Mary

For many Christians today was the celebration of the birth of Mary, mother of our Lord, properly called Theotokos by all Christians since before the Third Ecumenical Council (which Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant all accept as doctrinally binding).  For most Protestants, though, Mary remains an unknown.  Certainly, we talk about her at Christmas, and maybe at Annunciation, but rarely else.  When we do talk about her, it amazes me how we couch our terminology about her in continued polemics.  One talk I heard, fairly recently, made sure to say that "she was a dirty, rotten sinner just like the rest of us."  As I've argued before, this language is unnecessary and quite possibly wrong Biblically speaking (can God dwell in unclean places? Not according to the Old Testament!).  Even if she never sinned, she would still need a Savior: death comes to all and only through Christ's trampling down of death by death can it be stopped.  Christ is the only one, by virtue of the fact of His divine nature and Person, who was free from the necessity of death: He, out of the great love which He has for us, voluntarily took on death in His human nature, that we, united to Him by faith and baptism, might partake of His eternal Life.

There is something more about Mary that we need to keep in mind more often.  The goal of the Christian life, a great promise of the New Testament, is to be filled with the Spirit of God, to be built into the glorious Temple, so that the old promise that "I will be their God and they will be My people and I will dwell among them" might be fulfilled.  This, of course, is the conformity of our human nature to the human nature of our Lord.  However, His hypostatic union is different than what happens to us.  He is a divine Person, with a requisite divine nature who elects to unite with a human nature for our salvation: our salvation is to have a divine Person, the Spirit, fill our nature and transform our individuated persons.  We do not become hypostatically united with the Person of the Spirit, but become "partakers of the divine nature" as St Peter says in his second epistle.  So, even though "He became what we are so that we might become what He is" as St Irenaeus puts it, there is a fundamental and unbridgeable difference between us and Christ.  So, what model do we have for what our salvation looks like?

Mary, the mother of our Lord.

The Person of the Son indwelt her, transfiguring her (even causing her to prophesy), in a way analogous to how the Spirt dwells in us, transfiguring us in the process.  The difference, of course, is that the Spirit does not become incarnate.  But Mary is a human person with a human nature in the exact same way as we are, filled with God, becoming a Tabernacle and an analogy to Heaven itself.  There is a beautiful passage in 1 Kings 8 in which Solomon says something to the effect that "The heaven of heavens cannot contain You; how much less this house I've built!"  Yet, in Mary the uncircumscribable God took on a full human nature such that St Paul can say, "in Him dwelt all the fullness of the Deity in bodily form" (Col. 2:9).  She is more able, by the grace of God, to contain God than even the highest heaven.  This is our lot as well (Eph. 3:19).  Yet, of course, she does retain a more honored place than any other God-bearing Christian for, as St Luke records for us in her prophetic (and therefore liturgical) speech, "henceforth shall all generations call me blessed" (Luke 1:48).

Glory to God.