prosperity. They were allowing themselves
to be impoverished and oppressed because they knew the Messiah would come and
establish justice not by force and violence but by an incredible act of self-
sacrifice as both suffering servant and son of man. Then, all of a sudden, in
Matthew 1 we read what for the Jews is the most exciting passage of the New
Testament, perhaps and what for us is by far the most boring. Oh, no! The
begats, the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the Jews
gasped, "What? Can you prove that?" The son of Abraham, double
gasp." Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob."
I'm not going to read the whole thing, I promise you, okay? But notice a
few things. For instance, notice in verse 3, Tamar. Notice in verse 5, Rahab.
Notice in verse 5, Ruth and notice in verse 6 "David was the father of
Solomon by the wife of Uriah. Four women are mentioned in this genealogy
which is very unusual to have women mentioned at all. But what do all four
women have in common? Tamar had sex with her father-in-law, Rahab was a
harlot. Ruth was a foreigner, a Moabitist, and the wife of Uriah was just that,
the wife of Uriah, before the wife of David, before he committed adultery and
then committed murder to get rid of Uriah. In other words
Matthew is reminding the Jews of the legacy of David's line. Why? Because
what was the scuttlebutt about this young 13-year-old Jewess named Mary
getting pregnant before she was married? Messing around, right? Whenever you
see in the New Testament, Jesus called "the son of Mary," that's
derogatory. Why? It was an illegitimate birth in the eyes of the townspeople,
probably. What's Matthew doing? What's new? The appearance of sexual
immorality or even the reality of infidelity has never thwarted God's
purposes. In the case of sex with the father-in-law, and in the case of a
harlot, in the case of a foreign woman and in the case of an adulteress. I
mean what more is left? In other words
if God's purposes had been fulfilled through the Davidic monarchy up until
now and he didn't complain about David coming from such women and there was
Solomon, then this seeming scandal should not throw you too far off. And it
goes on, verse 11, "Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers at
the time of the deportation of Babylon." And now all of a sudden some
very good information that we never really had absolute certainty about anywhere
in the Old Testament, "After the deportation of Babylon, Jechoniah,
Shealtiel, Zerubbabel," well, we know him. We don't know what happened
after him, Abiud, Azor, Zadok, Achim, Eliud, Eleazar, Natthan, Jacob,
"Joseph, the husband of Mary of whom Jesus was born who is called the
Christ." In other words, we have now the proof that they didn't lose the
line. It didn't fizzle out. God didn't forget. But what was
happening? I mean if you were in the Davidic line and you realize it, you
stood up and said, "Hey, I'm Davidic!" What would happen? The
Babylonians would go squash or the Persians would go squash or the Greeks or
the Romans. Why? Because you are a pretender to the throne. Don't give us
this Davidic promise, this Davidic authority stuff. Your line is over. So if
you have royal blood, not just any old royal blood, but I mean divine right
royal blood flowing through your veins, what had you better do? Zip up.
Right? You better shut up. What happens as
soon as the word gets out that the Messiah is born? What does King Herod do?
"Oh gosh, gee willickers, I've got to go worship." What a stinking
liar. He ends up slaughtering dozens and maybe hundreds of infant males to do
anything, no matter how diabolical, to put an end to the Davidic line. And
Mary knew it all along. And you could actually see a Davidic line as far as
she is concerned as you correlate the Mathian and the Lukan genealogies. Now
we, I think, understand a little bit better how important and perhaps
exciting this must have been to those faithful, humble, poor Jews who had
been waiting and waiting and waiting for hundreds and hundreds of years,
wondering if God had forgotten. He hasn't. Verse 18, "Now the birth of
Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed
to Joseph before they came together, she was found to be with child of the
Holy Spirit. And her husband Joseph being a just man not wanting to put her
to shame resolved to divorce her quietly. But then the angel appears to him
in a dream, 'Joseph, son of David,'" in other words, I want you to begin
to figure things out here, Joe. Remember who you are? You're a son of David.
Weird things happen to Davidic sons. Okay? "'Joseph, son of David, don't
fear to take Mary for your wife, for that which is conceived in her is of the
Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you shall call his name Jesus for he
will save his people from their sins.' All this took place to fulfill what
the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 'Behold a virgin shall conceive and bear
a son and his name shall be called, God with us, Emanuel.'" Joseph probably
knew this as well as he knew any verse in the Old Testament because this is
one of those few key texts, those few key prophecies on which the anawim hung
their hopes. "So he knew her not until she had born a son and he called
his name Jesus." And here we go on and we discover that the Magi are
sent by God. Now, three Wise Men, it doesn't say they were Wise Men. It calls
them the Magi. What are Magi? They are Eastern Sorcerers, probably Persian.
There's an old Rabbinic maxim, "If anybody learns anything from a Magi,
one of the Magi, let him be accursed." Because they were the
practitioners in the Black Arts and some of the tools of their trade,
according to Brown and some other scholars, is that they use gold for all
their magical pages on which the incantations were written. They used
frankincense and they also used myrrh. These were some
of the basic tools of the trade as practitioners in the black art did it. And
when they give the stuff up to our Lord in the manger, what are they doing?
They are renouncing it. They have followed the light, they have found the
truth. But what of the Jews? What about the most knowledgeable of the Jews?
The most powerful Jews, the priests in Jerusalem who are in cohoots with
Herod, giving him all that he needs to track down the Messiah? Now maybe they
didn't know about Herod. Yeah. Maybe they didn't know about Herod. Sure, the
guy who kills his mother, kills his brothers, his cousins, murdered 35
members of the Sanhedrin? You trust a jerk like him? Something's wrong. The Magi and
the shepherds, we discover of course, in Luke that the shepherds come to
visit. Do you know that the shepherds were looked down upon as the lowest of
the low in Hebrew society? Women and shepherds were not allowed to give
testimony in a courtroom, but especially shepherds. They were dishonest and
they were perverted according to Rabinic sayings. It would be sort of like
having a baby and then, all of a sudden your neighbors look out the window as
they see the whores and the junkies and the pushers come to your front door.
What's going on? You know, property values are decreasing! God has taken the
humble and the sinners, those who are in most need of your mercy, and giving
mercy and insight and wisdom and so much more. In a sense turning upside down
the wisdom and the power of this age and this world. Luke 1 It goes on,
"And Mary is pondering all these things." I mean Magi from Persia,
shepherds. God, what are you doing? Well we don't have to go very far to
learn. Let's take a look at Luke, chapter 1. We could have lots of fun, by
the way, going through the rest of Matthew. You know, chapter 2, we didn't
even touch upon all that really - their flight down into Egypt and coming out
of Egypt as well. But, let's turn now to Luke, chapter 1. I know we don't
have that much time but let's just focus here for a moment. Here we have
Luke who is much less Jewish in his intentions than Matthew. Matthew is
writing the gospel for the Jews and the Jewish Christians. Luke is the only
Gentile author of a New Testament book. A trained physician, a rather skilled
historian, scholars tell us. He is writing all about Jesus, the Son of Man,
the son of Adam. Not so much like Matthew, the son of David. He's concerned
in his genealogy to take Jesus all the way back to David? No. Abraham? No.
Adam - to show that this man is the one who is to redeem the whole world, all
nations! After all, Luke's not a Jew. So it goes on
talking about in verse 5, the birth of John the Baptist foretold. We have
here the annunciation to Zechariah. And then we have, after the birth of John
the Baptist is recorded, the birth of Jesus foretold in the annunciation in
verse 26, "In the sixth month, the Angel Gabriel was sent from God to a
city of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was
Joseph of the house of David, and the virgin's name was Mary. And he came to
her and said, 'Hail, full of grace.'" Now that Greek term is translated
in various ways. Oh highly favored one, but the grace of God in the New
Testament develops and it becomes a kind of substance and not just an
attitude; that when God gives favor, it isn't just a feeling. It isn't just a
thought. It isn't just a subjective posture or attitude. It's God's own life.
So that when God favors you, he didn't just stand back and say, "Eeh, I
like ya." He gives himself to you. So when she is
full of God's favor, she is full of God's life and that's the term grace as
it develops in the New Testament. So, "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is
with you," an absolutely unique address. Never before has an angel
addressed somebody almost naming them full of grace. It doesn't say,
"Hail, Mary, full of grace." It says, "Hail, full of
grace," and it says it almost like a title. Scholars have torn this
apart to show the distinctiveness and uniqueness of the address. "The
Lord is with you." We could do so much with that, but we have to move
on. "She was greatly troubled at this saying and considered in her mind
what sort of greeting this might be. 'Don't be afraid, Mary,' the angel said
to her, 'for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in
your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.'" It goes
on, "'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 father David and he will
reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no
end.'" "Mary said
to the angel, 'How shall this be since I have no husband?' And the angel said
to her. 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you,'" or literally it goes on,
"'the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will
overshadow you.'" This is what we are going to develop in the 1:30 talk,
but I'll mention it now. That word "overshadow" is a rare verb.
It's used to describe what the Holy Spirit does over the top of the Ark of
the Covenant. And so it doesn't take much scholarship to see the connection
that is probably intended by Luke as he recounts this. The Ark of the
Covenant was so sacred because the tablets were in the Ark and the tablets
were the decalogue, the word of God, the ten words of God. Now why is Mary
the Ark? Because the word has been made flesh and is dwelling among us, but
within her. She is the true Ark, the true Ark of the Covenant, the New
Covenant. "Therefore, the child to be born will be called holy, the Son
of God." And then some more and she replies, "'Behold, I am the
handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done unto me according to your word.' And the
angel departed from her." And she makes haste to go visit cousin
Elizabeth. And as she walks into the house, John the Baptist, it says,
"leaps for joy." And look at 43, "Why is this granted me, that
the mother of my Lord should come to me?" People protest
about the phrase theotokos "mother of God." They should see it's
got a Biblical precedent in verse 43, "the mother of my Lord. For behold
when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe 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." And then, the song of Mary, the
magnificent Magnificat! I want you to listen to this like you never heard it
before. "My soul magnifies the Lord." All right it's built upon
Hannah's song, but it goes far beyond that song in 1st Samuel. "My soul
magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For he has regarded
the low estate of his handmaiden. For henceforth, behold all generations will
call me Blessed." Now just stop a
second. It I stood up and said to you, "My soul magnifies the Lord. My
spirit rejoices in God, my Savior. For he has regarded the low estate of his
manservant and henceforth all generations shall call me blessed."
Wouldn't you wretch? You'd say, "What's this guy come off. Who is this
guy to stand up here and say, 'Henceforth all generations shall call me, not
us, me - get that - blessed.'" Now we usually think of Mary as just
being humble and poor and faithful and so on - and she is. Humility and
modesty do not consist in making yourself into a doormat or disowning God's
graces and privileges. It means, in fact, owning them as God's graces and
privileges that are given to you to serve others and him. But with false
modesty you say, "Awe, gosh, shucks, gee willickers, I did nothing. I'm
just a doormat. Walk on me, you know?" Not Mary. "Henceforth, all
generations shall call me Blessed." Who do you think you are, woman? You
really want to know? The Queen Mother of the Son of David, because I have
been so humble and poor before the Lord. On my own I've got nothing, but the
Lord has filled me with everything. I am full of grace, but it's grace that
I'm full of. It's not personal power and Anthony Robbin's "Secrets to
Success." It's God's grace. It's all a gift. It's icing. It's gravy, but
it's now mine and so all generations shall call me blessed. That's what we
do in the rosary, isn't it? We just echo the angel, "Hail Mary,"
which means gift, "full of grace. The Lord is with you." And then
we say, "You are blessed amongst all women and blessed is the fruit of
your womb, Jesus. For behold henceforth all generations will call me blessed,
for he who is mighty has done great things for me and holy is his name."
Why? Because he has done great things for me. I am a humble, lowly handmaiden
and we're thinking, "Yeah, if you don't say so yourself, you know?
Tooting your own horn. Patting your own back. Come on, give other people a
chance." Well, that's
what the Church has had for 2000 years, a chance to toot her horn and to pat
her back. But she starts it off. "His mercy is on those who fear him
from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm. He has
scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts." Now you may be
thinking that she is being proud in her imagination, but she is just being
downright honest. "So he has put down the mighty from their thrones and
exalted those of low degree. He has filled the hungry with good things and
the rich he has sent empty away." We could spend an hour on every
phrase. It's just so packed! "He has helped his servant Israel in
remembrance of his mercy." Take a look at
chapter 2, verse 22, "And when the time came for their purification
according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present
him to the Lord. As it is written in the law of the Lord, every male that
opens the womb shall be called holy to the Lord and offer sacrifice according
to what is said in the law of the Lord a pair of turtledoves or two young
pigeons," which was the sacrifice for childbirth that was incumbent upon
the poorest of the poor, for those who could not afford a real sacrifice. It
suggests that Mary really was a handmaiden and so was Joseph humble and poor.
"Now there
was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon and this man was righteous and
devout, looking for the consolation of Israel and the Holy Spirit was upon
him." It goes on, "And it had been revealed to him by the Holy
Spirit that he should not see death before he had seen the Lord's Christ, the
Lord's Messiah." This shows than anybody full of the Spirit, meditating
upon the Old Testament would be expectant, waiting for a Messiah. This is
Messianism. "And inspired by the Spirit, he came into the temple. When
the parents brought in the child Jesus to do for him according to the custom
of the law, he took him up in his arms and blessed God and said, 'Lord, now
letest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word for mine eyes
have seen the salvation which thou hast prepared in the presence of all
peoples. A light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to thy people
Israel. And his father and his mother marveled at what was said about
him." I love him. "And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary, his
mother, 'Behold this child is set for the fall and the rising of many in
Israel.'" It isn't just
unmitigated blessings. If you go back to the prophecy about the 77s in Daniel
9, you realize that the temple will be reconsecrated. A strong covenant will
be made. Sacrifices shall cease and the holy city will be completely
destroyed and desolate. And so at the same time that Christ comes after 490
years to reconsecrate the temple, there is a doom pronounced upon those who
have accumulated in Jerusalem all kinds of wealth and political power and
have corrupted the temple, because whose temple is it? Is it Solomon's? No.
Is it the second temple that Ezra and Nehemiah helped rebuild? No. It's
Herod's temple. A half-Jew Edomite who was murdering half his family. The
downfall of those who wanted power and prosperity and wealth more than faith
and love and grace and justice. "A sign of contradiction and a sword
will pierce through your own soul also that the thoughts of many hearts will
be revealed." John 2 --Wedding Feast
at Cana Now we have
other passages to look at. We won't spend any time on them. I'm just going to
mention them to you and just draw conclusions briefly from them and then
conclude. Of course, we should go to John 2. The first of the seven signs in
the Book of Signs, the fourth gospel. The first of Jesus' miracles is to turn
water into wine, just as the first miracle of Moses was to turn water into
blood, so Jesus turns it into the blood of the grape as it is called in
Genesis 49. Here we have, I believe, something that is fraught with all kinds
of rich literary and theological symbolism. In John 1, "Behold the Lamb
of God who takes away the sins of the world," says John the Baptist. In
John 2, the Lamb goes up to a wedding feast. Now does that sound familiar? A
wedding feast where a lamb attends? That's how John is going to climax his
book of Revelation, by inviting all of us to the wedding supper of the Lamb.
And then along with the wedding banquet of the Lamb, we are also going to be
introduced to a Virgin Mother Queen's city, the new Jerusalem, which is both
virginally pure but maternally fruitful. Theologians
have suggested that John has deliberately just loaded the first few chapters
of his gospel with the symbolism and the keys to interpreting his Apocalypse
and the more you soak and meditate and ponder, I think the more you will
find. So, she approaches him and says, "They've run out of wine. 'Woman,
what is this between you and me?'" It's a very interesting phrase. I
would recommend for your study a book by a top Biblical scholar in America,
Manuel Miguens, who wrote a study on what does it mean, the Semitic idiom,
what to me and to you, woman?" He actually shows that there is nothing
caustic or irritated about Jesus' reply at all. It's basically, "You
know, there's nothing between you and me." So anyway,
"Jesus said to her, 'Woman, what is it between you and me? My hour has
not yet come." Jesus is thinking that the best wine will be given at the
hour. What does Mary say? Mary is assuming another posture, now. She is going
to have to distance herself from her son as her son. Now he's addressing her
not as Mother, but as Woman. It sure connotes in my mind Genesis 3:15 and
other key passages. Now all of a sudden, you are not just my mother anymore,
what you are talking about in this miracle would initiate a whole new economy
of salvation, woman, because that's what she is to be, a New Eve, a Mother to
all of the renewed and redeemed humanity. "Woman, my hour has not yet
come." What does she say, "Awe, come on, what are you going to do
this for your mother, and now we're friends." No. She turns to the
servants and says to them exactly what she says to us and all those who are
truly devoted to our Lady, "Do whatever he tells you." We should never
allow ourselves to be so exclusively focused upon Mary that we don't hear her
primary utterance. Do whatever he tells us! That's why Marian devotion does
not take us away from Christ. It refocuses our eyes and our ears on whatever
he tells us and that's what she is passionately concerned about now as then.
"Do whatever he tells you." And it goes on and he tells the
servants to take these six stone jugs full of water that were used for the
Jewish Rite of Purification to wash feet. Can you imagine, if you were one of
those servants? Well she said to do whatever he told me and you're taking
these big, I mean, literally hundreds of gallons of dirty water and you take
those jugs and you fill the cups with this dirty, smelly water used to wash
feet and wash the dirt off these people and you hand--- laughter -- these
guys don't know what to do with this man. What are they going to do when they
taste the foot water? There's so much
humor in this stuff that we miss, you know. And they're sitting back there
saying, "We're going to get in trouble. No, no. She said, 'Do whatever
he tells you.' We're just doing what the friend of the groom said, you know?
We're just following orders, you know?" And all of a sudden they just
kind of sit back there cracking up, waiting for all hell to break loose and
all kinds of problems. And then all of a sudden, what does the host say when
he tastes the water? The steward of the feast tasted the water now become
wine and didn't know where it came from though the servants who had drawn the
water knew. The steward of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him,
"Every man serves the good wine first, but when men have drunk freely
and have become drunk, then the poor wine. But you have kept the best wine
until now. This, the first of his signs Jesus did at Cana in Galilee." Now who is this
steward of the feast called the bridegroom? Well, if you go over to John 3,
you discover that that is what John the Baptist thinks about himself. Look
over at verse 27. John answered, "No one can receive anything except
what is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I have
said I am not the Christ but I have been sent before him. He who has the
bride is the bridegroom, the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears
him rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice." Now John has
deliberately joined together what the steward at the feast, the friend of the
bridegroom has said about this great wine with John the Baptist, the last and
the greatest of the Old Testament prophets who identifies himself as the
friend of the bridegroom, the steward of the feast, as it were. This last and
the greatest of the Old Testament prophets has said, "Hey, look, I'm
baptizing you with water" and by the way the water in those six stone
jugs goes back to Numbers 19. It was for the Jewish Rite of Purification in
Numbers 19, the word is "baptizein." It was for Jewish baptism
purification. John the Baptist says using that kind of water to purify the
people and get them ready for the Messiah, that same kind of water is all of
a sudden transformed into the best wine by the Lamb of God and John the
Baptist is saying, "The New Covenant has come." And when you go
into the Apocalypse, you see this thing just kind of thrown open to the whole
universe in Technicolor. Because there the Lamb of God in Chapter 5 is
enthroned and he leads all the people in worship and he invites all the
universe to the wedding supper of the Lamb where he presents the blood, the
wine, the best of the New Covenant at his banquet. This is what
our Lady triggered. Just a humble little Jewess who knows what grace is all
about. "Do whatever he tells you," and you won't even begin to
anticipate the glories that will be revealed to us. That's what she said. If
we will do whatever he tells us, we will not have to calculate what we can
produce with our own human resources. Why? Because if Mary tells us anything,
she tells us that God can do the greatest with the least. If we are tempted
to say, "I'm really not that smart. I'm not that eloquent. I'm not that
powerful. I'm not that rich. I'm a nobody." I'd say, "Bingo. You're
qualified. You have just proven yourself to be the most qualified of all
because who does God love to use?" The lowest, the least, the poorest,
the humblest, the ones who know they are nobodies, so that when God does
something great through them, everybody would look and say, "It had to
be God," and He gets all the glory. And that's what Mary wants to do, to
give God all the glory. Conclusion: Why Give
Glory to Mary? So we say,
"Well then, why give glory and honor and devotion to Mary?" Because
we do whatever Jesus tells us. And we do whatever Jesus does because the
fundamental axiom of Christian morality is the imitacio Christi, the
imitation of Christ, and he is the best of the best when it comes to being a
son. Not only a Son of his heavenly Father but a Son of his earthly mother.
When he accepts the mission of his Father to become a man and to obey the
law, he obeys it more perfectly than anybody could have ever imagined it
being obeyed. And when he gets to that commandment, "Honor your father
and your mother," that Hebrew word, kabodah, means bestow glory, comes
from kabod weight, glory. So he honors his Father and obeys his command by
bestowing unprecedented glory upon the one that he has chosen from all
eternity to be his mother. The only time that the Creator created a human
creature, created the one destined to be his mother. And he filled her with
his own life and grace because he began honoring as soon as she was created
his mother. So what do we
do? We honor Christ and we glorify him and we imitate him. If we really
imitate him, we do what he does and we honor and bestow glory upon his
mother. Not instead of him. It isn't undermining devotion to Christ. It's to
express our devotion of Christ, our worship of Christ by imitating him. And
if we do it we're going to be able to see in her face, the face of our
mother, because Jesus has taken on her flesh and blood and given us his own
Divine nature. Peter says, "We are partakers of Divine nature through
Christ" so that his mother can become our mother, spiritually,
supernaturally, but actually and really. And so in devotion to him, we can be
devoted to her without any compromise, without any tug of war, without any
diminution or decrease of our honor to Christ. Love is not a
finite substance. God is love. Love just keeps multiplying and reproducing
itself, and the more we love, the more love we have to give. And the more we
love Christ, well, we know if there were 90 percent that goes to Christ and
10 percent that goes to Mary, 100 percent of it goes to God and the God-man
and therefore 100 percent of it and more is available for us to give to
others and especially his Mother who has become our Mother. Isn't that what
Jesus is trying to say at the Cross when he says to the beloved disciple. He
didn't say "John," he said "to the disciple he loved, 'Behold
your Mother.'" We See Mary as our Own
Mother Now which
disciple did Jesus love? John as opposed to Peter? Not James, Bartholomew? He
loves all his disciples then. He loves all his disciples now. Who is the
beloved disciple who should look upon Mary as his Mother? All of us who are
beloved disciples. This is why in Revelation 12, "The woman who gives
birth to the male child who is to rule the nations, the Messiah against whom
the dragon makes war." At the end it says, after she has been delivered
up into heaven, kind of assumed bodily, as it were, "The dragon makes
war against the rest of her offspring, that is, those who keep the
commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus." They're the beloved
disciples. We are the brothers and sisters of Christ, the firstborn among
many brothers, and guess what that makes us? The children of the Queen Mother
of the Son of David. That heavenly temple is our home. That new Jerusalem is
our birthplace. The daughter Zion is our sister and she is our mother and she
is our bride and she is our homeland. Thank God that
we don't have to undermine or take away anything from the glory of Christ.
Rather we behold the ultimate masterpiece of Christ in Mary. And like any
artist, you know if an artist takes you into his room with all the
masterpieces hanging on the wall and you could stand there staring at him
saying, "Oh my. You are such a great artist. You're fantastic."
He'd say, "Hey, look at my work." He wouldn't feel offended if you
went over to his greatest work and said, "This is awesome. Wow! Thank
you!" He would say, "Hey, come on. Check out my pants and shirt.
Look at my face." No. Christ wants us to fall head over heels in love
with his Mother because that's his masterpiece. Exhibit A, that he can really
accomplish salvation. She was saved from sin. That's why she is sinless.
Because some people are saved from sin and other people are saved from sin
and she was saved by Christ from sin from beginning to end. It's the work of
Christ and we extol and praise our eldest brother, our Lord and Master and
our Redeemer as we love and as we follow his Mother and do whatever he tells
you. In the name of
the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit we pray: Father in heaven we
thank you for our Mother in heaven. We thank you Lord, Jesus Christ, for
filling her up with your grace, for giving to her spotless flesh and blood so
that we, through her, might have a perfect gift to express our thanks and
praise to you in giving you human nature that was unspotted to enable you to
make the perfect sacrifice, uniting that spotless human nature to the
glorious divine nature of the Second Person, the Eternal Son. Thank you for
making us sons and daughters of the Most High. Thank you Lord Jesus for
making the Blessed Trinity our family. Help us to renew our appreciation and
devotion to our adopted status but help us see that it's more than just a
legal standing. That you have filled us to overflowing with the same spirit
that filled Mary. Through her intercession increase our devotion in all
propriety but in all magnitude and help us with joy to spread that. We thank
you for Mother Church, called to be a virgin, a bride and a mother. Help us,
O Lord to see that we who are your Church are called to accept the fullness
of grace that Mary has. You chose her through whom to give Jesus to the world
and now still that pattern remains. You are continually giving the life of
Christ through Mary. Help us to always remember that in our hearts and to
store it up like she so that we might do whatever he tells us, that we might
do whatever pleases you, Lord Jesus. That we might sacrifice ourselves in
union with your Eucharistic sacrifice continued perpetually in heaven forever
in praise, honor and thanksgiving to our Father and your Father. And hear us
as we pray that family prayer you taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven,
etc.
The
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