Catholic Beliefs: Why Is Mary Called the "Mother of God"?

Today, January 1, the Catholic Church celebrates the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. I once remember being a little confused at the meaning of this title “mother of God.” It sounds pretty inflammatory to those unfamiliar with such a term, as it once was for me also. But there is actually a pretty simple explanation.

As Catholics, we do not worship Mary. Yes, you will probably find some somewhere that do, but this is not what the Church officially teaches. Those people you may find are just like those in any other church, that are in the process of learning their faith, and may come to some wrong conclusions along the road of discovery and growth. This term, mother of God, actually serves to strengthen our faith in Christ instead. It came about in the early Church, when there was much confusion over what it meant for Jesus to be both God and man. Some would err to either extreme, saying that He was only resurrected in Spirit, or maybe was really only a man, but in reality, He is both fully God and fully man at the same time. And while it is popular today to think of ourselves as being compartmentalized in nature, this is not the way God created us, neither is it the way that He was in the incarnation. We are created to be a whole being, a unity of body, mind, and soul. These faculties were meant to work in tandem, as they once did before the fall of mankind into sin. But there have been some that see a sort of dualism in Christ that divides these faculties into separate parts, leading to much confusion about who we are as human beings in this day and age, too. The ideas that our bodies could somehow be a mistake, something that we could be wrongly born into, something to easily be exchanged for something better or more to our personal inclinations.

However, Jesus was both fully God and fully man at the same time, so, to say that Mary is the mother of God is not saying that she is in any way a deity, or that she existed before God or that God somehow came forth from her, but that when she brought forth Jesus in His birth into this world in the flesh, she was giving birth to a being that was truly God. She did not just give birth to His humanity, as if that could be separated out, but to the wholeness of Christ, both human and divine. It is merely a declaration that Jesus truly was fully God and fully man at His incarnation, but God is the author of all of this. Mary was only the willing participant in this great love story.

Catholicism teaches that she is also the mother of the Church. Just as Adam and Eve brought forth sin into the world, tying a knot of sin within humanity, Jesus and Mary were the new Adam and Eve that untied that knot of sin by their redemptive work. Jesus by His work on the cross as God, and Mary, in her humanity, by her fiat, her simple yes to God’s work of bringing forth Jesus in the incarnation. (1 Cor. 15:45, Rom. 5:18-19, among others) A quick look back at Genesis shows Eve as the mother of all the living (Gen. 3:20). And in Genesis 3, it is the “woman” who will crush the head of the serpent. The Catholic Church has long seen this as a foreshadowing of the cooperation of Mary in defeating sin by her yes to God, as we know many, many things of the Old Testament are foreshadowings of the things to come in the New Testament. Now, moving forward to the foot of the cross, Jesus now employs this same term again as He entrusts His mother Mary to the care of John the Apostle. Once again, in John 19:26-27 NABRE, “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.” We see this as the moment that she became the mother of the new order of things, the new “mother of the living” in the spiritual realm, and the beginnings of the Church.

I find it interesting that this same term “woman,” is also used at the wedding feast of Cana (John 2:4), the day that she brought Jesus’ attention to the plight of the young couple, running out of wine. It was at this very moment that He performed His first miracle, at her request, thus ushering in His years of public ministry (John 2). She was there to point to the need, but then to quickly tell the servers to, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 3:5 NAB), as her job has never been to draw attention to herself, but only to draw us into obedience and attentiveness to her Son, our Savior.

So, today, this first day of the year, we celebrate this redemptive work of Christ from its very beginnings and conception, with the fiat of Mary, the mother of the Church, when the angel appeared to her. We celebrate that Jesus truly was, is and is to come Emmanuel, “God with us.” We honor her, just as Jesus did, in following the commandment to honor his father and mother. And just as He honored her, so do we, because we follow in His footsteps. And we thank Him for giving us the great gift of His mother, as intercessor once again for each one of us. This is an especially great gift for those among us who may have wounds that prevent them from coming near to God as Father just yet, a sort of stepping stone if you will. And, just as she did for that couple in the wedding feast of Cana, she still lives, now more alive than ever, in the very Presence of Christ, to notice our own continuing needs, and to intercede for them as she did once before.

Happy New Year to you and yours!

Photo Credit: Josh Applegate, stocksnap.io