Our Lady, Terror of Demons
Sermon to the Saint Louis Priory School on December 10
We often hear Our Lady praised with terms like gentle, loving, merciful, and even sorrowful. And these are all beautiful metaphors of her perfect love for us and for her son. But--gentle and loving though she is, Mary is no push-over. Her Immaculate Conception guarantees that she will hate evil—and hate it with a perfect hate. She stares down Satan himself. In ancient Greece, the early Christians use to depict Mary with the same iconography as Athena Parthenos, the warrior goddess of wisdom, bearing the storm shield and shaking her spear at Death Itself. Mary goes to war for us. And Satan is terrified!
Surely over the next few days of story of the birth of Jesus—how Joseph heard that Mary was pregnant, and was about to divorce her when the angel showed up..so on and so forth. I used to think that Joseph wanted to divorce Mary because he was ashamed of her. But how could any man possibly be ashamed of a woman like that? No, if you read the passage closely, you will find that there is no evidence that Joseph doubts his wife’s fidelity. Instead, we are told only that he is righteous. And we can tell from the angel’s words that he is also afraid. Note that the angel doesn’t say “don’t be ashamed to take Mary as your wife.” behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
In an instant, he realizes that this isn’t just a great woman he’s marrying. This is the new Ark of the covenant—a treasure so holy no mortal man may touch it. And he is humbled. (Remember that bizarre story from the second book of Samuel where Uzzah, the son of Abinadab sees that the ark is tipping over and reaches out to steady it—and is struck dead!) That story is in the bible for a reason. The ark, the locus of God’s covenant—is sacred. Mightily, frighteningly sacred. So sacred, that no mortal man may under any circumstances dare touch it. And Mary is the new Ark.
A few summers ago, when I went home to visit my family, we watched a really awful movie starring Macaulay Culkin called “The Good Son.” Surprisingly, it turned out to be a movie about a really bad son. In fact, this particular son was a serial killer; and at the end of the movie, his mother ends up holding him by his hand off the edge of a cliff. In her other hand is someone else’s son who is not a murderer and is in fact quite a nice kid. She can’t hold on to them both. So she has to make a decision.
After the movie, I turned to my mother and asked her, “If it was Dad and I hanging off that cliff, which would you choose?” Without hesitation, she said, “Oh, YOU!” So I turned to my Dad, and I was like, “Did you hear that?” but he just kind shrugged. What really surprised me was that she didn’t have to think about the answer. “I would choose my children,” she said, “over anything and anyone in the world.”
So I’ve done a sort of informal survey over the past few years, and you know what? I have never met a mom who would answer otherwise. I’ve never met a mom who even hesitated with her answer. That is a terrible—a, terrifying—kind of love.
There’s a painting in my home in an out-of-the-way spot in back of the house, that my mother did when I was a child. My mother is a professional artist. It was Halloween, and my sister and I went trick-or-treating, and some of the bullies on our block stole our candy. I was thirty-five years old—no just joking, I was eight, my sister was six. Anyhow, my mother is an artist, and a few days later, she went into the studio and painted this picture of us. It’s a dark painting of my sister and me in our Halloween costumes walking through a forest. In back of us, hanging from the trees are all those bullies. Dead. Suspended by their necks.
That is a terrifying kind of love. And while it may surprise you to hear that a mother could have such deep and violent emotions, I’ll bet it wouldn’t surprise your moms at all. A mother understands this formidable bond between mothers and sons. This is why the most powerful prayer in the world is that of a mother for her child. All we sons can do is be grateful and try to respect it. Try to respect them.
The love of a mother for her son, after all, is an icon of God’s love for us. It’s not a perfect icon—and that’s why we pray to God as Father. His is a more detached sort of love. And that’s a theological issue I would have to explain in another sermon. Suffice to say that this love—this formidable love, this fearsome love…a love so powerful that Satan himself trembles in its presence—this love of a mother for her son… Mary has this love for us: her adopted sons and daughters! And precisely because she is The Immaculate Conception, she loves us with a purity and intensity that even our own earthly mothers cannot hope to rival.
Holy Mary, Invincible Warrior, dread of the demons, pray for us.
