Beyond Compare More Glorious Than the Seraphim
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If your temperament is like mine, you would rather read one bold, challenging bit of prose than all of the manufactured sentiment so characteristic of this season. I found an article on Mary which I believe to be that one challenging bit of prose. If you do not already honor Mary in your heart, this is the one thing that you must not escape contemplating this year as you prepare for Christmas.
“Something is very wrong with Protestantism,” writes the Rev. Al Kimel. “Our ecclesial communities do not generate a devotion to Mary.” He offers some strong support for that statement. The crucial point comes when he applies to Protestant communities the consensus of the full Church, expressed in AD 431 at the Council of Ephesus. The Rev. Kimel writes:
I am beginning to suspect that no matter how “orthodox� we Protestants think we are in our doctrine of the Incarnation, we in fact are not. We have not faithfully appropriated the orthodox doctrine, because we have deleted Mary from the Church’s life of worship and prayer. This deletion of Mary is both evidence of our deficiency in our understanding of the Incarnation and a cause of this deficiency. Something is very wrong when our teaching and love of Christ does not generate the kind of hymnody, veneration, and devotion that is common in Orthodoxy and Catholicism.
Allow me some space to amplify his well-crafted article: It was the undivided Church gathered at Ephesus that blessed the practice of calling Mary Theotokos, a title which literally means “she who gives birth to God”: essentially it means, “Mother of God.” This dismayed some Churchmen, so the bishops of the Church gathered a scant twenty years later in a city called Chalcedon and reaffirmed what they said earlier at Ephesus. This time they focused on the union of God and man in Jesus Christ.
The Chalcedonian council stated that the Son and Word of God is “confessed in two natures without confusion, without change, indivisibly, and inseparably.” To restate that a little differently: The divine cannot be divided from or separated from the human in Christ. They are indivisible and inseparable. At the same time, both God and man retain what is proper to their nature: Christ is neither a mingling of the two nor a changing of one into the other. He is “fully God and fully man.”
This emphasis on the full union of God with humanity elaborates and underscores what was preached earlier at Ephesus: If you do not recognize the God who lay in the arms of a teenage mother in Bethlehem and called her “Amma,” then you do not recognize the one God preached by the Scriptures and the Apostolic teaching. If you are uncomfortable with this young girl giving to God milk from her full breast, then you are not really with us. If you doubt that God gave his mother the honor that he instructed you in the Decalogue to give your own mother, then you cast doubt on the very fact of your salvation. If it troubles you to join with your savior in praising his mother for her unique and irreplaceable role in your salvation, then you strike an axe at the root of his Incarnation.
“This is the faith of Peter; this is the faith of Paul. This is the faith of the Apostles; thus spoke the Fathers and thus we affirm….”