One of the oldest Christian prayers still in use today, dating back to at least
  the eleventh century, and maybe even earlier, is the prayer known as the Hail Mary.

It goes like this:

Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and
  blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us
  sinners now and at the hour of our death.

This prayer is used by some Christians as a regular part of their prayer life, mostly
in private prayers and in the devotion of the Rosary. Many Anglicans do use this prayer,
but we sometimes tend to be self-conscious about it, or think of it as an affectation;
something which is foreign to our Anglican understanding of the Christian faith. This
despite the fact that there are more churches in England dedicated to St Mary the Virgin
than to any other saint or commemoration – and England is quite unusual in this regard
compared to continental Catholic countries.

Now the use of this prayer is not a salvation matter – no-one should think that they
are a better Christian, or a worse one, based on whether or not they use the Hail Mary in
their prayers. But it is a part of our Christian heritage, and many people do find that it
enriches and expands their understanding and experience of God.. The prayer itself begins
with words taken straight from the Bible, in the greetings to Mary of the Angel in Luke
1:28, and Elizabeth in Luke 1:42. Hail, favoured one. The Lord is with you. Blessed are
you among all women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

The title of Mary as Saint, or Holy one, and the recognition of her role as Mother of
Jesus is the next part of the prayer.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

The prayer concludes with a request for Mary ¹s prayers for us. As we pray in the
fellowship of angels, and archangels, and the whole company of heaven, so we celebrate
Mary ¹s participation in all that as the prayer concludes with the words 

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

As we celebrate today this festival of Mary, Mother of the Lord, it is worth looking
briefly at this prayer, and the tradition of devotion to Mary which lies behind it.

Christian people have recognised that Mary, the mother of Jesus, has a special part in
our history and the story of our faith, ever since New Testament times. In the councils of
Ephesus in the year 431 and Chalcedon in 451, Mary was recognised with the Greek title
Theotokos, meaning bearer or Mother of God.

Throughout the middle ages, devotion to Mary was an essential part of Christian life
and worship, and it continues to have an important place in Catholic Christianity to the
present day.

Sadly, amongst the churches of the Protestant reformation in the 16th century there was
a reaction against the excesses of some devotion to Mary, to the point where even the
mention of Mary is considered in some circles to be something "Papist",
"Idolatrous", and somehow inimical to true reformed Protestant Christianity. I
don ¹t think I have ever seen a clearer example of this than a friend of mine, a very
devout and one-eyed evangelical Protestant, who positively refused to buy any Christmas
cards with "that woman" pictured on the front.

I suspect that one of the clearest examples in Christian history of "throwing the
baby out with the bath water", "cutting off your nose to spite your face",
or whatever simile you want to use, is the Protestant churches ¹ rejection of devotion to
Mary, the Mother of the Lord. Even the Anglican Church, in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, rejected such devotion, only recovering it in the reforms and renewal which
followed the Oxford movement in the nineteenth century.

For myself, I cannot see the logic in rejecting, ignoring, and even sometimes
denigrating Jesus ¹ mother, and then somehow imagining that in doing so we are giving true
honour to Jesus himself. In Luke’s account of the incarnation, first the Angel, then
Elizabeth, and finally even Mary herself acknowledge that because of the part she played
in God ¹s plan for salvation she is highly favoured, the Lord is with her, she is blessed
among all women, and all generation shall call her Blessed.

Mary is a reminder that in Jesus the impossible happened. "Human being" and
"God with us" walked on the earth in one and the same person. And through our
faith in this Jesus, and our walking in his ways in the fellowship of his Church, we too
can cross the divide, and transcend the mortality and sin of our human nature, to share in
the eternal peace of God which passes all understanding.

It would be wrong, and quite pointless, to pretend that Mary was some sort of God or
divine being herself. That would be to miss the point altogether. Mary is special to us
because she was so ordinary – a young woman, growing up in a country town in a backwater
of history. Yet God chose her to be the Mother of his Son. And she willingly participated
in God ¹s plan of salvation.

Some forms of piety and Christian teaching have emphasised the domestic and passive
aspects of Mary’s role in the Christian story. She went along with what God wanted and
what Joseph decided to do. She followed Jesus along as a spectator and part of the crowd
in the background during his ministry.

She stood at the foot of the Cross, and watched her son die. It has suited some people,
especially male leaders in the Church, to present Mary’s role in all this as entirely
receptive, as though she was a passenger, a vessel, even a victim. But that is not the
only way of understanding Mary’s part in the divine drama. Although it is true that the
Gospel stories of the Nativity present an idealised view which owes much more to what
later Christians believed about Jesus than to what actually took place in real life, it is
possible to see in them a recognition that Mary played an active role. She had a choice,
and she deliberately chose to offer up her motherhood to the service of God. 

There are hints in the Gospels that Mary took an active interest in the adult ministry
of Jesus, and that they did not always agree on the timing and content of what he said and
did. Finally, when Mary stood at the foot of the cross and watched her son die, she was
doing what I believe is made present once again in every Eucharist. She was offering up
the flesh and blood of Jesus as a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world. It would not
be true to say that she was acting as a Priest. On Calvary Jesus himself had that role.
But I believe it is true to say that every Christian Priest who offers up the sacrifice of
the Eucharist is doing exactly what Mary did, and shares something of the pain,  and
love, and blessedness of Mary in so doing.

St Paul was not just talking about the ordained priests of the Church, but about every
Christian when he wrote the words we heard in our second reading; "When the fullness
of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to
redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And
because we are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying,
"Abba! Father!". So we are no longer slaves but children, and if children then
also heirs, through God" (Galatians 4:4-7) 

We are heirs through God because of the active, willing and blessed participation of
Mary, with whom we pray; Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you
among women, and  blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God,
pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Father Nigel B. Mitchell

Precentor, St George’s Cathedral

August 1999

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Nigel B. Mitchell