In the following article by Fr. John Saward from his text The Mysteries of March: Hans Urs von Balthasar on the Incarnation and Easter, the author underscores the patristic tradition of the Annunciation and Good Friday both taking place on March 25th, and the theological and liturgical complementarity of these two great liturgical events. Indeed, Mary’s “fiat” at the Annunciation is also the yes which leads to the Redemption of the world and to her role as Co-redemptrix at the foot of the Cross on that “Good” Friday. – Ed.
There are years when, by date, the Annunciation falls during Holy Week, even on Easter Sunday; in 1989, for example, the twenty-fifth of March was Holy Saturday. In the Latin Church the problem of such double booking is solved by transferring the feast to a day outside the privileged Paschal period. However, in the Churches of the Byzantine rite, the solemnity of the Incarnation Stands its ground alongside the commemoration of the Lord’s Passion and Resurrection. If the Annunciation coincides with “Great Friday” or “Great Saturday,” these cease to be the two days of the year when the Eucharist is not celebrated; the divine liturgy is served in honor of the Incarnation, and there is a hectic duplication of offices. This custom may look like just another example of oriental delight in complication, but it is much more than that.
First, it reflects a tradition going back at least as far as Tertullian, according to which Our Lord died on the Cross on the eighth day before the Calends of April, that is to say, the twenty-fifth of March, the very day on which, by a later reckoning, he had been conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin. (1) Secondly, both the eastern liturgical practice and the calendrical tradition upon which it is based express an intuition of faith, the Church’s sense that the “mysteries of March”—the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection—are inseparably connected. Christian poets have always loved to entwine them. For example, St Ephrem, the fourth century Syriac writer, speaks of the new and everlasting springtime inaugurated by the coincidences of the month to which he gives the Semitic name of “Nisan.”
In the month of Nisan, when the seed sprouts in the warm air, the Sheaf sowed itself in the earth. Death reaped and swallowed it up in Sheol, but the medicine of life, hidden within, burst Sheol open. In Nisan, when lambs bleat in the meadow, the Paschal Lamb entered His Mother’s womb. (2)
In 1608 the Annunciation also fell on Good Friday and in England inspired one of John Donne’s finest Divine Poems. Donne looks at the Virgin Mother, “Reclus’d at home, Publique at Golgotha,” and considers the strange simultaneity of conception and crucifixion:
At once a Sonne is promis’d her, He her to John;
Not fully a mother, Shee’s in Orbitie,
At once receiver and the legacie.
All this, and all betweene, this day hath showne,
Th’Abridgement of Christ’s story, which makes one
(As in plaine Maps, the furthest West is East)
Of the Angel’s Ave and Consummatum est. (3)
The mysteries of March meet in Mary, the Virgin Mother of God. At the Annunciation she says Yes to the Incarnation of God the Son in her womb. On Calvary she consents to the Sacrifice he offers for the sins of the world. When he rises in glory from the tomb, her fiat flows into a jubilation beyond words. Mary gives her undivided assent to the whole mission of Jesus, from Lady Day to Easter Day and to the ages of ages:
At the beginning, at the very heart of the Incarnation event, stands Mary, the perfect Virgin, who “let it be done unto her,” who was prepared to enter into a physical and spiritual motherly relationship with the person and also the whole work of her Son. (4)
For Balthasar, there can be no Christology without Trinitarian doctrine, but there can likewise be no Christology without Mariology, neither Incarnation nor Cross without the Virgin who said Yes. Adrienne von Speyr said to Balthasar a year or two after her conversion, “if (Mary) is taken away, all you are left with is an abstract Redeemer.” (5) She knew from her own experience that the “Christ alone” (solus Christus) principle of Protestantism threatened to dehumanize Christ. There are no solitary stars in the human galaxy; every man “belongs to a constellation with his fellow men” (einer mitmenschlichen Konstellation). (6) If it is “not good for a man to be alone” (cf. Gen. 2:18), it is not good for the God-Man to be alone. (7) The divine person of the Son is a “subsistent relation”: being Son is “being towards the Father.” Now when he becomes man, he enters the world of human relationships, sanctifying them, raising them, through his relational Trinitarian personality, to a dignity beyond compare. Jesus’ relations with other human beings can never be routine, merely neutral or casual, least of all his relation with Mary, his Mother and Handmaid. As the history of the
Reformed denominations proves, to sever the Son from the Mother in whose flesh and by whose faith he became man produces a Christology of unsustainable abstraction.
And that is not all: a Maryless doctrine of Christ inevitably means a coldly impersonal or masculine picture of the Church. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have always seen the Church personified in Mary, the Ever-Virgin Theotokos; the Church is “she,” a person, a woman, Christ’s Bride and our Mother. But, for Protestantism, the Church tends to be an “it” or a “he,” not a surrounding maternal presence but an oppressive institution or a gang of interfering clergymen. In a collection of essays published nearly twenty years ago, commenting on Karl Barth’s “jovially malicious” remark that he had never heard a Roman Catholic sermon on Mary on Swiss radio, Balthasar warned his fellow Catholics of the calamitous effects of their losing “the Marian principle”:
Without Mariology, Christianity threatens imperceptibly to become inhuman. The Church becomes functionalistic, soulless, a hectic enterprise without any point of rest, estranged from its true nature by the planners. And because, in this manly-masculine world, all that we have is one ideology replacing another, everything becomes polemical, critical, bitter, humorless, and ultimately boring, and people in their masses run away from such a Church. (8)
Mary’s Yes at the Annunciation
The bond between Jesus and his Mother is Spiritual as well as bodily. The idea that it could be merely biological is humanly as well as theologically unthinkable. (9) Mary “devotes herself totally as Handmaid of the Lord to the person and work of her Son,” (10) in soul as well as body, and throughout the whole of her life. St. Augustine, followed by St. Leo, expresses the totality of this mothering by the adage that the Virgin conceived Jesus in her mind by faith before she conceived him in her womb. (11) Everything about Mary is Catholic, “according to the whole.” Her consent to the Incarnation is wholehearted and wholepersoned, without reservation and engaging every fiber of her being:
The full consent of the Mother was already required at the time of the Incarnation of the Son . . . this Yes of Mary had to be a consent of total faith, without limit, without any restriction. For at least three reasons: first, because God, in becoming incarnate in the Virgin, does not violate his creature; secondly, because this Mother had to be capable of introducing her Son into the plenitude of Israel’s religion, into perfect Abrahamic faith; thirdly, because the Incarnation of the Word requires precisely a flesh which itself welcomes him perfectly; in other words, because the faith of this Mother had to encompass her whole person, body and soul, it had to be an incarnate faith. (12)
In the Mariological section of the Theodramatik, Balthasar states as a principle: God “could not use force on his free creation.” (13) The Father does not inflict salvation, does not impose the Savior-Son. He turns to Mary, appeals to her will, waits for her reply. Our God, as Julian of Norwich liked to say, is a courteous Lord. (14) So Mary is not “passively used by God but helps in free faith and obedience, to effect the salvation of men.” (15) She cooperates, in a humble, handmaidenly way, with the saving work of the Trinity.
For Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr, Marian consent is the “fundamental attitude” of all Christian faith and love, of contemplative prayer and active service, “the original vow, out of which arises every form of definitive Christian commitment to God and in God.” (16) If we want to know what it means to know and love and follow Jesus in the Church, then we must turn in loving devotion to Mary, his Mother and ours. By contrast with all the aggressively masculine, Promethean pictures of what it is to be a Christian, Hans Urs and Adrienne refer us to the heart of the matter, to the Immaculate Heart of the Mother. There, for example, is to be found the secret of prayer. (17) Praising God in the Magnificat, contemplating Jesus in her heart, prayerfully awaiting the Spirit with the apostles, Mary is the supreme model in prayer as she is in everything else that is Christian. To be Mary is to be prayer. (18)
Mary’s Yes is virginal, the assent of a woman who looks to God’s omnipotence alone for new life and fruitfulness. The virginity of her body is the exact sacrament of her poverty of spirit, her unresisting readiness to receive what God gives her:
Mary’s life must be regarded as the prototype of what the Ars Dei can fashion from a human material which puts up no resistance to him. It is a feminine life which, in any case more than masculine life, awaits being shaped by the man, the Bridegroom, Christ, and God. It is a virginal life which desires no other formative principle but God and the fruit which God gives it to bear, to give birth to, to nourish and to rear. It is at the same time a maternal and a bridal life whose power of surrender reaches from the physical to the highest spiritual level. In all this it is simply a life that lets God dispose of it as he will. (19)
Mary’s virginal Yes is representative. She gives her consent to the Incarnation on behalf of all Israel. She sums up and fulfils but then surpasses all the faith and obedience of her people since Abraham. Israel’s faith was constantly failing, regularly flawed by hesitation, doubt, even flagrant infidelity. Here at last, by the, grace of the Immaculate Conception, is the all-pure Daughter of Zion, unreservedly ready to give herself to God:
God looked on “his servant in her lowliness” and did in her the “great things” he promised to “Abraham and his seed,” as Mary herself says in her hymn to grace. But this means that her Yes to the angel summed up and surpassed all the faith and all the obedience of the Old Testament from Abraham onwards. It means, too, that it integrated the Old Covenant with the New, Judaism with the Church. (20)
Mary is Israel in person, Israel at its most perfect and beautiful, the Old Testament fulfilled in the New.
It is not only Israel that Mary represents by her Yes. At the Annunciation she gives her assent on behalf of all mankind, indeed of all creation. To see how this is so, we must follow Balthasar in regarding revelation as a nuptial mystery. Many of the Church Fathers speak of the hypostatic union as a marriage (connubium) of the divine and human natures. In the earliest expressions of this, Mary’s womb is seen as the “bridal chamber” in which the Son of God espouses human nature. Eventually, however, the tradition begins to see that she is more than the venue of the nuptials:
Mary cannot be the impersonal “place” where the marriage bond of the two natures is tied. God does not do violence to his creature, especially not to the woman who represents his covenant. He treats her with respect as a person, as embodying that human nature which his Word and Son will assume and, in that sense, as endowed with a coresponsibility. (21)
Since the Incarnation is not an invasion but a wedding, God wants mankind gladly to say “I will,” to give him its nature freely by a responsive and spousal love. Mary fulfils that role for us all at the Annunciation. Balthasar cherishes St Thomas’ way of saying it:
In order to show that there is a certain spiritual wedlock (matrimonium) between the Son of God and human nature, in the Annunciation the Virgin’s consent was besought in lieu of that of the entire human nature. (22)
In other words, the marriage of divinity and humanity in the one person of Christ does not derive its matrimonial character exclusively from the side of the Bridegroom-Son. No, says Balthasar, it is “a real two-sided mystery of love through the bridal consent of Mary acting for all the rest of created flesh.” (23)
It is precisely as a woman, because she is a woman, that Mary can represent all humanity at the Incarnation. Woman by nature is receptive, responsive, reflective: the womb that receives the seed of man, the answer to his word, the face that shines back its love to him. (24) Now Balthasar argues that, in Old and New Testaments, the relation between God and his creatures is presented in the light of this nuptial mystery. God in his transcendence, as the primary actor and initiator, is analogically male with regard to the creature; the creature in its dependence on God is open and receptive, capax Dei, and therefore, in a certain sense, feminine. (25) It is true, says Balthasar, that modern physiology has demonstrated that, in the act of generation, the female contribution is as active as the male:
It is nonetheless undeniable that the woman is the one who receives and that it is the man who gives. Conclusion: receiving, consenting, accepting, letting happen can be an attitude no less active and creative than that of giving, fashioning, imposing. And if in the Incarnation the part of man is taken by God, who is essentially the Giver, indeed the Imposer, the part of woman, who as a creature accepts the divine gift, is far from being passive. Let us say rather that this assent is the highest and most fruitful of human activities—in Pauline terms, faith is required more fundamentally than works. (26)
Woman is the classic creature. It is supremely fitting, therefore, that a woman on her own, a virgin in fact, should have represented creation in consenting to the Incarnation. For the Yes asked of her is ein geschehenlassendesja, a fiat, a letting-it-be-done-in-her according to God’s will. Men are men, but at that great moment Man was a woman. (27)
Mary’s Yes to the Cross
Like her consent to the Incarnation, Mary’s faithful Yes to her Son’s Sacrifice on the Cross is feminine, at one and the same time virginal, motherly, bridal, representative. It is a fiat, a “letting it be done” of womanly and handmaidenly humility, which accepts its distance from the male and priestly self-oblation of the God-Man.
This is the only way the New Eve can be the helpmate of the New Adam. He bears the guilt of all mankind before the Father. . .He makes room for the very different contribution of his Mother. What she has to do is painfully let his suffering happen, by her own suffering, letting his suffering happen in her. Mary’s fiat beneath the Cross is the archetypal fiat for all faith in the Church, not least in the Eucharist. . . (28)
In the Holy Spirit, who has filled her from her conception, and who overshadowed her at the Incarnation, Mary on Calvary gives the Son back to the Father, or rather she lets the Son return to the Father. And in that gesture she is the model for the faith of the Church and the individual Christian:
The more seriously Christians take this letting-it-happen-in-me for themselves and their whole life of following Jesus, the more Marian is their baptismal faith. But because of that they are also linked with Mary’s gesture of giving back her Son, from the beginning as far as the Cross, to the Father in the Holy Spirit. The Son has to do all the work that the Father wants him to do, and so into that work he fits Mary and all mankind. (29)
In the Patristic eyes of Balthasar, the Lady who stands by the Cross is indistinguishably both Mary and the Church. When, like Vatican II, he says that Mary is the Church’s “type” or “model,” he means much more than that she is a poetic symbol of the Church. In an important sense, she is the Church, a Realsymbol, as the Germans say, a symbol which contains the very thing it symbolizes. Precisely as the historical person she is, the Blessed Virgin is the Church’s embodiment and personification, the “concrete universal (universale concretum) of the Church as Jesus is of divine sonship.” (30) By her virginal mothering of Christ, she is the first person to live in the bodily, believing relationship to him to which his whole Church is predestined. At the foot of the Cross Mary personifies the Church as described by St Paul: “without spot or wrinkle or any such thing . . . holy and without blemish” (cf. Eph. 5:27). Through the sanctifying grace of her Son, received at the first moment of her conception, she is “the only member of the real pilgrim Church to correspond fully to the ecclesial attribute ‘immaculate.'” (31) Mary is immaculate through the anticipated merits of Christ. At the foot of the Cross she stands as already redeemed through the Cross. In other words, as Adrienne points out, “pre-redemption” makes “co-redemption” possible. It is only by the grace of the Redeemer, given her from her beginning, that she can cooperate with him. “She is not pre-redeemed through co-redemption, but through pre-redemption she becomes Co-redemptrix.” (32) Our Lady does not in any sense redeem herself, nor on Calvary does she merit the grace to be pre-redeemed. No, through her Son’s grace, bestowed in advance, she is empowered to say Yes, in a humble and handmaidenly way, to the Sacrifice from which all grace flows.
It is on Calvary that the bridal aspect of Mary’s faith becomes most evident. “Mary begins by being the Mother, but at the Cross she finishes by becoming Bride, the quintessence of the Church.” (33) She somehow embodies the Church as the cherished spouse for whom Christ gives himself up on the Cross (cf. Eph. 5:25f). Balthasar treats this idea of Mary as “Bride of the Word” (Sponsa Verbi) with immense reverence and delicacy. It is Mary’s spiritual consent to the Sacrifice that is analogically bridal. She is Bride as the representative, the living summation, of humankind for whom Jesus lays down his life. She is Bride as New Eve, helpmate of the New Adam. On the Cross the Head and Bridegroom gives himself up Eucharistically for love of the Church, and the Church in Mary accepts the gift. Jesus does not want the Church’s faith to be given simply post factum. He wants a “simultaneous, instantaneous consent, so that his Sacrifice might be truly total: inseparably, the Sacrifice of the Head and the members.” (34) Even in the utter loneliness and dereliction of Calvary, forsaken by his Father, deserted by all but one of his disciples, Jesus does not want “to act alone, without the accompaniment of his Church.” (35)
Fr. John Saward, former Professor of Theology at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia, and at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, was recently ordained a priest and is exercising his priestly ministry in England.
Notes
(1) Cf. the Adversus Judaeos attributed to Tertullian, 8; PL 2, 656. By the same ancient reckoning, 25th March is also the date of Adam’s creation and Fall. A medieval author enlaced the four anniversaries in three lines of undistinguished Latin verse:
Salva festa dies, quae vulnera nostra coerces,
Angelas est missus, est passus et in cruce
Christus,
Est Adam factus, et eodem lapsus. (Summa Aurea vol. I, Paris, 1862, p. 602)
Even when Easter is late and Good Friday is not strictly a mystery of March, the Annunciation still falls deep within Lent, the season when the Church thinks specially of the Cross.
(2) Des heiligen Ephraem des Syrers Hymnen de Nativitate (Epiphania), tr. E. Beck, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Paris, 1903ff, Scriptores Syri, Louvain, 1959, p. 83.
(3) H. Grierson (ed.), The Poems of John Donne, London, 1933, p. 305. Donne’s “Holy Sonnets” show his appreciation of the unity of the mysteria vitae Jesu: the last line of the first sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next, and so on, from “Annunciation” to “Ascension,” the seven forming a “crown of prayer and praise” (ibid., pp. 289-292). Donne was fascinated by the reconciliation of opposites and all surprising unities. This is why maps attributed to him “as devices for making contraries meet”; John Carey, John Donne, London, 1981, p. 264.
(4) Hans Urs von Balthasar, Der antirömische Affekt: Wie lässt sich das Papsttum in der Gesamtkirche integrieren, Frieburg, 1974, p. 116.
(5) Adrienne von Speyr, Erde und Himmel: Ein Tagebuch, Einsiedeln, 1975-1976, vol.
1, par. 271. On the interrelation of Trinitarian doctrine, Christology, and Mariology, see von Balthasar, Elucidations, English translation, London, 1975, p. 66.
(6) Von Balthasar, Der antirömische Affekt, p. 115.
(7) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère rédempteur, Paris, 1980, p. 54.
(8) Von Balthasar, Elucidations, 72.
(9) Von Balthasar, Der antirömische Affekt, p. 164.
(10) Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, 56, in Sacrosanctum Oecumenicum Vaticanum II: Constitutiones Decreta, Declarationes, Vatican City, 1966.
(11) St. Augustine, Sermo 215, 4; PL 38, 1074; St Leo the Great, In Nativitate Domini 1, 1; Sources chrétiennes, Paris, 1940ff, 22B, p. 68. Cf. Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987, 13, 9; Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, pp. 55f.
(12) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, p. 55f.
(13) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, Die Personen des Spiels, part 2: Die Personen in Christus, Einsiedeln, 1978, p. 273.
(14) For example, Julian of Norwich refers to Our Lord’s “courtayse love”; A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed. E. Colledge and J. Walsh, Toronto, 1978, part 1, p. 211.
(15) Lumen Gentium, 56.
(16) Von Balthasar, First Glance at Adrienne von Speyr, English translation, San Francisco, 1981, p. 51.
(17) Von Speyr, The World of Prayer, San Francisco, 1985, pp. 97-125; von Balthasar, Christlich meditieren, Freiburg, 1984, pp. 53-66.
(18) “Mary’s being towards her Child (Das Hin-Sein Marias zum Kind) is essentially prayer”; von Balthasar, Christlich meditieren, p. 60.
(19) Cf. Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, vol. III: Die Handlung, Einsiedeln, 1980 , pp. 333f; von Speyr, Theologie der Geschlechter, Einsiedeln, 1969, pp. 162-188.
(20) Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 1: Seeing the Form, English translation, Edinburgh, 1982, p. 564.
(21) Von Balthasar, with Joseph Ratzinger, Marie, première Église, French Translation,
Paris, 1981, p. 8.
(22) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, vol. III: Die Handlung, pp. 329f.
(23) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3a 30, 1; cf. C. Feckes (ed.), Die heilsgeschichtliche Stellvertretung der Menschheit durch Maria , Paderborn, 1954, passim.
(24) Von Balthasar, Sponsa Verbi: Skizzen zur Theologie II, Einsiedeln, 1960, 171.
(25) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, Die Personen des Spiels, part 2, pp. 261f.
(26) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, Die Personen des Spiels, part 2, p. 264. Again developing an insight of Adrienne’s, Balthasar acknowledges that there is a certain analogical femininity about the Son’s relation to the Father, his eternal receiving of the divine essence from the Father. Since the eternal, uncreated Son is the archetype of all that is created in time, he is archetypal of both masculine and feminine—of the feminine by his passive receptivity towards the Father, of the masculine by his active gratitude for what he receives. However, when he becomes man, he becomes male, “because, as the One sent by the Father, he represents the Father’s authority within creation. With regard to creation and the Church, he is under no circumstances primarily the receiver but the producer (der Hervorbringende)”; “Die Wiirde der Frau,” Homo Creatus Est: Skizzen zur Theologie V, Einsiedeln, 1986, p. 140. Neither Father nor Son can be anything other than analogically male with regard to the creature. For Adrienne’s insights, see Erde und Himmel 3, par. 2039 and 2255.
(27) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, p. 58.
(28) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, vol. III: Die Handlung, p. 369
(29) Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, vol. III: Die Handlung, pp. 376f.
(30) Von Balthasar, Der antirömische Affekt, p. 164.
(31) Von Balthasar, Der antirömische Affekt, p. 150.
(32) Von Speyr, Maria in der Erlösung, Einsiedeln, 1979, pp. 42f.
(33) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, pp. 62f.
(34) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, p. 13
(35) Von Balthasar, Au Coeur du mystère, p. 54. Jesus’ relation to Mary as a woman has both individual and social aspects; Von Balthasar, Theodramatik, Die Personen des Spiels, part 2: Die Personen in Christus, Einsiedeln, 1978, p. 265. Balthasar does not speak, as Scheeben did, of Our Lady’s “spousal motherhood”; cf. his Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik, Band III, Frieburg, 1933, p. 491f.