“[Mary] is more our mother than the mother of our flesh. Our birth from her is better, for from her is born our holiness, our wisdom, our justice, our sanctification, our redemption.”
Saint Aelrend
She is your mother.
In the final moments before his death, Our Lord said, “woman, here is your son.” Then he turned to his beloved disciple and said, “here is your mother” (John 19: 26-27). Jesus desired to share his mother with his disciple, who stands for every single one of us, his beloved.
Why did the Lord do this? He did not say, “take care of my mother” or “you two are like family now”. No, the Lord spoke into existence a filial relationship between Mary and the disciple. When the Lord speaks, it is not suggestive, or even merely descriptive. It is creative. Generative. Life-giving. What God speaks, is.
So, again, why did the Lord speak this relationship into being? We as Catholics would say that just as God entrusted Mary to be the mother of the Word incarnate, to be the fruitful ground in which He can grow and mature into the man he is destined to be, so now Jesus entrusts Mary again to do the exact same thing, but in us.
Which brings us to our next reason.
“Why should we be sad? Doesn’t the Immaculata, our little mother, know everything that’s going on?”
St. Maximilian Kolbe
She cares for you.
Mary noticed that the couple at Cana had run out of wine. Who notices that kind of thing if not an attentive mother? She then instinctively tells her son, Jesus: “when the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘they have no wine.’” (John 2:3),
Someone once heard me speak of this, and instead of seeing it charity they said, “clearly she just wanted to have a drink!” Fine, I say. You can look at it that way if you want.
But I challenge you to also look at the Annunciation. Mary is given the message of the angel, announcing the birth of the Messiah and her role as the mother of that Messiah. Then what? What does Mary do immediately upon Gabriel’s departure?
“Mary set out and went in haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth… And Mary remained with her about three months.“
(Luke 1: 39,56)
Mary is always, always looking out for strangers and family alike. What she does in the Bible – namely helping everyone around her when she sees they have a need – she does now from heaven. And nothing is too small. If Mary bothered to tell Jesus about a lack of wine at a party, you can bet your life on her bothering to tell Jesus about you and your concerns, especially if you confide in her.
You might well ask why we not just tell Jesus our concerns. Is he not God?
Indeed, he is. And he will indeed come to your assistance if you call on him. What you have to understand is that Mary brings Jesus with her. She brings him, along with the whole host of heaven, to fight for you in an incredibly powerful way. Christ obeys her – we see this even in the scene at Cana – out of filial love toward her. He need not heed her requests, and yet he does.
That is the humility of God.
“This good Mother… would rather dispatch battalions of millions of angels to assist one of her servants than that it should ever be said that a faithful servant of Mary, who trusted in her, had to succumb to the malice, the number, and the vehemence of his enemies.”
St. Louis de Montfort
She gives the devil hell.
You see from the beginning the fate of the woman and her seed: “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)
The devil is real. That should terrify you, because his one goal is for you to be miserable, alone, bitter, and ultimately suicidal, both spiritually and physically. He hates you and will do whatever he can to obliterateyour life.
That scripture verse above is called the protoevangelium, which means “first gospel”. This is the first time God announces the good news of Christ’s coming and victory over the serpent (the devil). But notice that the enmity is not just between the devil and the seed of the woman. It is emphatically stated that the enmity will be between the serpent and the woman.
With that in mind, look back on all the times Jesus refers to Mary not as “mother” but as “woman” (John 2:4; John 19:26). Some people misread this as a devaluing or dismissing title. Don’t look at it like that. Read it as the Church reads it, within the context of the protoevangelium.
“[The divine plan of salvation] includes
Saint John Paul II in “Redemptoris Mater”
everyone, but it reserves a special place for the “woman” who is the Mother of him to whom the
Father has entrusted the work of salvation. As the Second Vatican Council says, ‘she is already
prophetically foreshadowed in that promise made to our first parents after their fall into sin’-
according to the Book of Genesis (cf. 3:15).”
Okay, so Mary is the fulfillment of the “woman” in Genesis 3:15. What does that mean for you?
It means that she, along with her son, will crush the devil in his attempt to ruin your life. She yearns to bring you her son’s saving grace, his divine protection, his ever-new providence. Just as through Eve death and sin came upon us all, so now through Mary, each one of us has special access to that fountain of grace which comes from the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. You can be spared of a life of misery and eternal damnation!
But no one will force you into loving or cherishing her. In the book of John, the beloved disciple had to choose for himself to take Mary into his house. Each of us, when presented with gifts from God, has the choice of receiving or refusing them.
What will you do?