THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter VII
THE TREE OF JESSE.
St. Gabriel, when delivering the great message to Mary, speaks of the Child as being at the same time the Son of the Most High and the Son of David. "He . . . shall be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father." Considering that Mary’s virginity was the presupposed, the in dispensable condition of her divine motherhood, we may at once take it for granted that between Mary and David there is the closest alliance in this ever-blessed mystery of the Incarnation; David could not be called Christ’s father except through Mary, and nothing could be a more emphatic assertion of the fact that Mary is the true Mother of the Son of the Most High, than the Angel s mode of speaking when he calls the future Offspring "the Son of David", with a natural right of succession to the throne of David. Christ succeeds to David through His own Mother. Christ came from heaven with immense greatness and power as the Son of the Most High, but He came also with full rights to an earthly throne; this throne belonged to Him in virtue of natural heredity, as much as the heavenly throne; He is truly the Son of David, being the Son of Mary, and Christ’s eternal kingship over heaven and earth is come to Him by a double birth-right, the birth right based on His Father s glory, the first Person of the Trinity, and the birth-right based on His Mother s lineage, the lineage of Mary, the daughter of David. No words could be more pregnant with the idea of direct, perfect, unlimited motherhood, than this phrase of the heavenly spirit, and had he said to Mary that she was to be the Mother of God, he could not have said more than that which is by implication contained in the phrase he used. He Who is to be called the Son of the Most High is the Son of David, with the right of an heir to the throne of his father; therefore Mary’s maternity has not merely the physiological role of giving life to the human portion of the God Incarnate; Mary’s motherhood has the full juridical and ethical value of a mother who is the heiress to immense rights, and who has full power to transmit these rights to the Son Whom she bears.
This juridical value of Mary’s motherhood as the only rightful possessor and transmitter of immense regal rights is a thing of wonderful beauty; it makes the whole tree of Jesse culminate in Mary. When in their mighty cathedrals our forefathers used their constructive genius to build up the tree of Jesse in stone and colour, they gave expression to their spiritual understanding of this aspect of the divine motherhood.
St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, gives us, as in a summary, the full spiritual significance of the tree of Jesse: "For I wished myself to be an anathema from Christ, for my brethren, who are my kinsmen according to the flesh, who are Israelites, to whom belongeth the adoption as of children, and the glory, and the testament, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises: whose are the fathers, and of whom is Christ, according to the flesh, who is over all things, God blessed for ever. Amen" (Rom. ix. 35) Whole books might be written on the spiritual power of the promise made to Abraham and his seed.
This promise is the one great supernatural factor of the world before the Incarnation took place. It is, I might almost say, the supernatural order in its juridical aspect, before it became a great living reality. "For God making promise to Abraham, because he had no one greater by whom he might swear, swore by himself, saying: Unless blessing I shall bless thee, and multiplying I shall multiply thee . And so patiently enduring he obtained the promise. For men swear by one greater than themselves: and an oath for confirmation is the end of all their controversy. Wherein God, meaning more abundantly to shew to the heirs of the promise the immutability of his counsel, interposed an oath" (Heb, vi. 13 17). Now this whole juridical order ultimately rests on Mary, as on the one surviving heiress of the great family whose destinies were essentially Messianic ; if Mary were not the true Mother of Christ, with unlimited rights and powers to transmit to her Son great supernatural inheritance, the whole divine order of the promise, there would be a gap between the supernatural order before the Incarnation and the supernatural order after the Incarnation.
The juridical value of the great promise is entirely dependent on the factor which is so energetically described in the Scriptures as "seed". "To Abraham were the promises made and to his seed. He said not : And to his seeds , as of many. But as of one: And to thy seed , which is Christ" (Gal. iii. 16). We see from this text of St. Paul that Christ Himself is to be considered as the One to Whom the great promise is made; not only is Christ the fulfilment of the promise of God, but in His ultimate glory and triumph all that God ever promised will attain maturity and completion. I am correct, therefore, in saying that Christ inherited through His Mother the right to all the great things promised to the patriarchs. St, Gabriel s words are unmistakable; something will be given to the Child from the Mother s side, the wondrous thing called by the Angel the throne of David.
The Angel completes the announcement about the great inheritance that will come to the Child, with the words: "And he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever". The whole of St. Paul s Epistle to the Romans ought to be pressed into service here, with its prodigious illuminations about the rejection and final reconciliation of Israel. We have not yet reached that fulness which will come when Israel will be converted to Christ. "For I would not have you ignorant, brethren, of this mystery (lest you should be wise in your own conceits), that blindness in part has happened in Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles should come in. And so all Israel should be saved, at it is written : There shall come out of Sion, he that shall deliver, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob. And this is to them my covenant: when I shall take away their sins " (Rom. xi. 25 27). I do not think that there is any temerity in saying that Mary’s role in the supernatural order will be understood by man completely then only when the Jewish race, fully converted to Christ, will own her as the one daughter of David through whom the whole economy of the supernatural order had to pass in virtue of her divine motherhood.
It has always been difficult for a certain class of minds to see in Mary more than the parent of
the human portion of Christ, to give Mary more than a mere ministerial, instrumental role, the role of supplying the caro, flesh, in the Christian mystery of the : Verbum caro factum, the Word made flesh. The Catholic Church, on the contrary, has never hesitated in making Mary the true natural Mother of the whole Person of Christ, the Mother of God.
The juridical transmission through Mary, in virtue of her full and true motherhood, of the great promise can be quoted as an evidence of the exactness of official Catholic thought. It is only a full person, a person sui iiiris, that can be considered as an heir. Christ’s full divine Person was thus heir of the promise. The parent who transmits the promise to the last heir, is of necessity parent in the full sense to that person; so Mary had to be parent to the full Person of the Son of God if the old order of the promise was to bind Abraham and Christ with one legal bond of supernatural predestination.
We may conclude these considerations about the juridical importance of Mary’s motherhood in the eternal economy of the supernatural with a doctrine propounded by St. Thomas Aquinas with all the loving reverence of one who understood, as far as human intellect can understand it, that wonderful blending of motherhood and virginity. In common with many other writers on things divine, St. Thomas makes use of the expression purissimi sanguines, most pure bloods, as describing what in Mary were the elements out of which the Holy Ghost fashioned the body of the Son of God.
On the one hand, we must give to Mary the whole physiological role of maternity; on the other, we have to discard in her case every element, however remote, that depends for its fructification and fertilization on the intervention of sex- factors. Christian Doctors have thought that the expression purissimi sanguines meets this twofold requirement of maternity and virginity, that the purissimi sanguines are all that is required to make of Christ the great Seed, to whom promises were made in Abraham.
If anything is abundantly clear in the Scriptures it is the role of natural parenthood in the transmission of the great promise: "For nowhere doth he take hold of the angels, but of the seed of Abraham he doth take hold" (Heb. ii. 16). Mary’s purissimi sanguines were the seed of Abraham, and in them, as in most precious pearls, there was the virtue and the truth of the whole supernatural order of promise. But the very might of that promise, suspended, as it were, in the purissimi sanguines of the Virgin, makes it more imperative for us to conclude that in Mary’s bosom not one of the developments that make natural maternity could ever have been absent. Mary did not less for her Child than other mothers do for their offspring. It all points to a "taking hold" of Mary’s life-blood by the power of the Most High in a way that is unsurpassed in the whole realm of nature and grace with the exception of the Eucharistic Transubstantiation.
In the Eucharistic Transubstantiation it would seem at first sight as if the whole order of the physical bodily matter had been suspended; yet the result of the Consecration words is Christ’s true physical body, the body born from Mary the Virgin: Ave, verum corpus, natum ex Maria Virgine. Such are the words of the Church when the consecrated Host is worshipped. So, likewise, in the Incarnation it would seem as if all the laws that govern man s descent from man had been put aside; but the reality is very different; the reality is a motherhood most perfect and most true in every sense, a motherhood that is capable of the greatest human responsibilities as well as of relationships with God Himself such as no other creature possesses. This then seems to me the peculiar characteristic belonging to both the Eucharist and the divine motherhood, that in both instances the apparent over-ruling of natural laws by God’s omnipotence produces results which are of the same kind as the realities thus suspended, though they be of an infinitely higher order than those realities; in one instance you have Christ’s body instead of the natural matter of bread and wine; in the other case you have divine maternity instead of human conception.
