THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD BY DOM ANSCAR VONIER, OSB
Chapter X
THE HUMAN MESSENGER OF THE DIVINE MOTHERHOOD
In St. Gabriel’s great message there is a complete absence of any allusion to Christ’s human career with its terrible conclusion. The Angel speaks of the eternal, unchanging glories of the Child that will be born of Mary; of the sufferings and the death that were to be the condition of that glory there is not the remotest mention. It was the office of the heavenly messenger to announce to Mary the full, the eternal nature of her motherhood, and the temporary, earthly eclipse of that great glory was not a necessary part of his message; Mary’s maternity is everlasting, indestructible, above all things and before all things; the Angel that came from the serene regions of everlasting life had the announcement of an everlasting event, not of a transient act.
It was reserved to a human being, to an old man, to complete the great gospel of the divine motherhood, and Simeon, the just man, who has known human life and who is nearing the end of his own days, speaks the second portion of that evangel of love and tenderness, Mary’s maternity. Gabriel, the Archangel, and Simeon, the old man, pour out from their minds what the Spirit of God had put there : the great secret of a mother who is at the same time the Mother of God and the Mother of One Who is to die on the Cross like a criminal.
Gabriel’s message is quite exclusive; it contains nothing except the idea of Sonship, divine and human. The Child Whom Mary is to call Jesus is the Son of God and the Son of David, and the eternal kingship of the Child is the result of that double Sonship; the coming down of the Holy
Ghost upon Mary, and the overshadowing of her person through the power of the Most High are explanations of that double Sonship, and they reconcile virginity and motherhood. Gabriel then is the messenger of the divine motherhood in its strictest acceptation. The Angel departs after having spoken in human terms "the mystery which hath been hidden from all eternity in God who created all things" (Eph. ii. 9); the mystery of the divine motherhood. Christ’s work and Christ’s mission Mary is not told yet. Joseph, Mary’s spouse, is the first to hear something of the secondary mystery, the work of redemption to be carried out by Mary’s Son. The primary mystery, the divine Sonship itself, is Mary’s personal and exclusive secret. "Joseph, son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife, for that which is conceived in her, is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son : and thou shalt call his name Jesus. For he shall save his people from their sins" (Matt. i. 20 21). To Simeon further light is bestowed on the immense temporal mission of the Child, and he sings the great Nunc dimittis, the glorious hymn of the role of Mary’s Son here on earth, in time as opposed to eternity. "He (Simeon) also took him into his arms, and blessed God, and said : now thou dost dismiss thy servant, O Lord, according to thy word, in peace, because my eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all peoples: a light to the revelation of the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel" (Luke ii. 2832).
The Evangelist adds that the Child s "father and mother were wondering at those things which were spoken concerning him". This confirms what has just been said about the exclusive nature of the message delivered by Gabriel; Mary had heard nothing of Christ’s temporal mission; Joseph had received the indefinite announcement of the redemption of the Jewish people from their sins. But Simeon in his ecstasies breaks down all the barriers : the whole world is to come under the powerful influence of the Child; all peoples, and, Oh! new message of grace ! the Gentiles will live in the light of the countenance of that little One.
From the Child, Simeon turns to the Mother, and here he completes Gabriel’s message, in a most unexpected way. The holy man scans the features of the beautiful Child; there, in the light of God, he sees the lines of a terrible fate. Did he see the Cross? Most likely not; but he saw enough to make his noble heart go out to the sweetest of all creatures standing before him in the full joy of an incomparably pure maternity. "And Simeon blessed them, and said to Mary his Mother: Behold this Child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted. And thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed (Luke ii. 34 35).
The divine motherhood is complete now. It implies greatest sorrow as well as greatest joy. No such message was given to Elizabeth, John s mother. Elizabeth s son was destined to be put to death by the lowest of human beings, the corrupt creatures of an infamous court. It was a human destiny, a noble ending to a Nazarene s austere life.
But the Mother of God had a maternity which was inseparable from God’s highest attribute, truth. She was to suffer from the opposition between truth and falsehood, between light and darkness: "But now you seek to kill me, a man who have spoken the truth to you, which I have heard of God. This Abraham did not" (John viii. 40). This is the way Christ, in the fulness of His Manhood, addresses the Jewish rulers. He thus gives us the clearest comment on the words of Simeon. To rule in the house of Jacob for ever was one of the essentials of the divine Sonship in Gabriel’s message to Mary. The bitter opposition of that house of Jacob was Mary’s first great trial of soul, when she followed her Son in His public life. There must be something evil in the heart of her own people, something horribly dark which she had not suspected. Out of many hearts thoughts were being constantly revealed which ought not to belong to the family of Abraham: "This Abraham did not."
The matchless power of truth that was in Jesus, provoked the hatred of a race of so-called religious men who had falsified in their own conscience and in the conscience of their fellow Jews the very idea of God. "It is my Father that glorifieth me, of whom you say that he is your God. And you have not known him, but I know him. And if I shall say that I know him not, I shall be like to you, a liar. But I do know him, and do keep his word. Abraham your father rejoiced that he might see my day : he saw it, and was glad" (John viii. 5456). These words, which are a sequel to the words just quoted, express better than anything the drastic conflict of ideals between Christ and the men who boasted of their descent from Abraham. Both in virtue of her own divine motherhood, she being the Mother of the One Who came full of grace and truth, and in virtue of her being the repository of all the promises made to Abraham and his seed, Mary’s heart was to be pierced with a sword, and her divine motherhood led to a sorrow such as no woman has ever known.
Mary’s motherhood never knew the physical pains that are the inseparable conditions of all maternity since the Fall. She was entirely free from the law which God put upon Eve: "In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children" (Gen. iii. 16). St.Thomas says, speaking of Christ’s birth, that in that birth there was no kind of pain, as there was no diminution of virginal integrity; but there was in that birth the greatest possible pleasure from this that the Man God was born into the world: Sed fuit ibi maxima iucunditas ex hoc quod homo Deus est natus in mundum (Summa 3, q. 35, a. 6). Nor does it appeal to the theological mind to insinuate that perhaps such pains of childbirth, if they had been allowed to take place, might have contributed towards the fulness of redemption ; for why should not Christ be born in pain as He was to die in pain? Would it not add to the perfection of the great sacrifice of Christ’s sorrows to have the sorrow of His birth added to the sorrows of His death ? Dolores parientis matris non pertinebant ad Christum, qui pro peccatis nostris satisfacere veniebat, says St. Thomas in the article of the Summa just quoted.
The pains of His Mother in childbirth had nothing to do with Christ’s mission Who came to make satisfaction for our sins; such pains would have been entirely outside Himself; they have nothing to do with His own sacrifice. But the sorrows predicted by Simeon were to be of a different nature; they depended completely on Christ’s sorrows, they were an echo of Christ’s sorrows, and Mary’s motherhood has been the most sorrowful of all motherhoods because she was truly the Mother of the One Whom the prophet calls the "Man of sorrows" (Is. liii. 3). Just as Catholic thought instinctively recoils from the notion that there might have been pain in the birth of Christ, so Catholic thought is full of the immense atoning value of Mary’s sorrows in conjunction with her Son s rejection by His own people. I said in a previous chapter that Mary’s maternity was more than an instrumental maternity; Mary shares to its full extent, with the Eternal Father, the parentage of the Incarnate Son of God; she has all the rights, privileges, honours of a parent, as well as all the love and tenderness of a parent; as the parent of the Son of God she was admitted into the secrets of the awful spiritual drama that led to the fall of many in Israel, that led to the Cross. Mary did not suffer in her physical parenthood; but in her moral parenthood the sufferings went as far as the parenthood itself. It was not the body, but the soul of that parent that was to make the supreme sacrifice: "And thy own soul a sword shall pierce".
Gabriel had spoken to Mary of her Child s right over the throne of David : "The Lord shall give unto him the throne of David his father." Mary, in her own Canticle, the Magnificat, had sung with such enthusiasm Israel s privilege through the mystery that was in her: "He hath received Israel his servant, being mindful of his mercy." But Mary was also destined to hear Israel cry out, in a wild outburst of hatred of Jesus: "His blood be upon us and upon our children!" There is in Mary’s sorrow something patriarchal, something that could only be felt by a soul in intimate contact with the immensities of God’s judgments over mankind.
