Mary was chosen by God to bring Jesus into the human world; by choice of God and her Yes.

Mary was chosen by God to bring Jesus into the human world; by choice of God and her Yes.

Mary is the Mother of God not the mother of Jesus as some declare. 

Her birth was for no other reason than to be the Mother of God.  “What the Catholic faith believes about Mary is based on what it believes about Christ, and what it teaches about Mary illumines in turn its faith in Christ.  (CCC 487).

“God sent forth his Son,” but to prepare a body for him, he wanted the free cooperation of a creature.  For this, from all eternity God chose for the mother of his Son a daughter of Israel, a young Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee. “a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.”  (CCC 488).

The Father of mercies willed that the Incarnation should be preceded by assent on the part of the predestined mother, so that just as a woman had a share in the coming of death, so also should a woman contribute to the coming of life.  (Following CCC 488).  

This birth of a daughter to Sts Joachim and Anne, was not so common that history has identified this couple as bringing a future Mother of God into the world and she was born without Original Sin.  When God chose her for this holy and glorious task he removed any sign of sin from her soul.  Of course the only requirement was that she would say Yes!

In the Catechism we read that the mission of the Holy Spirit is always conjoined and ordered to that of the Son.  The Holy Spirit, “the Lord, the giver of Life,” is sent to sanctify the womb of the Virgin Mary and divinely fecundate it, (impregnate) causing her to conceive the eternal Son of the Father in  humanity drawn from her own.  (CCC 485).

“Incarnation” is more than a word to exemplify the minds of theologians; it is the one plan of God to bring the Hypostatic Union into reality that could happen only once.  To cancel the heresy of denying the humanity of Jesus, we must adhere to the fact that the egg in Mary’s womb that was the Son of God assumed humanity with the Incarnation.  The thought that this egg was just human in essence that heresy would have some truth.  In that thought, many would have the idea that Mary was the Mother of Jesus alone.  Therefore the two natures in one body would have no sustenance.  The question would then arise with what nature did Jesus perform miracles and what was his human nature doing in the meantime?  

Because “human nature was assumed, not absorbed,” in the mysterious union of the Incarnation, the Church was led over the course of centuries to confess the full reality of Christ’s human soul, with its operations of intellect and will, and of his human body.  In parallel fashion, she had to recall on each occasion that Christ’s human nature belongs, as his own, to the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it.  Everything that Christ is and does in this nature derives from “one of the Trinity.”  The Son of God therefore communicates to his humanity his own personal mode of existence in the Trinity.  In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity.  (CCC470). 

Ralph B. Hathaway