In the early Christian centuries there were fierce arguments about who exactly Jesus is. The argument mattered to people because they were anxious not to blaspheme God or to underestimate the significance of the Salvation event. It mattered that Jesus was fully God and fully human because affirming that affirmed that human beings mattered to God. What is not assumed, the dictum went, is not healed. The title “Theotokos” or “God bearer”, affirmed at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, guaranteed that when we speak about her son we are affirming that he is Divine (because she is Mother of God) and that he is human (because she is the Mother of God). We are affirming the most intimate union between God and man: that He took our humanity in order that we might be partakers of his Divine nature.
So, of course, the title God Bearer or Mother of God is about us too. If the son of Mary was not God, what use would he have been in bringing us to God? If he were not man, what on earth had he to do with us? This title above all the titles of Mary is about the destiny of humanity. It is THE title which affirms all that the Church wants to say about the person of Jesus who is God made man and therefore it is THE theological statement which affirms our destiny as human become divine. The title adds not one little jot to our knowledge of Mary but it tells us all you ever needed to know about Jesus and about the dignity of humanity. Eastern Christians still speak of the Deification of human persons as our ultimate end: union with God.
It is also a title about our Vocation as individual Christians who, like Mary, are called to bear God to a world which is hungry for his love and his truth.
© Peter Bolton
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