What place Mary in our saving Hope?

What place Mary in our saving Hope?

Nativity image from the Brady art collection at the Jesuit Center in
Wernersville. 

It fits the season of Advent to pepper the daily readings and feasts during these four weeks before Christmas with references to the Mother of God, Mary.    And we celebrate in this season both the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and that of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.   As a memory of popular devotion to Mary, I recall celebrating Mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City, built where it is said that the Mother of God appeared to an Aztec native, Juan Diego.   Even as we celebrated Mass on the main altar at an early hour young couples approached prayerfully at a side altar to present their new-born children before the same image of Our Lady that Juan is said to have found imprinted on his cloak.

There is such an outpouring of affection among the faithful for Mary that Protestants sometimes accuse us of worshiping her or praying only to her as if she were the Incarnate God.   

We know that we do not worship her but look to her as a saint in heaven, indeed as a disciple of her Son, a mother who can help us grow in the graces of discipleship ourselves.   Our love for her, however, does raise the question about why indeed she herself could not have come to us as the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity.    So I ask God why Mary is not our Incarnate God instead of Jesus.   God in Three Persons could certainly have arranged for that.   And any child that Mary, as our Incarnate God and Savior, might have conceived could have been born to be a disciple to her rather than the other way around.

We cannot question the freedom of God to arrange our salvation in any way God desires.   We know that the Second Person of the Trinity comes as Jesus.  This has been revealed to us.  There are, indeed, some cultural reasons why God might come to us as a man instead of a woman.    One of them, I conjecture, is that women were far less likely to be crucified in the Roman Empire.    And God in the crucifixion of Jesus wanted us to know the greatness of divine love for us.     Jesus showed us such great love by subjecting himself to the worst possible humiliation and suffering that the so-called civilized world has devised: Crucifixion.

Mary as the Incarnate God could have suffered the same fate but women were almost always protected from crucifixion.  We have in the history of lynchings in the United States something similar.   The victims of lynchings were sometimes women but this was exceptional.   Crucifixions and lynchings, public shows of power, are used to humiliate, intimidate and eliminate opposition and they typically fall on men.   Women within the cultures that tolerate crucifixion and lynching suffer humiliations and abuse in other ways and Mary suffered at the foot of Jesus’ cross to represent them.

God chose to come as the man Jesus to take on this responsibility of sharing the worst effects of human sin that any one of us could suffer, humiliations and abuse of any kind.   Jesus wanted all of us and especially all those who suffered like pain and humiliation to be strengthened by the fact that God chose to suffer in the same way.  The sufferings of Jesus and the pierced heart of the Mother of God are 100% sufficient to strengthen and comfort men and women who have suffered atrocities of all kinds.    It is with this man Jesus and his Mother that we will be saved from our darkness.   So we celebrate in this season the beginning of our salvation in the birth of the Child and in the generous willingness of His Mother to follow him in hope.   They become our hope even as the world rejects them.

2019 Christmas Card by Sr. Mary Bur, IHM, one of an annual series!