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Late last fall I realized that I really didn't like Mary. More specifically, I disliked Mary. And I had disliked Mary for quite some time. There was no apparent reason; the Lutheran tradition I had been raised in and chosen for myself was at worst indifferent to Mary, not hostile. But I was definitely verging on hostility.

The realization didn't occur in a vacuum. It came out of my housing arrangements. I was living in New York City at the time, in a brick building called by its inhabitants the Community of Christ in the City. It was populated then, as it had been since its inception about twenty years previously, by Christians of various traditions all engaged in some kind of church work. As part of our communal life, we said nightly evening prayer together, using the order of service found in the Lutheran Book of Worship. The last canticle we sang every night was the Magnificat, the hymn of praise that Mary sang when Gabriel announced to her that she would bear a son who would redeem Israel at last (Luke 1:46-55). I would guess that during the course of my stay in New York, I sang the Magnificat about 350 times. Let me just tell you, after that many times, the words start to sink in. Occasionally it would even run in my head unbidden, but I liked the tune, so it was okay.

After I'd sung this maybe a hundred times, a few important things dawned on me. The first thing, of course, was that I disliked Mary, which was followed quickly by the conviction that this was a totally unacceptable attitude. Next it dawned on me that Mary is theologically important, and fancying myself to be a budding theologian, I had to take that seriously. And third it dawned on me that Mary is the model for the Christian life. Doubtless there are millions, probably hundreds of millions, of people who had all this figured out long before me. I was slow to catch on.

Now as to why I had disliked Mary. Part of it, I suppose, was that she is the subject of such controversy in ecumenical discussions, and I have been in the habit of taking ecclesial disunity very much to heart. (Though it's not like it's her fault that there is disagreement about her.) And I am vigorously non-sentimental, and most of the Marian art I'd seen up to that point in my life was grotesquely sentimental. But more than either of those, I'm embarrassed to admit, the problem was sheer jealousy. I wanted to keep the pursuit of God to myself and not need anyone's instruction on how to get there (which in practice meant rejection of God's plan for my finding him, too). Worse yet, Mary was the chosen one; she was the one everyone was calling blessed; and as patently absurd as it sounds to me now, I envied her the attention and didn't see why she was so extraordinary and I wasn't. Of course it was my own desire for glory, projected onto her, that was afflicting me. Once that unpleasant revelation came to me, I found Mary a lot more likeable.

So I started to make my peace with the Mother of God. It wasn't just an abrupt one-eighty into "Now I like Mary!" but entailed, as I mentioned before, some other realizations as well. First, the theological one.

The essential thing about Mary, I discovered, is that she safeguards what we know about Jesus Christ—a most appropriate task for the woman who held the infant Jesus in her arms. She is a christological protector, you might say, making sure we always remember that her Son is both truly human and truly divine. Her christological role comes out most clearly in the one dogma about Mary that is shared by all the churches, the dogma of the Theotokos . At the third ecumenical council in Ephesus in the year 431, there was a big controversy over whether Mary should get the title Theotokos or Christotokos . Nestorius preferred the latter. He was willing to admit that for nine months Mary bore Christ in her womb (as in Christo-tokos , Greek for "Christ-bearer"), but he wouldn't go so far as to say that she bore God in her womb ( Theo-tokos , "God-bearer"). This opinion inflamed those who said that Nestorius was denying the full divinity of Jesus Christ from the very beginning. If Jesus wasn't God from the start, then everything else would crumble, most horrifyingly Jesus' accomplishment of our salvation by taking on human flesh and saving it with a divine sacrifice. Furthermore, if Jesus were not both fully God and fully man, then his place with the Father and Spirit in the Trinity was a big hoax. Happily, Nestorius lost. Now all of us honor Mary as the God-bearer, the one who held the infinite inside the finite constraints of her body. (Christianity loves a good paradox.) Mary, in truth, is not a distraction from Jesus, but a path to him. Before, I had been mostly concerned with the abuse of this fondness for Mary, but I was gradually seeing that I had thrown out the baby with the bathwater, or in this case, the mother with the bathwater.

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49