Who is Mary? The God-bearer, the model disciple who points to her son and intercedes for us? A false idol, leading people away from the worship of the one true God? Or someone to whom we give little thought except at Christmas? It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that Mary is really only for Catholics (and the Orthodox Churches). Most Anglicans probably identify with the third of my hypothetical answers. At St Thomas’, however, I hope that wouldn’t be the case. After all, we keep all of the feasts associated with Mary in the church calendar, we recite the Angelus at the end of said Masses, we regularly ask for Mary’s prayers, and some of us go on pilgrimage to her Shrine at Walsingham (see separate article for details of this year’s pilgrimage). But it shouldn’t be the case that honouring Mary is something we do to prove that we are catholic, or something that we avoid to prove that we’re not. Mary is for everyone, not just those for whom Marian devotion is ‘their cup of tea’.

Many statues and icons of Mary depict her with the infant Jesus. Mary’s role above all is to point to Jesus, the one whom she brought into the world. We can’t think about Mary without thinking about her son. And yet if we try and think about Jesus without thinking about his mother too, we end up missing part of the picture. The mystery at the heart of our faith, that the eternal Son of God could become fully human, sharing in human life from birth to death in order that we might be saved, required Jesus to be born of a human mother. By honouring Mary as mother of God or God-bearer, as the church has done from earliest times, we recognise that the one she bore in her womb was not merely a man, but no less than God himself, who became man for our sake. The Angelus, traditionally recited three times a day, might appear to be all about Mary but in reality it is all about this great miracle of the incarnation, and it is thoroughly scriptural.

So we honour Mary chiefly as mother of God in the incarnation, the one who holds up her Son for all to see. But we also see in her a pattern for faithful discipleship and an example of what we shall become – ‘the model of grace and hope in Christ’, as a recent ecumenical report put it. Her ‘yes’ in response to the angel’s message shows us that discipleship is fundamentally about saying ‘yes’ to God, trusting him with our whole being and seeking to do whatever he wants of us. Her ‘yes’ was no doubt a trembling, fearful ‘yes’, as ours will likely be, but she was prepared and equipped for this awesome responsibility by the grace of God, and so shall we. On the Feast of the Assumption, August 15th, we celebrate the honour bestowed on her by God, and the reward of eternal life which we hope and trust shall one day be ours. Mary was privileged to be the first recipient of her Son’s salvation and the first to share in the resurrection which he won for all humanity – hardly something anyone could begrudge her! She herself recognised the enormous privilege God had given her: ‘All generations shall call me blessed!’ she told her cousin Elizabeth, but only after saying ‘My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord’. If God should honour her in this way, it is right that we should honour her too – for in honouring her, we always honour the one she honoured through her very being.

Mary is not only the mother of God, but our mother too, the one to whom we can always turn in any difficulty, confident that she will intercede for us to her Son – just as she did at the wedding at Cana. It is true that Christ is ‘our only mediator and advocate’, and so we have no need of other intermediaries. And yet in his infinite wisdom God has given us many channels of his grace – the sacraments, the prayer we offer for one another, and the prayers of the saints, above all Mary. At the very moment when Christ gave himself for us on the cross, Mary was there, sharing in his suffering in a way which no-one else could, and Jesus said to his disciple John ‘behold your mother’, entrusting them to each other. That surely symbolises Mary’s maternal care for the whole church, the body of Christ.

Mary has another, rather surprising, role – the bringer of unity in our divided church. In recent years there has been considerable ecumenical progress over Mary’s role in the church, and a crucial element has been a return to scripture, through which it has been possible to see through many of the divisions of the past. Mary is truly for everyone, and we should not be ashamed to show our love for her, the mother of our Lord and Saviour, and mother of us all.