V Mary’s Spiritual Motherhood
The Fathers of the Church, beginning with Justin (died A.D. 165) saw in Mary the antithesis of our natural mother, Eve. In Mary they contemplated the reversal of the drama of the first sin:
Eve listened to Satan under the guise of a serpent–Mary received the visitation of an angel.
Eve believed Satan’s lie–Mary believed the truth of God’s promise.
Eve disobeyed God’s commandment–Mary obeyed God’s word.
Eve is the mother of all the living, whom she and Adam involved in disaster and loss–Mary is the Mother of all who live as co-heirs with Christ of eternal life, born from above through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the fruit of Mary’s womb.
Mary’s spiritual motherhood rests upon John 19:25-27: “Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his home” (NAB).
We believe that in the beloved disciple are prefigured all the disciples of Christ. Thus, by his gift from the cross, Christ makes Mary the spiritual mother of us all. Jesus is her firstborn (Luke 2:7), the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom. 8:29). Mary is the Mother of all those brothers and sisters, ourselves, destined for glory.
The Christian Research Institute (CRI) will have none of this. It begins the attack by presenting Frank Sheed’s explanation of our Catholic doctrine: “Calvary was the sacrifice of our race’s redemption; everything that [Jesus] did and said on the cross related to that. So with his word to our Lady and John. It was as part of his plan of redemption that he was giving her to be the mother of John–not of John as himself but as man. From this moment she is the mother of us all.”(F. J. Sheed, Theology for Beginners (Ann Arbor: Servant, 1981), 131- 132.)
CRI gives this retort: “Protestants contend that only a predisposed ambition to produce a ‘spiritual mother’ could lead to such a reading of the text. That Jesus had only John, and not all men, in mind is made sufficiently clear by John’s comment that from that day on he took Mary into his care [CRI’s emphasis]. If the fact that Mary was now to look on John as her son means that she was also to look on all believers as her children, then the fact that Mary was simultaneously entrusted to John’s care would have to mean that she was also entrusted to the care of all believers, which is absurd.”(Elliott Miller, “The Mary of Roman Catholicism,” Christian Research Journal, Fall 1990, 28. The first part of Miller’s article appeared in the Summer 1990 issue. In these notes the two parts are referred to as Part 1 and Part 2. The articles represent the position of the Christian Research Institute.)
No Protestant Unanimity
CRI is unqualified to pose as a champion for all–even most–Protestants. About Mary’s motherhood of us all, the first Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, said: “It is a great joy of which the angel speaks! It is God’s consolation and overflowing goodness that man should be honored with such treasure: Mary as his true mother, Christ as his brother, and God as his Father.”(Luther’s Works (Weimar), 10:71:19-73:2.)
On Christmas Day, 1523 Luther preached, “I believe that there is no one among us who would not leave his own mother to become a son of Mary. And that you can do, all the more because that has been offered as a choice to you, and it is an even greater joy than if you embraced your mother with real embraces.”(Ibid, 11:224:8.) Two days later he said, “We are the children of Mary; we are able to hear the song of the angels!”(Ibid.)
At Christmas, 1529 Luther turned to the subject again: “Mary is the mother of Jesus and the mother of us all. If Christ is ours, we must be where he is, and where he is, we must be also, and all that he has must be ours, and his mother therefore also is ours.”(Ibid., 29:655:26-656:7.)
The Anglican de Satge writes, “She is the climax of the Old Testament people, the one to whom the cloud of witnesses from the ancient era look as their crowning glory, for it was through her response to grace that their Vindicator came to stand upon the earth. In the order of redemption she is the first fruits of her Son’s saving work, the one among her Son’s people who has gone all the way. And in the order of her Son’s people, she is the mother.”( John de Satge, Down to Earth: The New Protestant Vision of the Virgin Mary (Consortium, 1976), 111. The title of de Satge’s fourth chapter is “Mary, Mother of Her Son’s People.”)
Eastern Orthodox Christians, like us Catholics, are firm in their allegiance to Mary as Mother of us all. Nicolas Zernov writes, “The Mother of God is the Mother of all mankind, the friend and protectress of all members of the Church.”(Nicolas Zernov, Eastern Christendom (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolean, 1961), 279.)
On this doctrine of Mary’s universal motherhood, Orthodox and Catholic Christians are unanimous; Protestants are a house divided. Many Protestants agree with the liturgical churches; some do not, but CRI suggests all do not. This is simply inaccurate.
If CRI is sincere in its concern for ecumenism, it will cease attacking the Catholic Church’s understanding of our (common) Mother. It will make every effort to unite Protestants in a devotion to Mary at least as warm as Luther’s.
Which Position Is “Absurd”?
CRI characterizes Frank Sheed’s Catholic interpretation of John 19:25-27 as “absurd.” It objects that if Mary must look on all of us as her children, then she would have to be entrusted to the care of all believers, as she was entrusted to John’s care.
This objection collapses when we look to the Greek text of John 19:27: “the disciple took her eis ta idia.” CRI follows the Anchor Bible translation of the three Greek words, translating them as “into his care.” Other translations, Catholic and non-Catholic, have “into his home” (NAB, NIV, NEB, CCD, Kleist-Lilly) or “to his own home” (RSV) or “chez lui” (Jerusalem) or “en su casa” (BAC).
Such translations do very well for spiritual reading, but they are too free for exegesis. They are, in fact, precise where the Greek is vague. In the phrase eis ta idia, there is no word meaning “care” or “house” or “home.” (One may refer by contrast to John 7:53: “They went each to his own house” (RSV), where John wrote oikon [house] in his Greek text.) What does eis ta idia mean, then?
Eis is a preposition with five general meanings, expressing place, time, measure, relationship, and end, purpose, or goal. (The last two meanings–relationship and end, purpose, or goal–frequently converge in a given sentence.)
Ta idia is the neuter plural substantive use of the adjective idios: “private, one’s own.” John has used the plural, although the singular to idion is often found with no difference of meaning. According to context, the meaning may be “one’s own, my own, your own, his own, her own, our own, their own.”
But one’s own what? There is the rub. John’s expression is neuter and therefore, one may say, deliberately noncommittal. Ta idia can mean one’s own things, purposes, opinions, property, interests, intentions, business, whatever.
Classical Writers’ Testimony
Consider classical writers. Euripides (Iphigenia in Aulis, 1363) writes idia prasson, “doing his own thing.” (Paul [1 Thess. 4:11] uses almost the same words: prassein ta idia, “to do your own business.”) Again, Euripides (Phoenician Maidens, 555) writes, “Mortals do not possess things as their own [idia],” and (Andromache, 376) he says, “True friends have nothing as their own [idion].” Xenophon (Anabasis 1, 3, 3) writes of “[money] which I did not put away for my own [personal use, eis to idion]”–like John’s eis ta idia, except that John uses the plural.
Similar uses of the substantive idion/idia are found in Antiphon, Andocides, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Lucian, Theognis, and other Greek writers of the classical and post-classical periods.
Eis in John 19:27 is used to express end, purpose, or goal, a frequent usage in John’s Gospel (1:7, 4:14, 4:36, 6:9, 9:39, 12:7, 13:29, 18:37). In this usage eis translates into English as “for” or “as.” That the disciple took Mary eis ta idia means only that he took her as his own.
We teach and believe that John here is a type of all disciples. We all take Christ’s Mother by his gift as our own. She is the Mother of us all. This understanding is explained by John Paul II, quoting Augustine:
“Clearly, in the Greek text, the expression eis ta idia goes beyond the mere acceptance of Mary by the disciple in the sense of material lodging and hospitality in his house; it indicates rather a communion of life established between the two as a result of the words of the dying Christ; cf. Saint Augustine, In Joan. Evang. Tract. 119, 3: CCL 36, 659: ‘He took her to himself, not into his own property, for he possessed nothing of his own, but among his own duties, which he attended to with dedication.'”(John Paul II, Mother of the Redeemer (Redemptoris Mater), note 130.)
In John 1:11-14, the apostle uses the phrase eis ta idia with eis in its local meaning of to or into: “He came to his own” (neuter). This is followed at once by the masculine hoi idioi–“his own people” (who refused to accept him.)
On his cross the order is reversed. He comes to hoi idioi, his own people, his beloved disciple and his mother, and they willingly accept him, and they do his will. Obedient to his command, they take each other as their own (ta idia). The disciple takes Mary as his Mother, and she takes him as her son.
The two of them on Calvary are types of the Church, paradigms of all Christ’s disciples. She is our Mother. We are her sons and daughters. Paul calls Jesus “the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (Rom. 8:29). Shared humanity and grace makes him our brother, and the Mother of our brother by nature and grace is our Mother too.
Missing the Main Point
CRI alleges, “Our life is contained in the life of the Son, and Mary is His mother [CRI’s emphasis]. But this does not make her our mother in any way. . . . The birth that Jesus had through [sic] Mary was according to the flesh. Jesus derived His physical life through [sic] Mary, but that is not what He came to communicate to us.”(Part 2, 28.)
But it is precisely by the human nature which he took from Mary that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Because of her free cooperation, he has that body in which God became visible to us, and we could see his glory, full of grace and truth. From her he received the Body and Blood which are our Eucharistic food and drink, the pledge and guarantee of our eternal life (John 6:33ff, 50, 53, 57).
Jesus does not communicate himself to us in any other way than by what he is, God and man now inseparably united in one divine Person, Son of God and Mary’s son. In and by both his natures, human and divine, the one Person Jesus is our Savior, and his human nature is from Mary.
Mary’s Motherhood Unique
Now, let us ask a further question: Were Mary’s birth-giving and motherhood purely physical? Among human beings, motherhood is higher than among other animals because it is a relation of one person, the mother, to another person, the child. Since human persons are free and intelligent beings animated by spiritual, immortal souls, there is a spiritual component in all human motherhood.
But Mary’s motherhood is unique in that her child is a divine Person. The union of divine nature and human nature in Mary’s womb was supernatural in origin–“the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you” (Luke 1:35).
Her preparation, too, for motherhood was supernatural, not merely physical. God had filled her utterly with his presence and his grace before the angel approached her (1:28). Her personal response to the angel’s message was prompted by the God-given grace moving within her. That response was flawless. She was humble (1:48), full of faith (1:45), and obedient to God’s call (1:38). These Bible truths about Mary led Augustine to exclaim that she conceived Christ in her mind and heart before she conceived him in her womb.
Mary can be spiritually our Mother and spiritually the Mother of the beloved disciple because she was spiritually–not merely physically–the Mother of Christ.
CRI Anti-Biblical
CRI denies that there is a biblical basis for saying that everything Jesus said on the cross has a redemptive significance. I repeat: Jesus’ words on the cross to Mary and the disciple, says CRI, have no redemptive significance; therefore, they do not apply to all the redeemed. CRI here falters as a Bible-Christian organization, and many Protestants will have yet another reason for rejecting its article as a “Protestant response” speaking for all Protestants.
Second Timothy 3:15-16 says, “The sacred Scriptures are capable of giving you wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All [repeat, all] Scripture is inspired by God and is useful…for training in righteousness.”
We know that the writers of all four Gospels were selective in their choice of the materials available to them from oral tradition. John tells us clearly what his own principle of selection was. “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of [his] disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name” (John 20:30- 31).
What this means is that every detail of John’s Gospel has redemptive significance. The biblical basis for that should be abundantly clear–but apparently it is not, at least to CRI.
Ah, Yes–but When?
We must now notice the position of the words in John 19:28: “After this, aware that everything was now finished….” What was finished? His redemptive sacrifice, for Jesus’ death follows immediately, with his taking the sip of common wine (19:29) and with his last words, “It is finished.”
But when was he aware that everything was now finished, that now was the time for him to go? Precisely when he had made provision for his Church in 19:27, by giving us his own Mother. Verses 18-24 portray the crucifixion with its attendant circumstances. Verse 30 records his death.
Between these two events of utmost redemptive significance are verses 25-27. What happens in them? A private little family arrangement? No, a redemptive act: the bestowal of his own Mother to be Mother of the household of God, his Church, and Mother of every disciple-member of his Church.