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Mary as the figure of the Church

By Peter Sellick - posted Wednesday, 24 December 2008


Every time we pray the Lord’s prayer we pray that the Father’s will be done. This mimics the words of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane so that whenever we pray the Lord’s prayer we are aware that the Father’s will may be terrible. Perhaps this is why in any epiphany of God the words “fear not” are central as they are for Mary in the annunciation.

Mary does not make her statement of self forgetfulness alone. It is not a supreme act of individuality. For the introduction that names the places and times and names of the recipients connect her to the whole history of Israel. She has faith because she has been born into a community of faith who count the father of faith, Abraham, as their ancestor. Faith and grace a mutually supporting aspects of Christian belief.

Augustine remarks that if Mary had not believed then the Son could not have become incarnate in her. She had to accept the Word of God into her heart before she could conceive him in her womb. To understand the birth of Jesus from a virgin’s womb as a nature miracle is to miss the point. A medieval painting portrays Mary being impregnated by the Word through her ear. Not the usual orifice that we connect with procreation. The point is made for all believers, that the Christ may be born in them through faith and that this engenders grace.

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Likewise, on the level of the church, the Christ is born into the community because of the faith of that community.

Belief here is everything. The detractors of Christianity may see it as superstition and foolishness but to believe first is crucial. Without that nothing can happen for us. Mary says yes to the message of the angel Gabriel and because of this yes God became a man “and dwelt among us full of grace and truth”.

By contrast, that other woman in the Bible, Eve, says yes to the serpent and brings the whole human race down to death. Again on the individual level, we are all called to say yes or no to the Christ, to go with Mary and pour our lives out in discipleship or travel some other path. It is part of the economy of the human soul that we will say yes to something. Neutrality is not within our power.

Here the lines are drawn very sharply and I do not apologise to those who will be offended. When we say yes to something other than the Christ we are immediately in the company of demons who will imprison us and destroy our lives, no matter how we dress them up in the clothes of goodness and sincerity.

I am aware of the scandal of this, particularly in our time in which the human paths seem so convincing and promise such triumphant outcomes. But the evidence from history is before us, as it was for Israel. All of the utopias, all of the paths of nations anchored in the triumph of the self, or of the community, or of the nation, or of the myth of endless progress, have failed.

The millennium goals have become a joke. Our political systems simply do not have the power to eradicate poverty while men and women continue to seek their own security and aggrandisement. The only solution is Mary’s declaration. This is the only act, repeated over and over again by believers, that has the power to bring about the time of justice and grace and peace.

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At Christmas we celebrate the birth into the world of a man who is the pure Word of God, into the church and into the hearts of individual believers in the full knowledge that he is indeed the light of the world, the only light that can overcome our darkness.

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About the Author

Peter Sellick an Anglican deacon working in Perth with a background in the biological sciences.

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