Mary, Bearer of Life

Christopher Cocksworth

Description

Whether through suspicion or ignorance, serious consideration of what Mary can teach us has been lacking in large swathes of the church for some time. Drawing on careful biblical exegesis, church history and ecumenical thinking, this book suggests how a serious understanding of Mary might influence our ethical thought, and considers some of the key theological tensions at the heart of the church’s engagement with Mary.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
• Date de parution: 31 mai 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780334062028
• Langue: English

Extrait

Mary, Bearer of Life
Christopher Cocksworth





© Christopher Cocksworth 2023
Published in 2023 by SCM Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 978-0-334-06200-4
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd




For my mother with thanks




Contents
Preface
1. Introducing Mary: Bearer of Life
‘How can it be?’: Ethics of (impossible) life
2. Chosen
‘Favoured one’: Chosen in grace for life
‘You will conceive in your womb’: Chosen in grace for new life
‘Here am I’: Consenting (by faith) to life
‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb’: Considering life with Mary
Life in its beginning – Case study 1: Abortion
3. Called
‘Born of a woman’: Giving birth to life
‘She treasured all these things in her heart’: Forming the life of the born
‘There he made his home’: Being nurtured in faith, hope and love
Life as learning – Case study 2: Ethics for education
4. Redeemed
‘Where did this man get all this?’: Ministering life
‘Meanwhile standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother and …’: Dying for life
‘Including Mary, the mother of Jesus’: Rising to new life
Life for peace – Case study 3: Nuclear weapons
5. Fulfilled
‘Do whatever he tells you’: Life in the community of life
‘They have no wine’: Serving the kingdom of God
‘The Spirit and the bride say, “Come”’: Looking to the life of the life to come
Life for the earth – Case study 4: Environment
6. Loved
‘The Lord is with you’: Companion on the journey
‘Blessed is she who believed’: Sister in faith
‘Here is your mother’: Mother of the Church
Acknowledgements




Preface
‘Where is she?’ I thought, as I marvelled at the restored Frauenkirche in Dresden. The eleventh-century Romanesque church first built on the site and dedicated to ‘Our Lady’, pulled down in the seventeenth century, rebuilt in a Protestant Baroque style, destroyed through allied bombing in 1945 and rebuilt again after the fall of the Berlin Wall, showed no sign of Mary herself or any other women in its architecture. Mary’s absence in the Frauenkirche symbolized a sense that had been growing in me about my own life and heart, and about the theological and spiritual tradition that had shaped and mothered me, and to which I owed so much. The idea for this book grew steadily from about that point and merged with other theological interests that focused on perhaps the most basic of Christian convictions – that life is a gift of the God of life. I am grateful for a period of sabbatical leave which allowed time for reading, writing and some travelling. Although Covid restrictions in 2021 only allowed for a short time in Germany and a slightly longer time in the South Caucasus, they were profound times in all sorts of ways, not least for the help they gave to my thinking about Mary. I draw upon those experiences in the pages that follow and some of the theological and spiritual characters to whom they introduced me.
My time in Germany was split between Erfurt and Wittenberg, cities that played such a formative part in the Reformation. Intrigued by his views on Mary, I was on the trail of Martin Luther. Part of me felt like part of him: drawn to Mary in affection on the one hand, yet conscious of how misplaced attention to Mary can disrupt the clarity of the gospel on the other. I visited the Mariendom in Erfurt, the cathedral dedicated to Mary that Luther would have known well in his university days and that had a particular association with a charming but exotic medieval mythology about Mary meeting a unicorn. I walked through the streets of the city where Luther made sense of his terrifying thunderstorm experience in nearby Stotternheim when he had called out to St Anne, Mary’s mother, to save him. I prayed in the monastery where he later implored Mary to turn away Christ’s wrath. And so I came to taste something of the spiritual air that Luther breathed and found so stale. All that was reinforced in Wittenberg where Luther was sent to oversee a group of Augustinian monasteries and to teach in the newly founded university. I was fascinated by the position of the bronze relief of Mary being crowned Queen of Heaven right next to the door of the Elector of Saxony’s Schlosskirche where Luther is said to have nailed his 95 Theses. I was intrigued that the church where Luther had served as a parish priest before the Reformation, and as parish pastor during it, was called the Marienkirche. I could see that the stone relief of the crowned Mary in heaven holding the infant Christ above the west door of the Marienkirche belonged to a religious culture that seemed to place Mary somewhere between the worshippers and her son, and risked – entirely against Mary’s own desires – deflecting them from him.
There is certainly no such risk in the Marienkirche now, dominated as it is by the magnificent Cranach altar piece. Lucas Cranach, a Reformation artist, paints a stark and contemporary crucifixion. Luther is preaching from a short biblical text and pointing to the cross while on the other side of the picture the people of Wittenberg look on and listen. Its simplicity is stark and its combination of cross, Bible, preached word and activated faith is a brilliant précis of Reformation theology. Mary, so familiar in traditional depictions of the crucifixion before the Reformation, is nowhere to be seen. Above the crucifixion we see the three sacraments that Luther recognized: Lord’s Supper, Baptism and Reconciliation. Luther sits at the table of the Lord with the other disciples and, fittingly, is given the chalice that he had demanded be restored to the people. Cranach’s altar piece in Weimar, where the political centre of the Reformation was forced to retreat after the Schmalkaldic war in the mid-sixteenth century, has an even more dramatic version of the crucifixion. As Jesus dies on the cross for the sins of the world, we see him also to the side of the cross battling with the devil and turning the spear which had stricken him into a weapon that defeats evil once and for all. On the other side of the cross stands John the Baptist gesturing to Cranach and Luther, pointing them to the cross. Blood spurts from the pierced side of Jesus not, as in previous images, into a cup held safely in the hands of Mary, but on to Cranach’s head. Behind the cross, Adam dances free from the tomb. Jesus dies for all and for me. On the wings of the altar piece the deposed Elector of Saxony, John Frederik, who had staked his kingdom on the Reformation, prays with his wife. Their godly children do the same on the other side of the cross. Mary’s absence from the altar piece struck a particular note of irony in me because many years before, when John Frederik was a young man and the reform of the Church was in its early days, Luther had written his sermon on Mary’s Magnificat for him, commending Mary not only as mother of the Lord but as a paradigm of evangelical faith: a model for reformed Christians who placed their faith solely in the grace of God in Christ. It was as if one of the costs of the theological, spiritual, social and political convulsions of the Reformation was paid by Mary. Despite the intentions of the mainline reformers, Mary had been ejected from the life of the Church.
Wittenberg’s Marienkirche is known as the Mother Church of the Reformation. The only appearance Mary makes in the building is the one I mentioned earlier on the outside of the west wall above a door which is no longer used. Luther may have said that Mary is mother to us all but there seemed to be no positive part she could play in the reform of the Church of her son, except to remain out of sight and not to get in the way. But Mary will not go away, not even in historic Wittenberg, carefully preserved to tell the Reformation’s story. I saw her making a tentative, temporary but determined reappearance in three places. The castle of the Thuringian rulers who had supported Luther now housed an exhibition of modern Christian art. From Marc Chagall’s Mother and Child crucifixion, to Käthe Kollwitz’s Mary and Elizabeth , to the more contemporary Katerina Belinka’s striking depiction of a pregnant woman, Mary was very present. Farther down the main street, between the great Schlosskirche and Marienkirche, three well-produced posters brightened some hoardings which covered up some building work. Glauben , Hoffnung , Liebe – Faith, Hope and Love – they proclaimed, each with a biblical text to define them. Mary’s Magnificat had been chosen for love. More off the beaten track but still in the historic part of the city, a huge mural adorned a bare wall. Mary, bearing her sacred heart, was texting on an iPhone. Wittenberg, the heart of the rediscovery of the overwhelming goodness and unfathomable grace of God, to which the whole Church – and I,