Responding to a reader

Wahoo! Only three days, and somebody's commenting!

Bethany was kind enough to comment on yesterday's post about Mary. I started to answer her in the comment box, but I got so long-winded I figured I'd better just post it here. She brings up some good points about Catholic and Orthodox Christians' attitude toward Mary, and I'd like to respond to them. I won't quote everything she said; you can see it in the comments below.

It's true that the Bible doesn't mention Mary as a queen. Really, it doesn't talk about Mary much at all, since it's mostly concerned with Jesus. He is the heart of the Gospel.

However, I don't think it follows that because Mary is not the equal of her Son, then she is necessarily the equal of us. She was the closest person on earth to Jesus. She bore Him in her body, she nursed Him at her breast, she raised Him from infancy. We don't know how long Joseph lived, but he's not mentioned in the Gospels after Jesus' twelfth year, so I think it's safe to suppose that she was His sole parent for a good deal of His youth.

She also was the sole source of His genes. God was the origin of His divine nature, but Mary was the stuff God used to make Jesus' humanity. I know it boggles the mind (and I'm not theologian enough to unravel this), but Mary had the task, unique in history, of teaching God as a child to be human. Mary loved Him more than anyone else ever has, and surely she deserves extra respect for that. If (to oversimplify a bit) the strength of our Christianity is measured in how much we love Jesus, then Mary was the greatest Christian of us all.

There's kind of a subconscious assumption, especially in our Western, democratic culture, that anybody who is not God is "no better than the rest of us" and we must not treat anybody differently from anybody else. Hence, from the outside, it appears that Catholics (and all Christians other than Protestants, for that matter) are worshipping Mary as though she were God, if we give her any extra reverence. That's not the case. No matter how much reverence and love we give to Mary, we always give God more. She never died for our sins. It is not her body and blood that is given to us at the Eucharist. All blessings come from Him, even if she prays for them for us. If a Christian honors her above Him, then he is indeed in error. But there's no error in honoring her above the rest of us.

As for intercession, the passages you mentioned say that Jesus and the Spirit are interceding for us. They do not say that nobody else does or can. However, the Cloud of Witnesses mentioned in Hebrews, and the elders in Revelation who present the prayers of the faithful before the throne, are (it seems to us, anyway) clear references to the prayers of the saints in heaven on our behalf. If nobody but Jesus may pray for us, then we sin in praying for each other on earth. We know this is not true, of course; rather, we are commanded to pray for each other. How does it follow that our brothers and sisters in heaven are forbidden to pray for us, where we sinners are commanded to do so? Should not the perfected person pray even more than the sinful one? If we have prayer warriors on earth, who understand God's will only through a glass darkly, are the saved in heaven, who see Him clearly, less able to be prayer warriors? In short, will they be disenfranchised (to misuse the word) for being no longer sinful?

Finally, in practical terms, I can tell you that Mary and the other saints have certainly not hindered me from learning about God. On the contrary, my walk with Him is much closer since I began to see the Church, not stuck in a moment of time, but reaching back to the Apostles in an unbroken line. God's greatness is made more visible, not less, in the lives of those who have loved and served Him on earth.