Redeemer in the Womb: Jesus Living in Mary by John Saward, Post #3

This is the third post of several posts on Redeemer in the Womb: Jesus Living in Mary by John Saward.

You can find Post #1 here. 

Post #2 here.  

  

Kerstin’s Introduction to Chapter 3: A Womb Wider than Heaven: The Teaching of the Fathers:

From the early Church Fathers on there has been a wonder and amazement that God would condescend to become a little baby, going through the same nine months of development in the womb like any human. What makes this even more unusual is that in pagan antiquity there was a contempt for women and the bodily reality of birth was considered distasteful. Pagans may believe that simple statues are deities, but that God would subject Himself to the messiness of birth was unfathomable. “When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man,” sings the Church in the Te Deum, “thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.”

 

Kerstin’s Comments:

The Theotokos as Sanctuary

Earth and heaven too narrow to serve as embracing

arms, to conceal your divinity.

The womb of the earth is too small for you, and yet

the womb of Mary is large enough for you.

 

St. Ephrem has a ‘locational’ Christology. He sees the divine Word taking up a series of residences, each of which, in some sense or other, is a womb: the bosom of the heavenly Father in which he is eternally begotten in his divinity, the earthly womb of the Blessed Virgin in which he is conceived and carried in his humanity, the watery womb of the Jordan in which as man he is baptized, the deathly womb of Sheol into which in his human soul he descends.

 

Mother of Manna

The liturgical imagery applied by the Fathers to the expectant Theotokos sometimes becomes explicitly Eucharistic. “Mary,” says St. Ephrem, “gave us the living bread instead of the bread of trouble, which Eve gave.” She carries in her womb him who is the Bread of Life, the heavenly Manna.

 

Nestorianism and the Unborn Christ

In the 5th century the debate over the divine and human natures of Christ was intensely explored. Nestorius took the stance of indwelling,, the man Jesus is the temple in which the divine Word dwells. This means that God is only attached to a human being, and therefore Mary cannot be the Theotokos, the Mother of God. It was chiefly St. Cyril who brought more clarity to the issue and preserved not only the full divinity of Christ but also Mary as the Theotokos.

 

St. Cyril and St. Proclus came to see that the temple and dwelling-place images of Scripture, indeed all the figures of containment and enclosure, apply with greater precision to the Mother of God than to her Son. The Lord Jesus Christ is Emmanuel, God-with-us, God-made-man, God the Word personally present in the flesh. When for nine months the Virgin carries him in her womb, she is the consummate Ark and Temple of God.

 

Nestorianism, which removes God from Mary’s womb, was therefore declared a heresy.

 

Womb and Bridal Chamber

According to the Patristic understanding, the Virgin’s womb is not only a church, the shrine of divine presence; it is also a chamber, the scene of divine nuptials. “The nuptial union is between the Word and the flesh,” says St. Augustine (354–430), “and the bridal chamber of the union is the Virgin’s womb.”

 

…The description of the virginal womb as Christ’s “bridal chamber” is liable to misunderstanding in another way. It does not sufficiently show that the Incarnation takes place through the Blessed Virgin’s faith as well as in her flesh. She is not simply the scene of the Word’s marriage to humanity, the impersonal place in which the knot of the two natures is tied. She is actively engaged, personally involved. God does not force his Son upon mankind. Incarnation is not invasion. He wants humanity to welcome him. He wants the race of Adam to give the Word its nature freely, with a bridal love. At the Annunciation, Our Lady gives her consent on behalf of us all. “To show there is a kind of spiritual marriage between the Son of God and human nature,” says St. Thomas, “the Virgin’s consent was sought at the Annunciation in place of all human nature.” Our Lady says “I will” to the marriage as representative of mankind, indeed of all creation, and as such she is Bride. She is all at once, as St. Ephrem says, Christ’s Mother, Daughter, Sister, Handmaid, and Bride.

 

The Ark’s Final Transfer

When the Church begins to celebrate the falling asleep of the Mother of God, the Fathers make a direct connection between the womb that housed God and the tomb that could not hold his Mother. The reason for the bodily Assumption of Our Lady is her divine motherhood. “It is in recognizing this Virgin as Mother of God that we celebrate her Dormition.” For St. John Damascene (c. 675–749), there is a certain necessity about the glorification of the body that once contained God. It was necessary (edei) that she who had given hospitality to the divine Word in her womb should come to dwell in the tabernacles of her Son.

. . . It was necessary that she who carried her Creator as an unborn child (hôs brephos) in her womb should live in the divine tabernacles.

…As Ever-Virgin Mother, Mary reveals that with God all things are possible. The world is not a closed system of corruption. When he is born of a Virgin and rises from the dead in the flesh, the divine Word breaks the cycle of Adam’s decay. He comes to make all things new, to halt the decline into dust.

 

Ten Long Lunar Months

These texts show quite a departure from the pagan world in how Mary and her pregnancy are treated. They show reverence of the unborn child, womanhood, and the human body.

 

O noble Virgin, do you see,

As weary months of waiting end,

that your unblemished purity

Shines more lovely in motherhood?

O what great joys for the world,

Your chaste womb within it holds,

Whence comes forth the golden age

Whose light renews the face of the earth.

  

 

My Comment:

This chapter takes up meditative perspectives of Christ in Mary’s womb from the Church Fathers.

 

I don’t know who St. Anastasius of Sinai was but I have heard of his point that God did not have to incarnate as a baby but could have gone straight to a man.

 

St. Anastasius of Sinai (d. c. 700), who succeeded Sophronius and Maximus in the struggle against Christological heresy, observes that the omnipotent Word could have bypassed human infancy altogether and created for himself an adult human nature.

 

For he who had made Adam and brought him into being from non-being, without woman, womb, or birth, could have constructed an adult human nature for himself and dwelt in it and lived in this way in the world.

 

But he did not. The Son of God emptied himself and accepted the whole slow development of human life from conception to the last breath. He condescended to be conceived and carried in the womb, to take flesh from, to be “made from” (Gal. 4:4), a woman. A Victorian woman poet intuited the truth as swiftly as the Fathers:

 

No sudden thing of glory and fear

Was the Lord’s coming; but the dear

Slow Nature’s days followed each other

To form the Saviour from his Mother.

 

My thought here is that if we only had the Gospel of Mark, we might come to believe it to be so.  To my count there are only two references to Mary in Mark.  The first is when His mother and kindred show up while He is preaching:

 

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him.  A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you“. Jesus replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers”?  And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”. (Mk 3: 31-35).

 

And the second is a response from the crowd also in response to His preaching.

 

“Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?  And are not his sisters here with us”? And they took offense of him” (Mk 6:3)

 

Mark doesn’t even have the Blessed Mother at the foot of the cross or at the tomb.  So what do we make of Mark not having an infancy narrative?  Does he not know of those events?  He does identify a mother, but a mother is essentially by-passed.  Thank God for the other Gospels,  So much would have been lost if we only had Mark.

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Michael’s Reply to My Comment:

In theory, Mark was a child at the time of the crucifixion, some say he was the child who appears in the Garden of Olives when they arrest Christ, a child mentioned only in his Gospel. After, Mark was with Peter when Christians were being persecuted in Rome. So, his gospel is very much about martyrdom as a Christian vocation; more about the "Church" and the way a Christian should act, typical themes of the apostles' preaching in Rome. I think I read something about this in a book by Pope Benedict XVI, but I am not sure. Perhaps Michelle remembers it better than I do.

 

My Reply to Michael:

This is true. Mark is regarded as that child, but since he was Peter's secretary, it has been speculated that Mark got most of his Gospel from Peter. It is quite possible that Peter never knew the infancy stories, or if he did he may not have thought them as pertinent. I believe it has been speculated that Luke actually interviewed the Blessed Mother. How Matthew knew of the infancy story is more uncertain. But if you look at his version, it is much more surface historical facts than interior thought of the participants. He probably pieced that together. The only interior thought Matthew gives us is the angel who assures Joseph in a dream.

 

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My Comment:

I found this lovely.

 

According to the Fathers, God the Word treats Mary’s womb with infinite courtesy and gentleness: he leaves it, as he enters it, without breaking its maidenly seal. It is God’s inviolable sanctuary, and, like the temple in Jerusalem, says St. Ambrose, its gate remains shut.

 

What is this “gate of the sanctuary,” this “outer gate towards the East” that remains closed, and “no one shall pass through it, except the God of Israel”? Is this gate not Mary, through whom the Redeemer entered into this world? This is the gate of justice. . . . This gate is Blessed Mary, of whom it is written that “the Lord will pass through it, and it shall be shut” after birth, because she conceived and gave birth as a virgin.

 

As the most perfect sanctuary in revelation, the Immaculate Virgin’s womb, like her heart, is consecrated forever to God, and to him alone. She conceives as a virgin, she gives birth as a virgin, and remains forever a virgin. St. Ambrose speaks for all Christendom when he asks: Would the Lord Jesus have chosen for his Mother a woman who would defile the heavenly chamber with the seed of a man, that is to say, someone incapable of preserving her virginal chastity intact?

 

How wonderful to call Mary’s womb “the most perfect sanctuary.”  Her womb carrying Christ is a sanctuary, a sanctuary being a consecrated place and a most holy place. 

 

The reference to God treating Mary’s womb “with infinite courtesy…without breaking its maidenly seal” is a reference to conceiving without the sexual act and birthing without breaking the hymen.  For those that don’t know, the Catholic Church teaches that Mary did not birth Jesus through the vaginal canal but that He passed through her body in the way that the resurrected Jesus passes through walls.  Remember in Genesis after the eating of the fruit, God says to Eve, “I will intensify your toil in childbearing; in pain* you shall bring forth children” (Gen 3:16).  But Mary delivers Jesus, the “uncorrupted-by-sin” man and woman God originally intended to bear children in the way it was originally intended before the Fall.

 

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Michelle’s Comment:

I found this short passage but profound:

". . . hail, thou who hast contained in thy holy virginal womb him who cannot be contained." (St. Cyril)

And a few pages later, the link between our Blessed Mother's womb and her assumption:

"When the Church begins to celebrate the falling asleep of the Mother of God, the Fathers make a direct connection between the womb that housed God and the tomb that could not hold his Mother. The reason for the bodily Assumption of Our Lady is her divine motherhood."

"Through his Virginal Conception, God the Son becomes “one body” (syssômos) with his Mother; indeed, for nine months, like every other baby, his body is literally within hers. It is only right, therefore, that she should be “one body” with him in glory."

St. John Damascene agrees with the above, writing:

“It was necessary [says Damascene] that she who in giving birth had preserved her virginity intact should keep her body without corruption, even after death.”

"He did not spurn the virgin's womb"  -From Te Deum.