Theotokos: In Prophecy

As mentioned before, any privileges or special honors given to Mary are direct results of her role as mother of Jesus Christ – as such she has an intimate, inseparable connection to Christ – an eternal connection in the sense that God’s plan of Salvation is eternal.   Now because Jesus Christ is the Son of God – God incarnate, Mary can be properly called the Mother of God – not in the sense of causing God’s existence or contributing anything to the Godhead – but because she contributed human nature to the Incarnated Son of God – because God entered her womb and from her assumed human nature – she may indeed be called the Mother of God (Theotokos).

Because of her inseparable connection to her Divine Son, Mary, then, is foretold or foreshadowed in the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, sometimes directly and sometimes implicitly, but always in relation to the Messiah.

Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

Isaiah 7:14

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name will be called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace

Isaiah 9:6

The Messiah is to be of royal lineage.

Turn again, O God of hosts! Look down from heaven, and see; have regard for this vine,the stock which thy right hand planted.They have burned it with fire, they have cut it down; may they perish at the rebuke of thy countenance!But let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand, the son of man whom thou hast made strong for thyself!Then we will never turn back from thee; give us life, and we will call on thy name!

Psalm 80:14-18

Your divine throne endures forever and ever. Your royal scepter is a scepter of equity;you love righteousness and hate wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows

Psalm 45:6-7

God personally identifies Himself with the Messiah.

For thus says the Lord GOD: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out

Ezeckial 34:11

Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply

Jer 23:3

For I am with you to save you, says the LORD

Jer 30:11

The Messiah must suffer and die.

As many were astonished at him -- his appearance was so marred, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of the sons of men --  so shall he startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him; for that which has not been told them they shall see, and that which they have not heard they shall understand.
Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed? For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.  Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is dumb, so he opened not his mouth.  By oppression and judgment he was taken away; and as for his generation, who considered that he was cut off out of the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people?  And they made his grave with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, although he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth.  Yet it was the will of the LORD to bruise him; he has put him to grief; when he makes himself an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring, he shall prolong his days; the will of the LORD shall prosper in his hand;  he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul and be satisfied; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their iniquities.  Therefore I will divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he poured out his soul to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.

Isaiah 52:13 – 53:12

when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a first-born.

Zechariah 12:10

they have pierced my hands and feet

Psalm 22:16

Jesus is the Suffering Royal Messiah.

And again another scripture says, "They shall look on him whom they have pierced

John 19:37

Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, every one who pierced him; and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him.

Rev 1:7

Mary was a devout Jewish girl.  She would have heard these scripture references in the synagogue throughout her life.  She too was waiting for the coming of the Messiah.

When the angel told her that her Son would reign over the house of Jacob forever, she would have surely known that the angel was referring to the Messiah.  Even the Name to be given to the child, Jesus, meant that “God Saves”.  Knowing that her child was to be the Messiah would have opened up the prophecies to her.  She would understand that she was seeing them fulfilled in herself and her life.

Theotokos: In God's Eternal Plan

I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.

Gen 3:15

This passage in Genesis is called the Protoevangelium ("first gospel"): the first announcement of the Messiah and Redeemer, of a battle between the serpent and the Woman, and of the final victory of a descendant of hers.  After his fall, man was not abandoned by God. On the contrary, God calls him and in a mysterious way heralds the coming victory over evil and his restoration from his fall.

The promise of the Messiah, like all of God’s decrees, is eternal.  God is eternal – standing outside of time and space as we know it – all of reality is present to Him at one and the same present moment.  In God there is no past, no future, but only the eternal present.

The promise of the Messiah was a decree for the Incarnation.  But that decree also required a choice of a mother for the Incarnation.  The mother for the Incarnation was Mary.  So Mary’s union with God is eternal as well.

The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before his works from of old. I was set up from eternity and of old before the earth was made. When there were no depths, I was brought forth, when there were no fountains abounding in water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth. When as yet he had not made the earth... When he prepared the heavens I was there; when he marked out the vault over the face of the deep; when he established the skies above; when he made firm the foundations of the earth; when he fixed a limit for the sea so that the waters should not pass his commandment. Then I was beside him as his craftsman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him... and my delights were the sons of men.

Proverbs 8:22-31

This text from the Old Testament is often attached to the person of Christ.  The personification of Wisdom is a common metaphor in Old Testament literature.  The early Church quickly saw this as a reference to Christ.  This is reflected in the New Testament.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God;

all things were made through Him and without Him was not anything made that was made.

John 1:1-3

In Him all things were created.

Col 1:15-16

Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God

1 Cor 1:24

The Incarnation was decreed from all eternity.  In her role as mother of Christ, the Word Incarnate, Mary enjoyed an eternal inseparable union with Her Son.

A word about The Word

God by His infinite and perfect nature far surpasses our finite human understanding.  Through human reason, we are able to come to a very limited knowledge of God, by understanding what He is not.  But God, in His great love, desired us to know Him and to enter into relationship with Him.  In order to reveal Himself to us, God in His goodness spoke to us in human words in Sacred Scripture.  However through all the words of Scripture, God expresses only one Word, through which He communicates Himself completely to us, The Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ.  Thus in Sacred Scripture, we find truly present Christ in His fullness, who comes to us in love to meet and speak with us.

God is the author of Scripture.  The texts were written by human authors under the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit.  To compose the sacred books, God chose certain men who, all the while he employed them in this task, made full use of their own faculties and powers so that, though he acted in them and by them, it was as true authors that they consigned to writing whatever he wanted written, and no more.  Therefore Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teaches that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures.

To understand and interpret Scripture correctly, we must be mindful of several guiding principles.

1.       In order to discover the sacred authors' intention, the reader must take into account the conditions of their time and culture, the literary genres in use at that time, and the modes of feeling, speaking and narrating then current. For the fact is that truth is differently presented and expressed in the various types of historical writing, in prophetical and poetical texts, and in other forms of literary expression.

2.       Be especially attentive "to the content and unity of the whole Scripture". Different as the books which compose it may be, Scripture is a unity by reason of the unity of God's plan, of which Christ Jesus is the center and heart, open since his Passover.

3.       Read the Scripture within "the living Tradition of the whole Church". According to a saying of the Fathers, Sacred Scripture is written principally in the Church's heart rather than in documents and records, for the Church carries in her Tradition the living memorial of God's Word, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives her the spiritual interpretation of the Scripture.

4.       Be attentive to the analogy of faith.⁸² By "analogy of faith" we mean the coherence of the truths of faith among themselves and within the whole plan of Revelation.

According to an ancient tradition, one can distinguish between two senses of Scripture: the literal and the spiritual, the latter being subdivided into the allegorical, moral and anagogical senses. The profound concordance of the four senses guarantees all its richness to the living reading of Scripture in the Church.

1.       The literal sense is the meaning conveyed by the words of Scripture and discovered by exegesis, following the rules of sound interpretation: "All other senses of Sacred Scripture are based on the literal.

2.       The spiritual sense. Thanks to the unity of God's plan, not only the text of Scripture but also the realities and events about which it speaks can be signs.

a.        The allegorical sense. We can acquire a more profound understanding of events by recognizing their significance in Christ; thus the crossing of the Red Sea is a sign or type of Christ's victory and also of Christian Baptism.

b.       The moral sense. The events reported in Scripture ought to lead us to act justly. As St. Paul says, they were written "for our instruction".

c.        The anagogical sense (Greek: anagoge, "leading"). We can view realities and events in terms of their eternal significance, leading us toward our true homeland: thus the Church on earth is a sign of the heavenly Jerusalem.

As we explore Mary in Sacred Scripture, we will avail ourselves of these guidelines.


Summary of Part 1 Section 1 Article 3 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church