MARY - Woman and Mother

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Dear Parish Faithful,

Here are a couple of insightful paragraphs on the role of the Virgin Mary in the divine oikonomia. These passages also offer good insight into the ever-perplexing genealogy found in St. Matthew's Gospel, and the undeniably major role assumed by women in that genealogy:

"Mary is presented as the final and perfect instrument in God's providential history. She brings to fruition a long history of courageous women and mothers, as she gives birth to the Messianic son of David, son of Abraham (Matt. 1:1). Matthew indicates that Israel's sacred history has been marked, from its very beginning, by women open to God's action in their lives, cost them what it may. The presence of the feminine through the religious history of Israel, incarnated in the women mentioned explicitly by Matthew, and culminated in Mary of Nazareth, shows that, despite all the judgments of society, religion and culture, they were the ones who were open to the initiative of God working in them. Thus, one of them became the mother of the Messiah."

"The earliest Church immediately saw Mary as a woman and a mother. These themes are repeated in Matthew, but now we see Mary understood and presented as the perfection of all the women who have played a decisive role in the gradual unfolding of God's salvation history to become the mother of Jesus Christ. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba are not only women of great significance in critical moments of God's unfolding plan for his people. There is more to their role: they are included in the genealogy, written in a way which indicated that it is God-directed, because of their husbands and the sons they bore to them. They are both women and mothers."

MARY - Woman and Mother, by Francis J. Moloney