Lectio: Mary | Episode 1 | Augustine Institute

[Music] so [Music] welcome everyone to this lectio bible study on our lady on mary discovering the mother of jesus in the old and new testaments i'm really excited to be here with you today and to share some of the information that i've learned as i've been working through the old and new testament studying about the mother of christ especially drawing on a book of mine that i recently published called jesus and the jewish roots of mary unveiling the mother of the messiah some of you may be familiar with my earlier book jesus and the jewish roots of the eucharist and the eucharist lex leo bible study that was based on that book so this is kind of a sequel to that series and i'm going to be approaching mary in this bible study in a very similar way to the way we looked at the eucharist in sacred scripture there are lots of different ways to study mary in the bible one thing you could do is look at each passage in the new testament kind of take it verse by verse and walk through those interpreting them in their context but in this lecture bible study what i want to do is go back to the old testament and begin there and really not just focus on mary and the new testament but ask ourselves how is mary prefigured in the old testament and then revealed in the new testament and i think that once you start to look at mary through this lens not just the new testament but the whole bible many of our catholic beliefs about mary really come alive and we can understand how they're actually rooted in sacred scripture at least that's been helpful for me because when i first started studying the bible as a teenager and having to answer questions about the catholic faith i didn't have a lot of problems with the eucharist right so you know if someone asks you about the eucharist you can maybe open to john chapter six or to the accounts of the last supper where jesus says this is my body this is my blood well when it comes to mary when it comes to our lady it's a little different right so if you go into the scriptures say looking for the doctrine of the immaculate conception are you going to find a passage where it says mary was immaculately conceived no right in fact what you will find is statements like in romans chapter 3 verse 23 where paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god and so you have to ask wait how do we reconcile mary's immaculate conception and her sinlessness with paul's statements in romans if you look for for example our beliefs about mary's bodily assumption at the end of her life you're not going to find an account of the bodily assumption there's a brief reference to a woman clothed with the sun in heaven we're going to look at that a lot more closely later in revelation chapter 12 but there's no narrative of mary's assumption into heaven in the new testament and you can just go on and on mother of god right that's our title for mary she's never explicitly called mother of god in the new testament so why do we call her that as catholics and then of course my favorite which is mary's perpetual virginity right um many of us will hear in the lectionary if you go to mass regularly that the account of the brothers and sisters of jesus and the gospel and sometimes catholics walk away scratching their heads saying wait i thought mary was ever virgin we say that at every mass who are these brothers and sisters of jesus so what i want to try to show you today is that if we look at mary in the new testament through the lens of ancient jewish scriptures through the old testament and also through some ancient jewish traditions what you're going to see is that all of those beliefs about mary that we as catholics hold that at first glance look unbiblical if you just look at the new testament when you put them in light of the old testament they become very clear and very scriptural and also very beautiful and very profound so that's what we're going to be doing over the course of these seven sessions on mary in scripture so without any further ado i'm going to begin by laying out three basic principles for studying mary in the bible that we'll be utilizing throughout our entire bible study and these are in the notes but i just want to highlight them for you so number one if you want to study mary in scripture from a catholic perspective you need to understand that everything we believe about jesus and mary goes together right christology has to do with what we believe about christ about jesus and mariology has to do with what we believe about mary and here i would cite a passage from the catechism of the catholic church right a wonderful resource the official compendium but the church's teaching has a beautiful section on mary and in paragraph 487 there's a very important line that i want to highlight for you that will be kind of the guiding light of our study and it says this quote what the catholic faith believes about mary is based on what it believes about christ and what it teaches about mary illumines in turn it's faith in christ very important all right so everything we as catholics we believe about mary ultimately is rooted in and founded on what we believe about jesus himself so at the beginning of each session one of the things i'm going to do is i'm going to start with jesus and i'm going to show you how if we understand who jesus is then we can understand who mary is and why we believe what we do about her as catholics that's the first principle a second principle is what's called typology it's the study of the old and new testaments in light of one another looking at pre-figurations in the old testament of realities and events that come to fulfillment in the new testament looking at the old and light of the new and the new in light of the old and cardinal joseph ratzinger back in the 70s and 80s who went on to become pope benedict xvi had this to say about understanding mary in the new testament in light of typology and i'm quoting him here he says quote the image of mary in the new testament is woven entirely out of old testament threads very interesting the image of mary in the new testament is woven entirely out of old testament threads so if you want to think about the portrait of mary and the new testament as a kind of a tapestry all of the threads in that portrait all the threads in that tapestry are straight from the old testament so if we don't pay attention in the old testament if we don't pay attention to the jewish background we're not going to really see the picture of mary in the new testament clearly all right and then third and finally and this one's going to be fun all of our beliefs about mary as catholics are not new you know sometimes non-catholics will say well didn't the pope make up the doctrine of the immaculate conception in the 1800s and didn't he make up the doctrine of the assumption in 1950 when he defined it as a dogma you know aren't these just novelties and as you'll see over the course of our bible study nothing could be further than from the truth all of our beliefs about mary as catholics are not just new they are old very old in fact they go back to the earliest days of the church not just in the new testament but from the writings of the early church fathers in the second and third and fourth centuries a.d so in each session what i'll be doing is taking you through we'll start in the old testament we'll go through the new testament and then we'll come to the church fathers ancient christians and all the way up to today all right so it'll be a kind of whirlwind tour of doctrines about mary and their rootedness in sacred scripture okay so those are our principles for the study let's let's dive right in and do like i said we're going to do by beginning with jesus beginning with jesus now if you look at the new testament uh there are lots of titles for jesus in the new testament right he is the anointed one the messiah he is the son of god he is the lord he's the king of the jews he's the king of israel but one of the titles for jesus that's really essential for understanding who mary is is his identity as the new adam the new adam the man who comes to undo the effects of adam's sin and the effects of the fall so for example in romans chapter 5 verse 19 paul says this for as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners so by one man's obedience many will be made righteous romans 5 19 or again in first corinthians 15 45 thus it is written the first man adam became a living soul the last adam became a life-giving spirit so both those quotes from paul show that christ is a new adam he doesn't come into the world just to forgive our sins he doesn't come into the world just to save us from hell he comes into the world to undo the effects of the fall he comes in the world to inaugurate a new creation as a new adam and so any first century jew hearing that about christ that he was the new adam would have had a question and it's this if jesus is the new adam well then who is the new eve right because in the old testament adam and eve they don't operate in isolation they work together and so the question there leads us to an answer that points to mary as i want to show you if we look at the old and new together you'll see that mary is revealed in scripture as the new eve and that this has enormous implications for what we understand about her immaculate conception and her sinlessness okay so let's go back to uh the old testament and begin there with this picture of mary if we want to look for mary as the new eve in scripture we've got to go back to genesis chapter one through three the story of the first woman in eden eve now we could do an entire lectio series just on genesis one to three so i'm just gonna have to restrain myself here and make three basic points about eve and the book of genesis that are important for understanding mary and how she points forward to mary number one if you read through genesis carefully you're gonna notice something interesting eve is only called eve once in those first three chapters but over 10 times she is called woman that's the name of choice for the first woman for eve in the old testament woman woman woman over and over and over again that's the first point eve her primary reference is the word woman second whenever adam and eve fall whenever they commit the first sin they they do so together adam and eve fall together they cooperate in eating the fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge and bringing sin and death into the world this is really important because sometimes children's bibles will have pictures of the fall and they'll sometimes separate adam and eve as it's like you know adam's out working in the garden while eve's over here getting tempted and she's the one to eat the fruit but in the book of genesis itself it says that when eve took the fruit she gave some to her husband who was with her right so they fall together they cooperate in bringing sin and death into the world and then the third and final aspect from genesis 3 that's probably the most important is that after the fall god pronounces this mysterious prophecy when he punishes the serpent right who led them to sin and i've got this in your notes it's from genesis chapter 3 verse 15. it's a very famous passage after the fall this is what god says to the serpent quote the lord said to the serpent i will put enmity between you and the woman between your seed and her seed he shall strike your head and you shall strike his heel that's genesis chapter 3 verse 15. now what is the meaning of these mysterious words right it is a kind of cryptic statement who is god talking about here well in the notes i've tried to break this down for you if you look at that prophecy very carefully they're basically four characters in the prophecy number one the serpent who is at war with this mysterious person the woman second the serpent's seed or offspring who is at war with the woman's sea or offspring and then finally this battle between the woman's seed and the serpent's seed which notice it says that the serpent strikes at the heel of the woman's sea and that but that the woman's seed strikes or crushes the serpent's head now why is that mysterious well i'm from south louisiana and we have lots of snakes and i used to love snakes when i was a kid i used to play with snakes not the poisonous ones and but one of the things you learn if you grow up in a place with lots of snakes is that if you want to kill a snake you have to go for the head right and it's very effective to crush the head however it's also very dangerous to try to do it by stepping on the head which is what the passage here is describing because what will often happen is if you try to step on the snake's head it will strike your heel and if it's a poisonous snake you might die right so the weird thing about this prophecy is that it describes a battle between the woman the serpent the woman's seed and the serpent seed and in which it looks like both the serpent and the woman's seed lose the battle because the serpent's head is crushed it dies and if the woman's seed is struck what happens he dies too right so this is a very mysterious prophecy what does it mean well lots of interpretations running around out there some secular scholars will say well this is just an etiology a story of origins it's just kind of an ancient story meant to explain why women don't like snakes you know like which is true by the way because i remember one time when i was a kid i caught up about a five foot king snake outside in our backyard and i brought it in to my mother to show her i was like look what i caught and of course she screamed at the top of her lungs i said get that out of here you know and i said well mom i want to keep it as a pet and it was interesting you know what her reason was for not letting me keep it as a pet this is true she said you cannot keep a snake as a pet because the devil appeared under the form of a snake that was her argument and my immediate response was well that's not all the other snakes fault you can't blame that on them that's not fair right of course she won the day and i didn't get to keep the snake but the point is most people know that when it comes to snakes and human beings there's some kind of mysterious tension there right we have a fear of snakes most people do have a fear of snakes and so some people say well this is just an etiology it's just a kind of story of how humans and snakes don't get along but that was never how the text was interpreted by ancient jews or by ancient christians as i show in the book on the jewish roots of mary if you go back and look at ancient jewish tradition they interpreted this as a prophecy of the messiah that when the messiah would come one of the things he would do would be to conquer evil would be to conquer the devil who appeared under the form of a serpent right and then what happens then is that in ancient christianity they recognize that if the seed of the woman is the messiah then who is the mother of the messiah well it would be mary right so if you turn then to the new testament what you'll see is with that background from genesis in mind there are certain passages about mary and the new testament that kind of come alive in a new light and reveal that she isn't just the mother of jesus or even just the mother of the messiah but that if you read these new testament passages in light of the old testament and in light of these jewish traditions about the messiah you'll find that mary is being revealed as the new eve and there are two key books in the new testament where this is really clear the first is the gospel of john one of my favorite gospels and then the second is the book of revelation right the apocalypse of john so let's begin by looking at the gospel of john with the famous story of mary at the wedding at cana and also at the foot of the cross once again we could spend hours just looking at mary in the gospel of john and at the wedding at cana and at the crucifixion but for our purposes here i just want to focus on one strange aspect of those two episodes in john's gospel you probably already are familiar with it you've probably noticed it before and it's this that when jesus encounters his mother in the gospel of john he doesn't address her as mother he addresses her as woman right so the famous example of this is from john chapter 2 verse 4 at the wedding at cana after mary points out in a very feminine way right they have no wine okay very feminine because you'll notice she doesn't ask him to do anything about it she just brings it to his attention it's kind of like my wife whenever she says it's garbage night you know she's not asking me to do it she didn't make any demands but she's bringing it to my attention right and mary does that very gently brings it to his attention and then jesus kind of responds or in a way it seems a little overreactionary almost when he says to her woman what is that to you and to me my hour has not yet come right now that's a strange response i can only imagine what my mom would say if i ever addressed her as woman right and some some non-catholics will actually say oh look this is a good example of how jesus is like preempting catholic devotion to mary he's putting her in her place you know and he's kind of disrespecting her right now that interpretation is extremely uh improbable for two reasons first um remember the fourth commandment is honor your father and mother right and as a basic rule of interpretation just throw this out here if your interpretation leads you to the conclusion that jesus breaks one of the commandments it's probably wrong just just general rule of thumb right so jesus is not going to break the fourth commandment by dishonoring his mother so we just know that he's not disrespecting her even if it sounds strange to our ears secondly as if you look at the next uh quote on your hand out there jesus doesn't just address mary as woman at cana he also does so when he's in his agony on the cross in john 19 verse 26-27 it says this when jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing near he said to his mother woman gune in greek behold your son and then he said to the disciple behold your mother. and from that hour the disciple took her to his own home john 19 26-27 okay so how do we explain this why does jesus do this why does he address mary as woman at the wedding at cana and talk about his hour which is the hour of passion and then again do the same thing on the cross in the midst of his agony and i think the answer to that question is this it's that jesus here is revealing to us that mary isn't just his mother she's also the new woman of the new covenant she is the new eve right and he's revealing her role in salvation as the new eve and you can see this in the notes i've made a little chart there just by looking at the parallels between even the old testament and mary in the new testament right so eve number one is called woman 11 times mary is called woman twice and that's something we have no other examples of a jewish man ever addressing his mother as woman second eve invites adam to commit the first sin in the book of genesis well in the new testament number two mary invites jesus the new adam to perform his first miracle right the wedding it came third eve is with adam at the fall when he's tempted by the devil to sin and likewise in the new testament mary the new eve is with jesus the new adam at the crucifixion when he undoes the effects of sin and casts out the devil that's actually a a very important point in john's gospel when jesus passion comes he says now is the hour when the prince of this world will be cast out so he's undoing the effects of the fall at the cross and then finally number four eve is the mother of the offspring who conquers the serpent and that is really fulfilled in mary because it's her offspring her seed is the one who conquers the devil on calvary right through his passion his death and his resurrection so this has led various new testament scholars to recognize that in the gospel john mary her premier identity in a sense is that she's being revealed as the new eve all right now if you have any doubts about that you can just turn to revelation chapter 12 because we find similar imagery in the apocalypse of john and this is a very famous passage we're going to come back to it several times over the course of uh this bible study and it's from revelation chapter 12 verses 1 and following uh the famous vision of the woman clothed with the sun i want you to read through this you're probably familiar with the text but read through it with genesis in mind and some of the points we made earlier okay so it says this quote a great portent appeared in heaven a woman clothed with the sun with the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars she was with child and cried out in her pangs of birth in anguish for delivery and another portion appeared in heaven behold a great red dragon and the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child that he might devour her child when she brought it forth she brought forth a male child one who was to rule all the nations with a rod of iron but her child was caught up to god into his throne and the great dragon was thrown down that ancient serpent who was called the devil and satan the deceiver of the whole world revelation 12 1-5 and then verse 9. okay so what's going on in this passage who is this mysterious woman who is clothed with the sun well it's interesting if you study many commentaries on the book of revelation a lot of them will say oh well that woman is a symbol for the people of god she's either a symbol for israel or a symbol for the church but she's definitely not mary a lot of commentators will actually say especially protestant non-catholic commentators they'll resist the idea that she's married but the problem with that interpretation is that if you look at it in context it doesn't really hold a lot of water because if you look at the whole context of everything we just read you'll notice john is having a vision with these apocalyptic symbols and images and in this vision there are three main characters right so first you have the serpent second you have the woman and then third you have the woman's child the male child whom she has she delivers now all commentators will agree that the serpent represents an individual and that individual is satan the devil john himself explicitly tells you that second all commentators will agree that the child also represents an individual who is that individual it's jesus christ the messiah right the king of israel the lord of the world but what they'll say is and this is where it gets inconsistent but the third person in the in the vision the woman can't be an individual she just has to be a collective figure right representing the people of god or the church but that's problematic in other words if the first symbol the serpent is an individual and the second symbol the child is an individual then it also makes sense that the third individual the mother of the child would also be mary the mother of christ right an individual so what we have here is a kind of a vision of three characters satan christ and mary and in this instance it's not just catholic scholars who recognize this some recent protestant scholars have actually admitted this and i'm going to give you this quote because i think it's actually helpful here ben witherington iii he's a methodist scholar very prominent uh protestant author written hundreds of books it's amazing and he says this about revelation 12 quote i would suggest that this figure of the woman is both the literal mother of the male child jesus and also the female image of the people of god in other words it's not an either or it's a both and it's not either an individual or collective figure it's both she represents mary first and foremost but mary herself as we're going to see is the mother of the church and she becomes a symbol for the whole people of god and i think that this is right that this really is a vision of christ satan and mary the mother of jesus now why does that matter well it's real simple when's the last time in the bible we saw a woman at war with a serpent and a serpent trying to kill that woman's offspring it's genesis chapter 3. so revelation 12 is also revealing that mary's role in salvation history is to be not just the mother of the messiah but the new eve all right with all that in mind then let's turn now to the ancient christian church and to the doctrines of our catholic faith if it's true that the bible when it's taken as a whole old and new testaments reveals that mary is the new eve then what are the theological implications of that interpretation what are the theological implications of that conclusion and is this just some kind of novelty that dr petrie's making up is there some kind of newfangled interpretation that i'm you know giving to you here today and the answer is no it's very ancient and it's very important and you can see this by going back and reading some of the early church fathers these were bishops and priests who were writing in the second third fourth and fifth centuries a d at the time when the bible was being formed and the church was spreading throughout the roman empire and what's fascinating is all the way back to the earliest fathers whose writings we have there was widespread agreement in both the east and the west that mary in the new testament was not just the mother of god not just the mother of christ but the new eve let me give you a couple of examples here the first quotation is from saint irenaeus of lyon right he was writing in the second century and this is what he says quote the knot of eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of mary for what the virgin eve had bound fast through unbelief this did the virgin mary set free through faith then again saint cyril of jerusalem writing in the 4th century he's the bishop of the church in jerusalem well those ancient churches there is he says this death came through a virgin eve it was necessary that life should also come through a virgin and then finally saint john chrysostom whose name means golden mouth one of the greatest preachers in the ancient church in the fourth century he wrote quote a maiden expelled us from paradise and through a maiden we find eternal life end quote so notice here unlike some contemporary christians who will say oh well mary's just an ordinary woman right that's not how ancient christians regarded her they recognized that she plays a pivotal role in the history of salvation right just as eve played a unique role in bringing sin and death into the world so too mary the new eve plays a unique role in bringing salvation to the world through christ she is not just an ordinary woman the other thing that they derived from this and this is really important was that if mary is the new eve then it also stands to reason that she is free from sin all right listen to two quotations this is from saint ephrem the syrian a fourth century writer in the east and then saint augustine of hippo one of the great fathers of the church and the patron of the augustine institute so let's see what augustine has to say it's probably a good idea let's see what augustine has to say right about our lady so saint ephraim wrote this about mary's freedom from sin quote only you jesus and your mother are more beautiful than everything for on you oh lord there is no mark neither is there any stain in your mother wow and then saying augustine of hippo in his famous book on nature and grace he was dealing with the question of original sin and and sin within the human condition and he says this quote we must accept the holy virgin mary concerning whom i wish to raise no question when it comes to the subject of sins out of honor to the lord for from him we know what abundance of grace for overcoming sin in every particular was conferred upon her who had the merit to conceive and bear him who undoubtedly had no sin wow does augustine seem confused about whether mary has sinned or not no he's very clear that when it comes to sin we make an exception not just for jesus but also for his mother all right now what does that have to do with the new eve i think this is so important for us to stress um because a lot of non-catholic christians and even a lot of catholics may wonder how can we say that mary was free from sin when she was just a human creature right are you trying to say she's divine or that she's god no no of course not she is a human being she's a human creature but her freedom from sin flows from her identity as the new eve because if you look at salvation history think about it for just a minute adam and eve in genesis chapter one and two are they created in a state of sin or free from sin well the answer is free from sin right yeah they're created in a state called original holiness right they're created good without sin right so if that's true of the old adam and the old if the old adam and the old eve were created in a state of freedom from sin then how much more true must that be of the new adam and the new eve think about it for a minute if mary is the new eve and she would create it with original sin that would make the old eve greater than the new eve right and that's not how typology works old testament prefigurations are never greater than their new testament fulfillments right same thing's true if mary ever committed a single sin in her whole life she would be just like the old eve who committed the first sin right so the church's belief in mary's sinlessness as well as in her immaculate conception the doctrine that she was created from the moment of conception free from original sin flows out of her identity as the new eve it's a grace that god gives to her because of her special role in salvation history right and this is just so important to stress because sometimes even catholics will make a mistake here they'll say well mary had to be free from sin so that she wouldn't transmit the sin to jesus well you got to be careful with that you can't say it was necessary for her to be free from sin otherwise she would transmit us to jesus because then what about saint anne what about mary's mother did she have to be free from sin and then her parent too and then like you end up getting in a into a series that would lead all the way back to the first parents and then you it leads you into a problem a logical problem it's not that it was necessary it's that it was fitting for mary to be free from sin because she was not just the mother the messiah but the new eve all right in closing then i just would like to end uh by making well actually two last points first uh i mentioned at the beginning of our bible study romans 3 23 that verse all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god that's a verse that many many christians will say contradicts our catholic belief in mary's immaculate conception and sinlessness and i would just like to point out to remind us here that when we interpret a verse in the new testament we always need to put it in context right and so if you want to insist that when paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god there are absolutely no exceptions which some of our non-catholic brothers and sisters will insist that gets you in a problem because all christians admit there's at least one exception right jesus okay so that was your first exception second exception when paul says all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god he's clearly not also talking about all of the unborn right or children who die before reaching the age of reason they can't even commit an actual sin right so there's another billion exceptions so when it comes to our beliefs about mary we're just asking for one more it's just one more exception okay and it's just because she's the new eve it's not because she's divine or anything like that it's because of god's grace operating in her in conclusion then what does the church have to say about this today i'd like to end with a quote from the catechism of the catholic church paragraph 4 11 in which the church here makes a direct connection with the book of genesis mary's identity as the new eve and her immaculate conception and freedom from sin so we'll end with this last statement here in the catechism of the catholic church paragraph 4 11 it says this about the passage in genesis quote the christian tradition sees in this passage genesis 3 15 an announcement of the new adam who because he became obedient unto death even death on a cross makes amends super abundantly for the disobedience of the first adam furthermore many doctors and fathers of the church have seen the woman announced in the proto-evangelium as mary the mother of christ the new eve mary benefited first of all and uniquely from christ's victory over sin she was preserved from all stain of original sin and by a special grace of god committed no sin of any kind during her whole earthly life now that is a great mystery it's something to ponder is something to meditate on it's something to be thankful for too because you know what it points forward to what god has in store for us right he didn't come into this world to die on the cross just so that he could pretend we're righteous one day in the resurrection right we will all be completely free from sin as members of the church we will too be immaculate and we will live throughout all eternity without ever committing another single sin and so mary becomes a living sign of what god's grace can do not just in her life but in your life and in mine and that's why this doctrine of the immaculate conception and mary's sinlessness is something that also gives us hope for what god has in store for us thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

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Length: 37min 12sec (2232 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020