A Quick Significance of Our Lady
The Catholic Church has given Mary a lot of titles and importance. This can be off-putting to some, but scripture and reason can tell us that they are all deserved.
Let’s look at four titles/traits that the Church states belong to the Mother of God:
The New Eve
The Ark of the New Covenant
Queen of Heaven
Sinless
It has been well accepted for thousands of years that in looking at Biblical “types”, the newer occurrence is greater than the older, as God’s redemptive plan for creation unfolds and grows in glory. What does any of that mean? Well, we can consider Christ as the new Adam extremely briefly:
Adam was made in God’s image, was declared “very good”, and installed as the head of the world. However, through a selfish misuse of his free will he brought sin and death into the world, severing the grace of God from all of mankind.
Christ is the embodiment of the Word of God Himself and is perfect, beyond very good. He is the King of all kings of this world. Through his human will perfectly united to the divine will, he resisted any temptation and in a selfless act of sacrifice restores grace to the world.
Adam brought death; Christ brings eternal life.
Further reading: Christ The New Adam by Sana Khokhar
The new Eve
A key point missing from the above is that Adam was not the first to sin, it was Eve. When the serpent visited Eve she fell to temptation; when Gabriel visits Mary she submits wholly to the will of God. Satan triumphed over mankind by deceiving a woman who brought corruption into world, and a woman brought into the world the incarnation of God to undo this corruption. Now the ‘Hail Mary’ prayer is frequently invoked as one of the most powerful prayers in the fight against temptation.
Why would we need to pray for Mary’s intercession against the forces of evil when we could go straight to God? Well, God loves to delegate. It’s why he created mankind in the first place; to look after the earth. He could have done that by Himself, He doesn’t need anybody else to be His gardener. But, out of his love and not necessity, he creates beings and imbues them with purpose. So, no, you don’t “need” Mary’s intercession against the devil. But this is the devil who, in his pride, thought he had defeated God when he tempted the first woman. Now he gets his head kicked in when you tap in the New Eve. Could there be a greater insult to his rampant and pathetic ego than this? And, in striving to live a holy life and grow closer to God and his perfect will, why would you only ever do what you “need” to?
Further reading: Mary as the New Eve: OT Typology of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Christian B. Wagner
The new Ark of the Covenant
Remember what the Ark of the Covenant (not Noah’s) was. It was the holiest item in all of Israel, crafted to God’s specific dimensions, housing the holiest of relics such as the Ten Commandments tablets, the bread of Heaven, and the staff of Aaron (the symbol of the High Priest). Now that we’re in the New Covenant, has there been anything comparable to this? What can we think of that has physically contained and safeguarded the (W)ord of God and the bread of Heaven?
God saved the Israelites from death in the desert by raining down Mana, the bread of Heaven. Jesus offers salvation for all through the sacrifice of his body, taking the form of bread. His body is the bread of Heaven, he is the Word made flesh. He is the eternal High Priest, and his body is both a type of Mana and God’s words of the Commandments - these most holiest things which were kept in the Ark of the Old Covenant. Again, what Ark does our New Covenant have?
Yes, you could see where I’m going even if you were blindfolded. Mary herself is the new Ark who bore the Word made flesh - the high priest and the sacrificial bread. And, as the second type is greater than the first, the first Ark was lost and the second was preserved through bodily assumption into Heaven. But I won’t discuss the Assumption in this article.
But don’t just take my word for it. Compare the Gospel of Luke to the Ark in the Old Testament:
Further reading: Mary, the Ark of the New Covenant by Steve Ray
Queen of Heaven
God is the King of Heaven - aren’t queens the spouses of kings? Not always, and not always in the Bible. During the Kingdom Period the kings of Israel would take multiple wives. This obsoleted the typical office and the position instead went to the king’s mother. Mary is the mother of God. Israel was a temporary Kingdom on Earth; Heaven is the eternal Kingdom of God. When God’s Kingdom was extended in a human physical way down to earth we saw at least an outline of the what the structure of the Kingdom of Heaven is, in terms we can wholly relate to.
Does this undermine the authority of God as King? Absolutely not. When we receive God’s love do we “take” it from Him, leaving Him with less than he had before? Of course not. His love and power are infinite, a human poses no possible threat or parasitic loss to His glory. Again, if that was how the relationship between creature and creator would work, God would never create. This “what do I NEED to do?” view moulds into a “everything but the personhood of God is bad” mindset which cuts a person’s heart off from all of creation, which God Himself says is good.
As St. Louis de Montfort put it:
“She is not the sun, which by the brightness of its rays blinds us because of our weakness; but she is fair and gentle as the moon, which receives the light of the sun, and tempers it to make it more suitable to our capacity.”
An extremely apt analogy as Revelation tells us that she is “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet”. God’s glory shines on her as the sun shines on the moon. The moon does not undermine the sun’s light; it absorbs then reflects it, so we see it at both night and day. As Mary herself says: “My soul magnifies the Lord”.
Further reading: Queen of Heaven by Brian Kelly
Sinless
All titles and positions of Mary culminate in the doctrine of the immaculate conception, which holds that at the moment of her conception in her mother Anne’s womb, she was protected from the stain of sin. Some Catholics (and maybe Orthodox who have much shared Mariology with us) might fall into the trap of saying that sinlessness was necessary for Mary to be the Mother of God. This couldn’t be necessary as that would mean something which is not a logical contradiction is impossible for God. Nothing is impossible for God, as logical contradictions aren’t real ‘things’ in themselves. Mary being a sinner is not a logical contradiction.
But, we can see the grounds to justify the immaculate conception using a framing that St. Thomas Aquinas often used; fitting (you’ll see the joke shortly), because he denied the immaculate conception (but before the Church dogmatised it, so that’s fine). Can we know through logic, for example, why God became man to redeem us from sin? No. He could’ve decided to do it in an instant. So why did he become incarnate and die? To share in humanity with us so we may share in divinity with Him. He who is infinite and immaterial took on matter and form and died, to resurrect Himself in an act and display of His glory and to defeat death. It was most fitting through God’s loving nature to do this for us rather than a simple snap of the fingers.
Ask yourself if it would be fitting for the perfected type of Eve (the first sinner) to be a sinner. Would it be fitting for the new Ark (the holiest item of Israel) to be tainted and corrupt? Ask yourself what Gabriel meant when said “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (KJV). Could the Ark have contained items not of God, that being children of Joseph? If Mary was culpable for sin then the Mother of God would have been capable of damnation. Can you honestly believe that He would let that even be a possibility?
This is also not to be taken as some sort of fatalist argument, to think that because Mary was not born with the stain of sin, her not committing a culpable sin in life isn’t ‘important’ as she was on easy mode. Adam and Eve were born without the stain of sin and that didn’t help them. Mary would have lived her entire earthly life resisting manners of temptations that Adam & Eve would never have fathomed, yet she resisted until the end.
And is Romans 3:23 a refutation?
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God (KJV)
As Jesus did not sin this can only be St. Paul speaking in hyperbole and generality rather than an absolute. Yes, he was God, but he had a fully human will aswell as divine. To imagine that he is a pure exception to this verse is dangerously close to monophysitism, if not overtly so.
If you would be willing to deny the First Council of Nicaea - the bare minimum creed to be considered a Christian in any strict sense - for the sake of “owning the Papists” and fanatically clinging on to a denial of Mary’s significance, let me know so I can pray for her intercession in your life.