Hail Mary

Today is the feast of the Annunciation. Translation: This post is going to cause a reaction. Why? Well, have you heard the joke about the three issues that Protestants have with Roman Catholicism? Mary, Mary and Mary. Certainly not a joke, this feast day in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox liturgical calendar, otherwise known as the Solemnity of the Annunciation of our Lord, is all about Mary.[1] And therefore, it is all about Jesus. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

Today we celebrate the coming of the angel Gabriel and his shocking announcement to Mary, a young, poor, Jewish woman who was still months away from proper marriage – “You will be with child and give birth to a son . . . the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God.”[2] On this day, more specifically, we celebrate Mary’s fiat, the courageous “may it be done to me,” not because it represents any merit outside of God’s grace but because Mary’s freely chosen “yes” was the chosen avenue for God’s very Incarnation and a model of Christian discipleship for us today.

If you are Protestant, you are probably squirming in your chair already. Like me (raised Presbyterian), you may have reacted so much to Mary as to push her out of your consciousness and spirituality altogether. As Evangelical scholar Scot McKnight put it, “Most of us know far more about what we don’t believe about Mary – that she wasn’t immaculately conceived, that she had other children and wasn’t perpetually virgin, etc. – than what we do believe about Mary.”[3]

That’s why McKnight chose to write a book about Mary, encouraging his Evangelical friends to desist from such “reaction formation” and begin to see Mary in a fresh and biblical light. “We are Protestants!” he says forcibly. “We believe in the Bible; Mary is in the Bible; we need to believe what the Bible says about Mary.”[4] Ultimately, he writes, and I use his own words, “Because the real Mary always leads us to Jesus.”[5]

This is what most Protestants miss regarding Marian devotion – the Rosary, Novenas, scapulars and pilgrimages to places like Lourdes or Madjugorje. It is all about Jesus. At least that’s the intended design. Our understanding of, our attention to, and yes, our relationship with Mary can and should point to, awaken our faith in, and strengthen our primary relationship with Jesus.

Yet I’d have to admit as a Catholic that at times Marian devotion can obscure its Christocentric focus. I often joke about Catholics giving the impression that Mary is the fourth person of the Trinity, but only half in jest. The way we talk about Mary, if it doesn’t lead us to Jesus, makes non-Catholics very uneasy. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t also make Mary herself uncomfortable.

Msgr. Peter Hocken, Catholic priest and noted ecumenist, cautions against such a consequential separation, suggesting that the Spirit will convict us if in honoring Mary we obscure the clear centrality of Jesus:

The Spirit will make Catholics uneasy, not about honouring Mary (Luke 1:48), but about all forms and expressions of Marian devotion that downplay or ignore the centrality of Jesus. Anything that obscures the uniqueness of Jesus’ role as mediator between God and the human race will be contested by the Spirit.[6]

And so it should. What we celebrate today has been celebrated for centuries because it marks the moment that God “became flesh and dwelt among us.”[7] It marks the moment when, “with the entrance of the eternal into time, time itself is redeemed.”[8] Mary is “full of grace,” because, in a quite literal sense, she is full of Jesus. On this day, I wonder if we, Catholics and Protestants alike, with our eyes fixed on the Lord, might together be able to join in the angelic chorus. . .

“Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.”

Luke 1:29

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[1] Documented celebrations of the feast of the Annunciation date back to the fourth and fifth centuries.

[2] Lk 1:31, 35.

[3] Scot McKnight, The Real Mary: Why Evangelical Christians Can Embrace the Mother of Jesus (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2007), 5.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, 6.

[6] Peter Hocken, The Glory and the Shame: Reflections on the 20^th Century Outpouring of the Holy Spirit (Guildford, UK: Eagle Publishing, 1987), 117; taken from Paul M Miller, Evangelical Mission in Co-operation with Catholics: A Study of Evangelical Missiological Tensions (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2013), 138-139.

[7] Jn 1:14.

[8] Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater (The Mother of the Redeemer), 1.