Mary, Mediatrix: Exemplar for the Contemporary World

In Redemptoris Mater, Pope John Paul II says that Mary "is present in Cana of Galilee as the Mother of Jesus, and in a significant way she contributes to that 'beginning of the signs' which reveal the messianic power of her Son." Her motherhood, said John Paul, was in the dimension of the Kingdom of God, "in the salvific radius of God's Fatherhood." Considered in the magnitude of cosmic events, the specifics of the miracle at Cana were small, a response to an immediate need. Through them, however, Mary impelled Christ into his messianic mission. Pope John Paul II wrote:

Thus there is a mediation: Mary places herself between her Son and mankind in the reality of their wants, needs and sufferings. She puts herself 'in the middle,' that is to say she acts as a mediatrix not as an outsider but in her position as mother. She knows that as such she can point out to her Son the needs of mankind, and in fact, she 'has the right' to do so. Her mediation is thus in the nature of intercession. Mary 'intercedes' for mankind.¹

Mary did not receive Gabriel's message or carry Christ in her womb in the manner of a channel, basically untouched by what flowed through her. Rather, her entire body-person was forever involved. With her Fiat, she gave flesh of her flesh, consecrated her whole being so that humanity might receive, meet, and know the Word made flesh for our salvation. As a human person, she was free. She could have drawn in, closed herself to the message and mission. But hers was not a pro forma response, a "yes" to something pre-determined, that would simply pass through her, use her as a mere instrument. She questioned, understood enough, and said "Be it done to me." In receiving and responding to a personal encounter beyond her own powers, she became the medium, in whom and through whom, the personal Word of salvation came for the benefit of all.

The culmination of Our Lady's dogmatically-defined privileges is her Assumption, body and soul, into heaven. This is of particular importance regarding her body-person as Mediatrix. She is the only creature who was defined as having already been received into heaven as total body-person. She personally exemplifies the preciousness of body-of matter and its capacity for glorification. Even now, she mediates that mystery concretely but transcendentally in eternal life. Matter is already glorified in a creature, Mary, Mother of God.

A fourth aspect of mediation, considered within the context of faith is this: what is conveyed is for the common good and, as such, must be truthful. Mediation is an interface for communion of persons and the conveying of truth. It is not a gift for the personal aggrandizement of the one who mediates. The Visitation mystery emphasizes this in a particular way.

Adrienne von Speyr, in her book, Handmaid of the Lord, reflects on the Visitation mystery that followed so closely upon the Incarnation:

Through the encounter with the angel who addressed her as 'full of grace,' Mary has become the mediatrix of grace. Wherever she goes with her Child, the grace of the Child flows out through her into the world. The Child in her womb gives her the grace to awaken the mission of John by way of his mother. In few events does it become so impressively evident that grace always overflows and never stops at the person. It goes from Jesus to Mary, from Mary to Elizabeth and from Elizabeth to John, there to be thoroughly poured out, and finally, thus increased, to return to the divine Source to which John points. It is obedience that first shows Mary how she is to administer the grace she has received, by virtue of obedience she retains nothing for herself, so that the grace of the Son has lost nothing of its power and urgency when it has passed through her hands. Therefore Elizabeth is also sure that she has received divine grace, and for that reason she can also be sure that she in turn, selfless and obedient, passes it on to her son.²

Lumen Gentium designates Mary as "Advocate, Helper, Benefactress, and Mediatrix" (#62). Note how the titles coinhere in one another. As Mediatrix, she "comes between" in order to unite, or to further deeper union. At Cana, Our Lady is helper and advocate for the couple that "have no wine" for their wedding guests. Much more, she is "in medias res" in order to impel her Son into his public mission. She is benefactress who, through the simple needs of a village wedding, mediates what is for the good of all. It is a moment of truth, transcending this and every wedding. The Mediatrix at Cana mediates her Son into his redemptive journey: the Bridegroom who will make ordinary wine the means of Transubstantiation and Eucharistic self-gift. To participate in, and mediate one truth, puts one in touch with all truth. As the poet Sister Maura Eichner asks in a similar context: "If you were God, would you have thought of that?"

Mediation in the Contemporary World

Why suggest that Mary as Mediatrix is exemplar for the contemporary world? The fourfold qualities of integral mediation in Mary's person highlight also the challenges which contemporary life and culture present when mediation is understood as 1) Trinitarian; 2) centered (in order to provide an interface for communication and union); 3) requiring matter and embodiment; and 4) conveying what is for the good of others, authentically, truthfully.

The revealed truth of inner Trinitarian life remains a stumbling block for many today-or even seems irrelevant. The Old Testament testifies how difficult it was for people to receive the truth of One God in a culture that clung to multiple deities. The New Testament, especially the Johannine and Pauline Letters and The Acts of the Apostles, manifests how challenging it was to bring the truths of Christian Revelation to those ensnared in Gnostic pleromas with their demi-gods and aeons. Recently, not only outside, but within the Church, there has been misunderstanding of, and resistance to the document Dominus Jesus. Since the archeological discovery of Gnostic Gospels at Nag Hammadi in the last century, a Gnostic revival of sorts has flourished, as evidenced in the New Age Movement, and a widespread fascination with works such as The Da Vinci Code.

In revealing the inner life of the Trinity, Jesus said "Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself; it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work" (Jn. 14:10). "But when the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth, since he will not be speaking as from himself but will say only what he has learned ... Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: All he tells you will be taken from what is mine" (Jn. 16: 13, 15). In light of Jesus' revelation, the Church expresses the identity of each Divine Person in terms of relation. Recently, Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical Deus Caritas Est eloquently dwelt on the truth that God is Love. The Trinity is Perfect Love. The more perfect love is, the more that love will be expressed in self-gift, deference, reverence for the other. To say that Marian mediation is Trinitarian in its source means that Mary exemplifies, in a creaturely manner, the qualities of such divine love.

Contemporary cultures, especially among Western nations, increasingly place high value on choices that counter authentic communion of persons. Radical independence is prized and many avoid making permanent commitments or choose legal forms of union with protective clauses. One thinks, for example, of the legal partnership created in France at the turn of the millennium: the so-called PACS (Pacte civil de solidarite), an acronym designating a legal agreement that falls short of marriage while specifying some benefits and responsibilities for each of the partners. One couple, in their late twenties, who entered this civil union, said that although they had lived together for eight years, they did not feel ready for marriage. The New York Times reported that "both are children of divorce and they think marriage is a burdensome institution, weighed down with religious connotations, likely to end badly and at enormous expense."³ Another couple who entered the agreement in 1999 said that they would never marry, even if they could, because "It is such a heavy thing, marriage."

In bypassing the Trinitarian aspects of permanent relationship and total self-gift, many in Western cultures are reinterpreting relationship and marriage-eviscerating their meaning while retaining the terminology-such as "marriage," "family," and "parent." Reinterpretation is then followed by attempts to legalize such arrangements. When forms of union no longer bear a recognizable Trinitarian image, they cannot mediate what has never truly been received or given. They "float in the space" of subjective interpretation, and can change according to personal choice and the exigencies of the moment.

A second aspect of genuine mediation is centering through which one's entire body-person becomes a midpoint for communication and bringing others into union. Each newborn child responds to others and the environment as if all were of one piece, with the child as the center of his universe. When the child cries, the universe responds to its needs and wants. If there is healthful growth, this changes. For example, a child will push endlessly at baubles hung over its cradle, gradually experiencing "otherness"; there is a growing realization that it is not the center of the universe. There are "others" with their own reality. This brings the possibility of relation. If such development does not occur, the infant grows into the child, the teen, the adult who retains the notion that he/she IS the center of the universe, not a mediator, but one who draws everything back to self. Like the space vehicle that responded to an attraction within its small being that outweighed even the attraction of a star, such a person may close in upon self-or try to change reality to suit individual choices and desires. Christ's call to human fulfillment in the Beatitudes: his description of the Last Judgment; and Mary's "Be it done to me," reveal what brings true "beatitude"- the mediation of good things for others.

In the film, The Passion of the Christ, there is a perceptive scene, placed in the high priest's house on the night between Holy Thursday and Good Friday. Christ is incarcerated in a cell beneath the house. Mary silently moves across the flagstone floor above the cells-intent, listening. Suddenly, she kneels and bends down, pressing her face to a flagstone, communing with her Son imprisoned below. The film portrays Mary's communion with him, her entire body-person united to his pain and suffering. It is a union between Mother and Son that transcends stone and distance.

Thirdly, authentic human mediation is incarnational, embodied. For both Christ and Mary there has to be a body. The Letter to the Hebrews is amazing for the number of ways it emphasizes this truth.

You who wanted no sacrifice or oblation,
prepared a body for me.
You took no pleasure in holocausts or sacrifices for sin;
then I said, just as I was commanded in the scroll of the book ...
'God, here I am! I am coming to obey your will.' (Heb 10:5b-7. 9)

The Letter to the Hebrews also stresses that God never said to an angel, "You are my Son, today I have become your father" (Heb 1:5). Rather, for a short while the Son is described as being made lower than the angels, but now crowned with glory and splendor "because he submitted to death; by God's grace he had to experience death for all mankind" (Heb 2:9). As compassionate high priest, Christ, "During his life on earth ... offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard. Although he was Son, he learned to obey through suffering" (Heb 5:7-8).

In the opening years of the Third Millennium, the gift of body is often distorted, violated, treated as an object to be manipulated and refashioned. During the twentieth century the human body came to be considered a malleable artifact- raw material for experimentation, or for recombination with other forms of life and matter. Robert Brungs, founder of ITEST (Institute for Theological Encounter with Science and Technology) recalled with quiet horror the slogan of the World's Fair, held in Chicago in 1933. It stated: "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms." Near the entrance to the Fair was a looming sculpture meant to interpret that slogan. It portrayed a large robot, bent down over two human figures like a mechanical womb. That was 1933. The sequence of "science finding, industry applying, and man conforming" has indeed moved rapidly. It is common to hear the present status of mankind described as "posthuman."

Approximately 60 years after the Chicago World's Fair, N. Katherine Hayles published her book How We Became Posthuman. Drawing insights from her 16-year study of the history of cybernetics and the convictions that have spurred technological development she wrote:

What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions ... First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began long before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.⁴

Hayles is not overstating what has already occurred. This is not science fiction. Applications of these convictions and technologies are happening so rapidly that what persons in the mid-20th century would have considered unthinkable have become commonplace-often, not only tolerated in some nations, but affirmed by legal right. I cite just two examples from recent months that exemplify a rapidly changing understanding of the human person in regard to animal life and the artificial/ commercial means of producing children.