The Most High

The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 22) C-2

Entrance Antiphon Cf. Ps 45 (44):10 At your right stands the queen in robes of gold, finely arrayed.

Collect O God, who made the Mother of your Son to be our Mother and our Queen, graciously grant that, sustained by her intercession, we may attain in the heavenly Kingdom the glory promised to your children. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

(August 22) The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Pius XII established this feast in 1954. But Mary’s queenship has roots in Scripture. At the Annunciation, Gabriel announced that Mary’s Son would receive the throne of David and rule forever. At the Visitation, Elizabeth calls Mary “mother of my Lord.” As in all the mysteries of Mary’s life, Mary is closely associated with Jesus: Her queenship is a share in Jesus’ kingship. We can also recall that in the Old Testament the mother of the king has great influence in court. In the fourth century St. Ephrem called Mary “Lady” and “Queen” and Church fathers and doctors continued to use the title. Hymns of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries address Mary as queen: “Hail, Holy Queen,” “Hail, Queen of Heaven,” “Queen of Heaven.” The Dominican rosary and the Franciscan crown as well as numerous invocations in Mary’s litany celebrate her queenship. The feast is a logical follow-up to the Assumption and is now celebrated on the octave day of that feast. In his encyclical To the Queen of Heaven, Pius XII points out that Mary deserves the title because she is Mother of God, because she is closely associated as the New Eve with Jesus’ redemptive work, because of her pre-eminent perfection and because of her intercessory power.

“Let the entire body of the faithful pour forth persevering prayer to the Mother of God and Mother of men. Let them implore that she who aided the beginnings of the Church by her prayers may now, exalted as she is in heaven above all the saints and angels, intercede with her Son in the fellowship of all the saints. May she do so until all the peoples of the human family, whether they are honoured with the name of Christian or whether they still do not know their Saviour, are happily gathered together in peace and harmony into the one People of God, for the glory of the Most Holy and Undivided Trinity” (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 69).

Scripture today: Isaiah 9:1-6; Psalm 112; Luke 1:26-38

In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. The angel went to her and said, ‘Hail, you who are full of grace! The Lord is with you.’ Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be. But the angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, you have found favour with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the House of Jacob for ever; his kingdom will never end.’ ‘How will this be,’ Mary asked the angel, ‘since I am a virgin?’ The angel answered, ‘The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. Even Elizabeth your relative is going to have a child in her old age, and she who was said to be unable to conceive is in her sixth month. For nothing is impossible for God.’ ‘I am the Lord’s servant,’ Mary answered. ‘Let it be to me according to your word.’ Then the angel left her. (Luke 1:26-38)

The Most High There are many things which recur so constantly in the life of man that they may be thought of as characteristically human. A man speaks – animals do not. He laughs – animals do not. He plans for the future, selecting among goals and not merely reacting to instinct – animals do not so plan. He is aware of external things precisely as existing in their own right – animals are not aware of this. He makes judgments about the nature of things. And so on. The natural powers of animals can be remarkable, and elements of their awareness and instinct approach man’s intelligence and power of choice, but they do not meet nor equal it. Well, one of the recurrent and most widespread features of human life and civilization is the presence of religion, which is to say the recognition of and recourse to higher unseen powers. These higher powers are generally represented in visible objects which can easily come to be regarded as the powers themselves. Thus do we have idol-worship. That aside, man turns to higher powers and understands there to be an invisible world peopled by them. The individual (and his society) is aware of his own vulnerability and very limited power, and he has the sense that there are powers above that have influence over the course of the world. So he turns to those powers and endeavours to influence them in his own favour by prayers, sacrifices and by other means. The point here is that God or the gods are perceived as having power, and by judicious behaviour man can obtain the advantage of this higher power. The point here is that power is perceived as the foremost attribute of the deity. God is powerful, while man is dependent and vulnerable. This is man’s instinct, and it is a source of religion. God is the mighty One, and therefore he is not to be offended. If one is pleasing in his sight by keeping his rules, his power will be a protection and one’s salvation. One question immediately springing from this common perception of the deity is this: how powerful is the deity in question? To what degree is he powerful? – because it would seem that all sorts of factors circumscribe his power, such as the existence of other powers. The next question is, is the deity in question good and moral, or is he indifferent to morality? Many of the gods of the myths were not particularly moral and so could not be depended on.

On all these counts, revealed religion displays a special and even unique character. There is but one God to begin with, and all is in his hands. Indeed, he is not merely the arranger of the world, the organizer of its structure. He is its creator in a radical and total sense. At one point in Cardinal Newman’s novel Callista, a pagan states that it is the Christians who brought in the idea of a “Creator”. The God of revealed religion creates and sustains the entire arena of reality, visible and invisible, from absolutely nothing. All things, visible and invisible, are sustained constantly by him from nothing. Their entire existence is dependent on his constant wish. This is a remarkable doctrine, though attainable by human reason. So there is one God and he is the Creator of all. But there is this – and it brings us back to the matter of power, the feature of the deity which especially interests vulnerable man. God is not only powerful, but almighty. He is all-powerful, infinitely powerful, powerful in a sense beyond challenge by any rival. This, then, is the foremost feature of the God of revelation, that he is almighty. Nothing is impossible to God. God has revealed that he can do anything – but this too has a corollary. For while the gods of the myths and religions of man were not especially rational or moral, the true God is so. He is holy and wise, even if it is beyond man to understand his rational and holy ways. Almighty God is good and holy. Nothing is impossible to him, provided it accords with his holiness, his love and his wisdom. That corollary having been stated, man has every reason in the world to turn to the true God with confidence, appealing for an exercise of his unlimited power, and this is because he is all-merciful. His love shows itself as mercy before human need. His power which has no limit shows itself in mercy. Nothing is impossible for God, and this is wonderfully good news for broken and vulnerable man, enmeshed in his misery of sin and death. This is the Good News of revealed religion and especially of Jesus Christ, that almighty God is rich in mercy. To believe this is an ongoing test of faith, but this test must be met with the aid of grace. We will tend not to believe this and to fail in faith. God wants us to believe the Good News of Jesus Christ that God is almighty, that his power is shown in his mercy, and that he is our loving Father.

All this brings us to our Gospel passage for today (Luke 1: 26-38), in which the Angel says to Mary that nothing is impossible to God. Stupendous things have been done by God for us and for our salvation, not least his election of the humble virgin for so great and high a dignity. She was predestined from all eternity to be the mother of the incarnate Son of God, the King of kings and Lord of lords. She has thus been made by him to be Queen of heaven and earth. She is our mother and our Queen by Christ’s gift. Today as we think of the Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary, let us think of how great God is, how his power and mercy are without limit, and how in union with Mary our sister, mother and queen, we may approach the throne of grace and ask that we be transformed into the likeness of her divine Son our Saviour.

(E. J. Tyler)

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