The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary , 2001
Luke 1:26-38

Mary's Place in the Church

In a Venetian museum hangs a masterpiece by Titian, one of Italy's greatest painters. It is entitled, "The Annunciation." The Annunciation refers to the announcement which the angel Gabriel made to Mary. Titian's portrayal is by no means a mere representation of a Hebrew peasant girl in small-town Nazareth. Mary looks to be a woman of highly cultivated royalty. She kneels in a marble court of a palace. Next to her are a workbasket, a quail, and an apple. The workbasket symbolizes her as an ideal mother who takes care of her household; the quail means she provides meat for her home, and the apple, first associated with the loss of Eden by Eve, is now restored.

As Mary kneels a dove hovers over her, a symbol of the Holy Spirit. Light from the dove shines down to the passage she is reading, Isaiah 7:14, "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Emmanuel." Gabriel appears before Mary as a winged angel of youthful beauty, clothed in luxurious and jewel bedecked robes. As he balances on a cloud, he announces, "Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee." In the distance is a flowery landscape suggesting that because of this event "the wilderness and the dry lands shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." Mary appears in Titian's rendition a remarkably gracious and gorgeous woman.

Titian's painting is typical of the rich symbolism surrounding the Virgin Mary. Indeed, she has inspired magnificent woodcarvings, stained glass, embroidery, and painting. We want to examine now this subject of the annunciation, and then, attempt to understand Mary's place in the life of the Church today.

The Church calls us to celebrate the Annunciation of the blessed Virgin Mary on March 25 because it is nine months before Christmas, when Jesus was born. In our Gospel passage from Luke 1:26, God sends Gabriel to Nazareth to tell the young Mary that she would conceive and bear a son. When Mary asked how this could happen since she was a virgin, the angel told her that her pregnancy would come about through the creative action of the Holy Spirit. And, this would be no ordinary son. His name would be Jesus. He would be great, and called the Son of the Highest; Almighty God would give Him the throne of his father David; He would reign over Israel forever; and of his kingdom there would be no end. When all these things took shape in Mary's heart she burst forth with a beautiful song called the Magnificat . "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit doth rejoice in God my Savior."

The virginal conception, or virgin birth is a doctrine that has come under attack in some academic circles. According to modern theories, the virgin conception is in reality similar to miraculous births found in other religions. The argument is expressed something like this: "If you read the myths of the ancient world, you can find other popular virgin birth stories. Maybe Luke just borrowed the idea from other cultures in order to spice up the story a little."

Well this objection sounds plausible until one looks at the details of those ancient myths. There are basically two kinds of miraculous birth stores.

Most are stories like the birth of Hercules, who was the child of the Greek god Zeus and a human woman. These accounts involved a sexual encounter between a god and a human woman. If the woman was a virgin before the encounter, she was not considered a virgin afterward. The so-called virgin birth stories almost always involved some kind of sexual encounter between a god or goddess and a human being, an element totally absent from the biblical account. A few other pagan stories are similar to the Greek myth of the birth of Alexander the Great. The story goes that Alexander was virgin born after his mother, Olympia, cohabited with a serpent! It's a crude story doubtlessly derived from mythological stories about a powerful man, most likely long after his death.

Obviously, these virgin birth myths do not compare with the holiness and wonder of the historical record of Jesus' miraculous conception in Mary found in the Bible. We know how miniscule an actual conception is. In order to observe a fertilized human egg you would have to magnify it under a microscope hundreds of times. The virginal conception announced by Gabriel involved some unique circumstances. Mary's egg was fertilized through the power of the Holy Spirit. That is what Luke 1:35 tells us. Secondly, it was the humanity of the Second Person of the Trinity who was conceived. It is amazing to think to what degree Jesus Christ humbled himself to come to earth to be our Savior. The infinite God, the Creator of the universe, became a tiny human embryo in the womb of Mary.

Why is the doctrine of the virginal conception important? For several reasons. First, it vindicates Scripture. If we are going to deny the truth of the virgin birth, then we are opposing the clear testimony of God's Word. We are starting down that slippery slope of skepticism that erodes the supremacy and authority of Scripture. If we do not have enough faith to believe what God's Word says, then we do not have enough faith to be a Christian.

Secondly, the virginal conception guards against heresy. A common misbelief concerning Jesus views Him as merely one more in a long line of Jewish messiahs. Whereas the other aspiring messianic prophets failed, Jesus got lucky. He was able to persuade enough people that He was the true Messiah, even though He was entirely human. Clearly this is a repugnant notion that is refuted by the miraculous virginal conception of Jesus Christ.

Thirdly, the virginal conception guards against gnosticism. One branch of gnosticism is docetism. Because the docetists despised physical, material and historical reality, for them, the Son of God was a non-physical phantom figure. No doubt gnosticism contradicts everything we know about the creation and incarnation. The virgin birth argues not only for a physical beginning but for a historical one as well. This is assuredly the reason the Church refers to the Virgin Mary in the creeds. She stands there as the faithful witness to the actual historicity of Christ and, at the same time, of His real divinity. Mary is the chosen instrument of the incarnation. In this is the true, the great glory of Mary. This is enough to "make her blessed" for all time.

What a great honor Mary enjoys! God Almighty chose her to become incarnate and save His people. Nevertheless, the fact that some strands of the Church have elevated Mary higher than she deserves makes her a controversial person. A good part of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglo-Catholic piety revolves around marian dogmas and devotion. It is the Roman Catholic Church that pushes the matter the farthest. Over the centuries several doctrines have become dogma: the perpetual virginity of Mary, her immaculate conception, her dormition, her assumption into heaven, her coronation as Queen of Heaven, and as queen, her heavenly mediation and intercession.

Perhaps it would be helpful to review these doctrines from a biblical perspective. Those who hold to the perpetual virginity of Mary claim that their position enjoys the endorsement of Church tradition. This is only partially true. During the first couple of centuries her virginity was rarely celebrated. Only with the rise of monasticism did that change. The asceticism of the monasteries greatly valued virginity. Sexual abstinence as a virtue came to permeate the entire Church, and the monks found in Mary a model to follow. The monastics came to fervently praise the eternal virginity of Mary. However, the fact that the Bible mentions Jesus' four brothers and sisters seems to contradict Mary's perpetual virginity. Matthew 13:53-56 is worth reading:

Now it came to pass, when Jesus had finished these parables, that He departed from there. When He had come to His own country, He taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished and said, "Where did this Man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is this not the carpenter's son? Is not His mother called Mary? And His brothers James, Joses, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this Man get all these things?"

The passage suggests normal lovemaking and procreation between Joseph and Mary. After the birth of Jesus, they went on to have a standard God-honoring, intimate relationship that resulted in more children. Moreover, Hebrew culture prized marriage and child bearing. The worst curse possible for a woman was to be a childless spinster. So where does the doctrine of the perpetual virginity come from? It comes from the Apocrypha. Soon after apostolic times, mythical and poetical writings appeared, such as Pseudo-Matthew and The Protoevangelium of James ; these second and third century works were full of legends and tales. Church Fathers like Jerome and Augustine, who were very sound in most things, nevertheless used bad judgment in naively basing the perpetual virginity doctrine on these uninspired, shaky sources. For example, The Protoevangelium of James teaches that the "brothers of the Lord" were sons and daughters of Joseph by an earlier marriage, that Joseph was an old man when he wed Mary, and that he brought into the marriage all of Jesus' many siblings. That is why most of the Medieval paintings depict Joseph as an old man. Yet the whole fable was fraudulently concocted in order to justify Mary's perpetual virginity.

Besides the non-biblical sources for Mary's never-ending virginity, the notion makes a mockery of Joseph and Mary's marital relationship. Hebrews 13:4 says, "Marriage is honorable among all, and the bed undefiled." In other words, sex is not inherently sinful. It is basic to marriage, and a matrimony that is not consummated is a dreadful thing.

Next, marian piety gradually led to the idea that Mary was so special that not only was she free of actual sin, that is, sins of commission or omission, but she was also free of original sin, or the sin inherited from Adam. From this notion the Roman Church finally laid down the doctrine of the immaculate conception in 1854. According to this dogma, Mary, from the moment she was conceived by her mother Saint Anne, was by God's special decree delivered from "all stain of original sin." Hence, Jesus Christ and Mary are the only two human beings to have lived sinless lives. In their view, Mary had to be sinless for the Son of God to become incarnate. For some reason they think Jesus required a sinless buffer like Mary in order to make contact with a sinful world. Why this is important I do not understand. There are other problems with the immaculate conception. Does not this doctrine separate Mary from the rest of humanity? Doesn't her status blur the Creator-creature distinction? And if Mary was sinless, why would she need a savior at all? Why would she sing out, "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my Spirit doth rejoice in God my Saviour?" Only sinners need a savior.

Following the Immaculate Conception, the Pope in 1950 went on to proclaim ex cathedra the infallible dogma of the bodily assumption of Mary into Heaven. Again, Mary's assumption relies on ludicrous apocryphal books such as Obsequies of the Holy Virgin , and Pseudo-Melito . [See pp. 86 ff of Marina Warner's great book, Alone of All Her Sex for exhaustive details on this. The doctrine of assumption is linked to the doctrine of dormition. What is Mary's dormition? Dormition states that, unlike the rest of mankind, Mary did not undergo physical death, rather she fell asleep for three days in a cave. That deathless passing from this life to the next is called her dormition, or sleeping. Upon completing her dormition she experienced the resurrection of the body. Her body was taken up or assumed into heaven, where she was immediately crowned the Queen. An attempt is made to give biblical support for the assumption of Mary. The "woman clothed with the Sun" in Revelation chapter twelve is understood to be the Virgin. Nonetheless, this highly symbolic text surely refers to the Church, not Mary.

Furthermore, Mary is understood as holding a special position among the saints. The veneration due her is not merely dulia, it is hyperdulia. She is the intercessor to God, she is the mediator to Christ. In fact, some would like to see her become officially declared co-Redemptrix on an equal footing with Christ. This is possible when you accept the premise that she is capable of dispensing grace. Rome insists that the angel Gabriel told Mary in Luke 1:28, "Hail, Mary, full of grace." The Latin is even more emphatic, "Ave Maria gratia plena." In other words the Queen of Heaven is not only ubiquitous and omniscient to hear and answer prayer, she is so abundantly full of grace that she is able to dispense it to those of us on earth who request it of her. How do we respond to such an assertion?

First of all, the translation, "Hail, Mary, full of grace" is slanted. The Greek verb is passive. "Hail thou who hast received grace" would be more accurate. It means simply, "Hail thou who hast had the fortune to be the object of the kindness of God, who has chosen thee as the instrument of His ways." Mary responds by giving simple consent, "Let it be to me according to your word." The angel Gabriel's complement to Mary surely grants her high prestige, but it does not in any way support the idea that she can dispense graces with which she is superabundantly endowed.

Scripture says emphatically that "there is one God and One Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus" (1 Tim. 2:5). Our Redeemer Jesus Christ is not simply our primary Mediator, or our best Advocate among a host of others, Jesus is the only Mediator. We dishonor Him when our prayers fly to another.

Mariology has become a source of division in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. As Evangelical Anglicans we oppose it. The Church is tainted when she looks to silly books to base her dogmas. We oppose the marian excesses charitably, gently, but firmly. We refute them because we have a zeal for biblical truth and for the purity of God's Church. We are saddened when the glory that belongs to Christ alone is eclipsed by another.

On this day of the observation of the annunciation of good news to Mary let us follow her example. Mary sang out in the Magnificat , "My soul magnifies the Lord, And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior." Like Mary, let us rejoice in Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world. Let us worship God with thankful hearts for the incarnation of the eternal Word of God for our redemption. And like Mary, may we have humble and submissive hearts to accept the will of God, and seek to obey Him.

Return to Sermons