Christian Art | Holy Mary | King James Audio Bible | KJV | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ
Luke 11: 27-28 – Week 27 Ordinary Time, Saturday (King James Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
27 ¶ And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked.
28 But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.
The woman raises her voice to praise Mary, for Jesus’ sake. Through Jesus, the woman is moved to acclaim the holiness of Mary. It can be true to say also that very many Christians are moved to contemplate Mary through knowledge of Jesus. For many Christians, Mary is our spiritual mother. Through Jesus, we discover our relationship with Mary, and so reciprocally through Mary we discover and seek to imitate the Son.
In response, Jesus highlights Mary’s ‘Yes!’ to God. Mary said: ‘Be it done unto me according to thy word.’ Here is a model of complete humility and obedience to God.
We hear little of Mary through much of the course of the Gospels. Some of what we read may seem strange, as when Mary and Jesus’ family come to try to speak with Jesus, concerned that Jesus is mad. It is also striking when Mary seems perfectly in tune with Jesus’ mission, as for example when Jesus is on the Cross.
Such relative silence, between infancy narratives and the Cross, may be illustrative of Mary’s perfect humility. It was through this perfection that Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit the Son.
Concluding Prayer | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ
Lord God,
source and origin of our salvation,
make our lives here on earth so proclaim your glory,
that we ay praise you without ceasing in heaven.
We make our prayer through our Lord.
King James Audio Bible | Endnotes
Hail Mary, Mother Of God
The title ‘Mother of God’ is a longstanding and deeply meaningful term used by many Christians to refer to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. While the phrase ‘Mother of God’ does not appear in the Bible, there are many passages that support this understanding of Mary’s role in salvation history.
One such passage is Luke 1:43, in which Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, greets Mary with the words: ‘And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?’ (KJV) The phrase ‘my Lord’ (Greek kyrios) is a common title for God in the Old Testament, and Elizabeth’s use of it to refer to Jesus suggests that she saw him as divine. This would make Mary the mother of God in the fullest sense of the term.
Another important passage is John 1:1-14, which describes Jesus as the Word of God made flesh. Verse 14 states: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.’ (KJV) By giving birth to Jesus, who is the Word made flesh and the only begotten of the Father, Mary can be understood as the mother of God.
The Gospel of Matthew also contains several references to Mary as the mother of Jesus, who is God in human form. In Matthew 1:23, an angel tells Joseph that the child to be born to Mary ‘shall be called Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us’ (KJV). This name emphasizes the divine nature of Jesus and reinforces the idea that Mary is the mother of God.
In addition to these biblical passages, the early Church Fathers also wrote extensively about Mary’s role as the mother of God. For example, in the 2nd century, the theologian Saint Ignatius of Antioch wrote that Jesus ‘was truly born of a virgin, and was truly crucified…He was also truly raised from the dead…Mary was truly of the seed of David’ (Letter to the Smyrnaeans, chapter 1). This statement affirms both the humanity and divinity of Jesus, and by extension, Mary’s role as the mother of God.
In the 5th century, the Council of Ephesus officially affirmed the title ‘Mother of God’ for Mary, declaring that ‘the holy virgin is the mother of God, because she bore according to the flesh the Word of God made flesh’ (session 3). This council was convened to address the heresy of Nestorianism, which denied the unity of Christ’s divine and human natures, and the affirmation of Mary as the mother of God was a key part of the council’s teaching.
In more recent times, both Catholic and Protestant theologians have continued to affirm Mary’s unique role as the mother of God. The Catholic Church, for example, teaches that Mary’s ‘divine motherhood…is the source of her extraordinary dignity’ and that ‘the Church venerates her as the Mother of God, and also as Queen of Heaven and earth’ (Catechism Of The Catholic Church, paragraphs 495, 966). Similarly, many Protestant theologians, while not using the title ‘Mother of God,’ have acknowledged Mary’s special place in salvation history and her role in bringing Christ into the world.
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
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