Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Kecharitomene – “Full of Grace”
“Mary is definitively introduced into the mystery of Christ through this event: the Annunciation by the angel. This takes place at Nazareth, within the concrete circumstances of the history of Israel, the people which first received God’s promises. The divine messenger says to the Virgin: ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you.’[1] Mary ‘was greatly troubled at the saying, and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be’:[2] what could those extraordinary words mean, and in particular the expression ‘full of grace’” (kecharitoméne).[3]
Sensing her perplexity, the Angel came to her and said: “Do not be afraid… Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High”[4] To this, Mary replied, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word.”[5] [6]
How many persons have greeted Mary in prayer with these joyful words, pronounced for the first time at Nazareth? In how many languages, cultures, and writings of the great human family of the Church have they been pronounced?
Throughout her conversation with the angel, Mary displayed admirable virtues: Simplicity, Prudence, Wisdom. When Gabriel had finished speaking, Mary was confronted by the supreme test of her faith regarding obedience and humility. Would she assent to the will of the Triune God, who wished to save humanity with Mary to become the Mother of God in His human nature? Would she satisfy the yearnings of mankind for salvation, the hope of the angels for the redemption of man? Her answer to Gabriel was: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord! Be it done to me according to thy word.”[7] Her faith in the angel’s revelation was complete and unreserved. Her consent to be the Mother of God was not passive but active, unforced, absolutely free, and her humility was deep, and her obedience wholehearted. At that moment, the Incarnation took place, and the angel departed.
Mary’s fiat expresses her humility; it expresses her free acceptance of the will of God for her role within the divine plan. However, Protestant exegetes are wary of delving further into the discernment of Mary’s words—she, a mere creature, who possessed the potential to call God’s redemption into existence by her consent to obey God’s will. For them, the fiat becomes primarily a literary figure which concludes a passage. The Protestant, owing to a distrust of the idea that this ordinary creature was elevated in being and acted by grace, approaches with great caution the possibility of Mary’s participating intimately in redemption and salvation through her freely willed but divinely aided consent.
The Protestant Reformers
Max Thurian (1921-1996) was a Reformed/Calvinist theologian and author, and the sub-prior of the Taizé Ecumenical monastic community in France. During the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI invited him to participate in the liturgical reforms of the Catholic Church. On May 12, 1988, Thurian became a Roman Catholic and he was ordained a priest.
His book, Mary: Mother of All Christians[8] was written as an ecumenical Marian study, primarily a biblical exegesis of the New Testament passages, and Old Testament types on Mary with chapter titles such as Daughter of Zion, Full of Grace, Poor Virgin, Dwelling of God, Handmaid in the Faith, Mother of the Lord, etc.
“In regard to the Marian doctrine of the Reformers, we have already seen how unanimous they are in all that concerns Mary’s holiness and perpetual virginity. Whatever the theological position which we may hold today in regard to the Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary, it is right to know perhaps to our great surprise that these two Catholic dogmas were accepted by certain Reformers, not of course in their present form but certainly in the form that was current in their day.”[9]
Martin Luther, the German founder of the Lutherans, certainly believed in the sinlessness of the Virgin Mary, and some argue that he had accepted the Immaculate Conception as well:
“…above all it is necessary for us to see what original sin is in order to be able to understand how the holy Virgin Mary was released from it…as to the conception of the Virgin Mary whose body was procreated in the fashion of other children, until the soul was infused, it was not necessary that she should be conceived as was Christ; for she was able to be brought forth under the law of original sin, up to the time when her soul was bestowed. But, in that which concerns the other conception [the passive conception], that is to say the infusing of her soul, one believes with devotion and holiness that she was brought forth without original sin, in such a way that at the moment of her soul being infused she was also similarly purified from original sin, and at the first instant in which she began to live she was without sin, adorned with the gifts of God.”[10]
Similar references in various works of Luther have supported that his essay on Mary is not merely something that he said once in passing and gave no further thought, but that he persevered with his concept of Mary:
“There can be no doubt that the Virgin Mary is in heaven. How it happened we do not know. And since the Holy Spirit has told us nothing about it, we can make of it no article of faith…It is enough to know that she lives in Christ.” [11]
“The veneration of Mary is inscribed in the very depths of the human heart.”[12] .
“[She is the] highest woman and the noblest gem in Christianity after Christ…She is nobility, wisdom, and holiness personified. We can never honor her enough. Still honor and praise must be given to her in such a way as to injure neither Christ nor the Scriptures.” [13]
“No woman is like you. You are more than Eve or Sarah, blessed above all nobility, wisdom, and sanctity.”[14]
“One should honor Mary as she herself wished and as she expressed it in the Magnificat. She praised God for his deeds. How then can we praise her? The true honor of Mary is the honor of God, the praise of God’s grace…Mary is nothing for the sake of herself, but for the sake of Christ…Mary does not wish that we come to her, but through her to God.” [15]
Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss Protestant Reformer, does not detect, (as do various Calvinist arguments) within the assertion of Mary’s perfect sanctity, any violation of Christ’s humanity:
“He who was about to remove our sins but not to make all men holy, must be himself holy. Hence God sanctified his mother: for it was fitting that such a holy Son should have a likewise holy mother….”; “I have never thought, still less taught, or declared publicly, anything concerning the subject of the ever Virgin Mary, Mother of our salvation, which could be considered dishonorable, impious, unworthy, or evil…I hope this is sufficient to have made plain to pious and simple Christians my clear conviction on the matter of the Mother of God: I believe with all my heart according to the word of holy gospel that this pure virgin bore for us the Son of God and that she remained, in the birth and after it, a pure and unsullied virgin, for eternity.”[16]
Heinrich Bullinger (1504-1575), who represents the second generation of the Reformation and a stabilization of Reformed doctrine, and who was Thomas Cranmer’s[17] brother-in-law and Zwingli’s successor, wrote:
“What pre-eminence in the eyes of God the Virgin Mary had on account of her piety, her faith, her purity, her saintliness and all her virtues, so that she can hardly be compared with any of the other saints, but should by rights be rather elevated above all of them…”; “…And if she who was wholly pure from her birth did not disdain to be purified, that is to say to receive the blessing of purification, is this not all the more reason why those who fall under the yoke of the law by reason of their real impurity should observe the same?”; “…we believe, that the pure and immaculate embodiment of the Mother of God, the Virgin Mary, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, that is to say her saintly body, was carried up into heaven by the angels…”[18] (The Assumption)
Below, a passage from French Reformed pastor Charles Drelincourt (1595-1669), who well represents the Reformed tradition of the 17th century:
“We do not simply believe that God has favored the holy and blessed Virgin more than all the Patriarchs and the Prophets, but also that He has exalted her above all Seraphim. The angels can only qualify as servants of the Son of God, the creatures and workmanship of his hands; but the holy Virgin is not only the servant and the creature but also the Mother of this great and living God.”[19]
Max Thurian concludes:
“The Lutheran and Reformed traditions which have retained the creedal beliefs in Christ, true God and true Man, born ‘of the Virgin Mary, blessed mother of God, humble handmaid of the Lord, our example of faith, obedience and saintliness’ have not believed that the doctrines of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (though admitted in a certain sense by Luther) or the ‘corporeal Assumption’ of Mary (though admitted by the Reformer, Bullinger) must be held in the same fashion….
“[On the biblical material:] There is even a danger in insisting on a state of sinfulness for Mary, because sanctity then is in danger of appearing as a kind of contradiction of true humanity, and belief in Christ’s humanity is altogether compromised since there can be no doubt that He did not know sin in Himself….As far as [Mary] is concerned, according to the Gospel, she is the expression of grace in its fullness and of God’s infallible and predestined choice which causes His earthly mother to become the symbol of the Church’s motherhood. There is nothing further in regard to Mary with which revelation is in the least concerned; we can assert nothing other than this, for this is the most as well as the least that we can state to those who on the one hand would wish to speak of Mary as if she were sinful or on the other as separated from our condition as human creatures. We do not see how either the one or the other can be legitimately proved from the Gospel. Mary, full of grace, Daughter of Zion, the Mother of God Incarnate, the symbol of Mother Church is holy because in her the Gospel sees the living sign of a unique and pre-destined choice of the Lord, the response of faith from a perfectly human creature, but one who was also totally obedient.”[20]
What follows is a summary in Luther’s own words of the reformer’s final and unrevoked position on Marian theology:
[1] Luke 1:28.
[2] Ibid. 1:29.
[3] Mother of the Redeemer…Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Mater, March 25, 1987.
[4] Luke 1:30-32.
[5] Ibid. 1:38.
[6] John Paul II, Homily, December 8, 1980.
[7] Ibid.1:38.
[8] The quotes from the Protestant Reformers come from this book. Thurian’s sources are listed as Tappolet’s Das Marianlob der Reformatoren (1962), and R. Stadler’s “The Holy Virgin in the Reformers” in Choisir (13 May 1962), pages 17-20; along with Martin Luther’s Works (Weimar edition); Huldrych Zwingli’s Collected Works (Berlin); etc.
[9] Max Thurian, Mary: Mother of All Christians, (New York: B. Herder) 1963, page 197.
[10] Sermon on the Day of the Conception of Mary, Mother of God, 1527; cited in Thurian, page 197
[11] Sermon of August 15, 1522, the last time Martin Luther preached on the Feast of the Assumption.
[12] Sermon, September 1, 1522.
[13] Sermon, Christmas, 1531.
[14] Sermon, Feast of the Visitation, 1537.
[15] Explanation of the Magnificat, 1521.
[16] Annotationes in Evangelium Lucae, and sermon on “Mary, ever virgin, Mother of God” in 1524, cited in Thurian, page 23, 76.
[17] Thomas Cranmer (1489 – 1556) was an anti-Catholic leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which was one of the causes of the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See. Along with Thomas Cromwell, he supported the principle of Royal Supremacy, in which the king was considered sovereign over the Church within his realm.
[18] Cited in Thurian, page 89, 197, 198.
[19] Cited in Thurian, page 89.
[20] Mary, Mother of All Christians, page 204 [endnote], and page 24, 25, from the chapter “Full of Grace”.