Book Aim

To share the insights with us that led to him accepting Mary as his mother.

Chapter 1 – the loving logic of Mary’s maternity

• Jesus said to baptise in the name of the father, the son and the Holy Spirit. Notice how these are not 3 titles.
• God is father, son and Holy Spirit.
• God in himself has the essence of family. Fatherhood, sonship, and the essence of the family which is love.
• God then is not like a family, God is a family.

Typology

• A type is a real person, place, thing or event in the OT that foreshadows something greater in the NT. From type we get the word typology, the study of Christ’s foreshadowing in the OT.
• Typology unveils more than the person of Christ; it also tells us about heaven , the church, the apostles, the Eucharist, the places of Jesus birth and death and the person of Jesus’s mother.
• Explicit types
  • Jerusalem temple foreshadowed the heavenly dwelling of the saints in glory (2 cor 5:1-2; Rev 21:9-22)
  • Israel prefigured the church (Gal 6:16)
  • The 12 tribes prefigured the apostles (Luke 22:30)
  • The ark of the covenant was a type of the blessed Virgin Mary (Rev 11:19; 12:1-6,13-17)
• Implicit types (types not explicitly discussed, but obvious)
  • Saint Joseph’s role in the early life of Jesus clearly follows the patriarch Joseph’s role in the early life of Israel. Same name, both are righteous or just, both receive revelations in dreams, both become exiled to Egypt, both prepare the way for a greater event (the exodus led by Moses, and the redemption brought about by Jesus the redeemer)
• Marian types
  • Mary is prefigured in
    • Eve the mother of all the living
    • Sarah, wife of Abraham, who conceived her child miraculously
    • The Queen mother of Israel’s monarchy who interceded with the king on behalf of the people of the land
    • Also Hannah and Esther
    • Most explicitly the ark of the covenant
• Covenant
  • In the ancient near East, a covenant was a sacred kinship bond based on a solemn oath that brought someone into a family relationship with another person or tribe.
  • God made covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and David, all of which failed because of man’s unfaithfulness and sin. God remained constantly faithful, the others did not.
  • Only a man as righteous and constant as God could fulfil the human end of a covenant with God.
  • So God became man in Jesus Christ and established the covenant by which we become part of his family, the family of God.

Family

• The Church looks to God as father, Jesus as brother and heaven as home. What’s missing then?
• Every family needs a mother; only Christ could choose his own, and he chose providentially for his entire covenant family.
• He shares everything with us
  • His divine life
  • His home
  • His Father
  • His brothers
  • His mother
• A family is incomplete without a loving mother
  • The apostles knew this, and gathered with Mary at Pentecost.
  • The early Christians knew this, and painted her image in their catacombs and dedicated churches to her.
  • The earliest icons portray her holding her infant child forever bearing him to the world.
• A true mother, she is usually portrayed pointing to her Son but looking out towards the viewers, her other children.

Chapter 2 – Mary’s motherhood is Eden revisited

• John echos Genesis, a fresh start, a new creation
  • Gen 1:1 “in the beginning good created the heavens and the earth”
  • John 1:1 “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God”
  • Gen 1:3-5 – God created light to shine in the darkness
  • John 1:4-5 – the Word’s “life was the light of men” and it “shines in the darkness”
  • Gen 1:2 – “the spirit of God…moving over the face of the waters”
  • John 1:32-33 – the spirit hovering above the waters in baptism.
• The renewal of creation would come with the divine life given in the waters of baptism.
• Counting the days. Day:
  1. John 1 starts the events with John the Baptist in 1:19. Let’s call this day 1.
  2. The next day… John 1:19
  3. The next day… John 1:35
  4. The next day… John 1:43 (so we are on day 4)
  5. Day 7 “On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there,” John 2:1 NIV
• Mary’s prompt; Jesus’s response
  • John 2:3 “They have no wine”
  • “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come”
  • “What have you to do with me” was a common genre and Greek idiom in Jesus’s day. Found in several other places in the OT and NT. It does not signify reproach or disrespect. It covers respect and deference. (Used verbatim in Luke 8:28)
  • Jesus defers to his mother, though she never commands Him. She merely tells the servants “Do whatever he tells you” John 2:5.
• Woman
  • Another echo of Genesis “woman” is the name Adam gives to Eve (Gen 2:23).
  • Jesus is addressing Mary as Eve to the new Adam which heightens the significance of the wedding feast they’re attending.
• How can Mary be the bride and mother?
  • Isaiah 62:4-5
• Mary’s relationship to us all
  • “Woman” redefines Mary’s relationship with Jesus and with all believers.
  • When Jesus gives his mother to his beloved disciple, he gives her to his beloved disciple of all time.
  • Eve was the mother of the living (Gen 3:20)
  • Mary is the mother to all who have new life in baptism.
• The New Eve
  • At Cana, the new eve radically reverses the fatal decision of the first Eve.
  • It was a woman who led the old Adam to his first evil act in the garden.
  • It was a woman who led the new Adam to his first glorious work
• Revelation 12
  • Attributed to John.
  • Points back to the protoevangeleum (Gen 3:15)
  • Depicts a new eve, prevailing over evil.
• Is this a modern eisegesis?
  • St Justin martyr – dialogue with trypho
    • Written around 160AD
    • He points out the comparison between Eve and Mary
  • St Irenaeus of Lyons (learned from Polycarp who was John’s disciple)
    • Also spoke of Mary as the new eve
    • In “proof of the apostolic preaching” he also suggests Mary’s intercessory power, as seen at Cana.

Chapter 3 – Israel and the bearers of the new covenant

• Ark of the covenant
  • The prophet Jeremiah in 587 BC concealed the ark in order to preserve it from defilement when Babylonian invaders came to destroy the temple. (2 Maccabees 2:5-8)
  • In Solomon’s temple the ark occupied the Holy of holies.
  • Ark contents
    • The stone on which the finger of God had traced the ten commandments
    • A relic of the manna
    • Aaron’s rod, the symbol of his priestly office.
  • Ark details
    • Made of Acacia wood
    • Box shaped
    • Covered with gold ornament overshadowed by carved cherubim
    • Atop the ark was the mercy seat, which was always unoccupied
  • Standing before the ark in the holy place was the menorah
  • The Ark represented the protection and power of the almighty.
  • Israel would bring it into battle. Joshua 6:13 – they marched with it around Jericho 7 times before the wall fell down.
• Revelation 11:19
  • John claims to have seen the ark, after the blast of the seventh trumpet of the seventh avenging angel
• Revelation 12
  • And a great sign appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars , she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery. Revelation 12:1-2 RSV-CE
• Note the numbering and divisions in the Bible were added only in the middle ages.
• John has shown us the ark of the covenant and it is a woman.
• Who is the woman
  • On one level it is the church, which labours to give birth to believers in every age.
  • The male child could only be Jesus. (Psalm 2:9 describes the messianic King promised by God)
  • Rev 12:9 John states plainly that the drain is not an allegory, but a specific person. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. †Revelation 12:9 RSV-CE
  • John refers to her only as woman. Evoking Cana
  • Revelation 12 evokes the protoevangeleum:
    • 15 I will put enmity between you and the woman,  and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, *  and you shall bruise his heel.” Genesis 3:15 RSV-CE
    • 17 Then the dragon was angry with the woman, * and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea. Revelation 12:17 RSV-CE
  • Mother of all living
    • 20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living. Genesis 3:20 RSV-CE
    • The new eve fulfils the promise of the old, to be more perfectly the mother of all the living.
• Covenant
  • What made the ark holy was that it contained the covenant.
  • John saw the ark of the new covenant, the vessel chosen to best God’s covenant into the world once and for all.
• Luke
  • Luke 1 echos 2 Sam 6

The above is taken from https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/mary-the-ark-of-the-new-covenant.

• Why would Luke be so coy about this? Why not just come right out and call the Blessed Virgin a fulfilment of the type of the ark?
  • Cardinal Newman: …she was, or may have been alive when the apostles and evangelists wrote; there was just one book of scripture certainly written after her death and that book does canonise and crown her” (revelation)
• Scripture
  • Is not a code to be cracked, but a mystery we could never plumb in a lifetime.