Mary, Mother of God, 2006

Mary, Mother of God, 2006
Each year on this date, Saint Cyril of Alexandria must somewhere be smiling and cringing. Smiling because this celebration of Mary, the Mother of God is a vindication of his life-long struggle for orthodox Christology. Cringing because in the Post-Communion prayer, we slip in the title, “Mother of Christ,” which was precisely the formula he fought so long to get rid of! It is a bit like toasting the memory of Ronald Reagan by quoting Leonid Brezhnev.

Cyril spent the better portion of his adult life in a relentless battle against Bishop Nestorius of Constantinople. Nestorius’ claim to infamy is that when his flock was referring to Mary as the Mother of God, he felt that their Christology was too extreme and asked instead that they call her Mother of Christ. After all, how can God, without beginning or end, have a mother?

But Cyril insisted, and indeed carried the day. Yet in a fit of theological amnesia, our English translators decided that the Latin phrase Filii tui Genetricem et Ecclesiae Matrem, literally “Mother of Your Son and Mother of the Church” should be rendered “Mother of Christ and Mother of the Church!” And of course, this wasn’t merely a problem with our translators: it had to get by a bunch of bishops and was approved by the Vatican. This morning, for your edification and my sanctification, I will pray the prayer as written. And why not start the New Year making lemonade with this one?

“Isn’t this just the sort of arcane nonsense that only scholars can care about? How much difference can it make? Isn’t Jesus the Christ and Mary the Mother of Jesus?” Yes and yes.
The problem is not what Nestorius allowed, but the fact that he insisted on calling Mary the mother of Christ and forbad her to be called Mother of God. Just as fatherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to god the Father, so too, motherhood is revealed to us by Jesus’ relationship to Mary His Mother. To understand fatherhood, we must understand God’s fatherhood; to understand motherhood, we must understand Mary’s motherhood. No small praise for the Virgin of Nazareth in Galilee.

God is eternal and without origin, but God’s body is not. It is Mary who gives God a body. But the question is this: is God therefore a body? Can we in some way say that in fact, Mary is somehow at God’s origin, at least as we know Him now? It sounds risky to say so, but our salvation and the redemption of God’s good creation is at stake, if we refuse to acknowledge this.
For Nestorius, the body of Jesus the Christ was simply a tool. His real nature, the divine nature inhabited this body for a time, but threw it off, once He accomplished what needed to be done. Therefore, since his divine nature didn’t need a mother, he merely went along with the Incarnation as a kind of charade, or to be more kind, as a condescension to our lowly human nature for the purpose of instructing us. He put on a body to allow us to see something of God, but not God. Following this reasoning, we too must someday throw off our bodily eyes and perhaps even our bodies in order to see God.

“Show us the Father!” the Apostle Philip pleads at the Last Supper. Jesus’ response to Philip is important. He chides him: “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me? He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Jesus does not say, “He who has seen me has some idea of what the Father is like.” Indeed, we can come to an idea of God’s character by inspecting many of the signs He has put in creatio. Jesus also does not say, “He who sees me with spiritual eyes sees the Father.” No, He simply says, “He who sees Me sees the Father.”

This is true because Jesus is God and Jesus, since He is also man is a body. Some of us don’t like to admit it, but our nature as human beings means that we are bodies. Not merely bodies, mind you, but bodies nonetheless. It is false to say that we are spirits inhabiting bodies, though many of us today would prefer to think that. Many are ashamed to be bodies. Often this is because we think that only perfect bodies are worthy of respect, to the great profit of the plastic surgeon. Or we are embarrassed by the weakness of the body, that it becomes ill or has desires that we have difficulty controlling. So we blame the body and long to be rid of it, perhaps not consciously, but I do believe this is true. And I do believe that this is why we have so little respect for mothers today, including the Mother of God. For it is to our mothers that we owe our bodies, and therefore it is to our mothers that we owe ourselves. For we are bodies.
So we return to the importance of today’s Solemnity. God takes for Himself a mother and so becomes a body. If Jesus is not a body then His Resurrection is not bodily, then His presence in the Eucharist is merely symbolic. Indeed, there is much at stake in calling Mary the Mother of God. If God is pleased to be a body, surely our bodies can’t be bad: indeed, they are gifts from God: they are ourselves! When we leave this earthly life, we won’t be ourselves again until the Resurrection when we will receive our bodies back (at age 33, according to Thomas Aquinas—but I digress). Remember that: we won’t be able to hug our departed loved ones again until the Resurrection, but that will happen; therefore we have this hope for the world, that everything about it that is good will be perfected by God in the end, our bodies included. For if God cherishes humanity enough to become human, surely He will not begrudge us humans becoming God with Him.