As Mary birthed Christ to the world, so the Church births
believers, “other Christs,” to each generation. As the Church becomes mother to
believers in baptism, so Mary becomes mother to believers as brothers of
Christ. The Church, in the words of one recent scholar, “reproduces the mystery
of Mary.”
We can read all of these interpretations as a gloss on a
striking passage of Irenaeus, which we encountered in the last chapter. For the
male child is, without doubt, “the pure one opening purely that pure womb which
regenerates men unto God.” And the “other offspring” we see in Revelation are
just as surely those who are regenerated unto God, those who are born of the
same womb as Jesus Christ. (Scott Hahn, Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God
in the Word of God [New York: Image Books, 2001], 66)
Read in the light of the fathers, Revelation 12 can
illumine our subsequent reading of all the New Testament passages that describe
Christians as brothers of Christ. The Greek word for “brother,” adelphos,
literally means “from the same womb.” From John and Irenaeus through Ephrem and
Augustine, the early Christians believed that womb belonged to Mary. (Ibid.,
66-67)
We are made brothers
and sisters of Christ—adelphos,
“from the same womb.” Thus we can confidently approach the queen mother of
heaven not just because she condescends, in her great mercy, to hear us, but
because we are her children, of royal birth, of noble blood. We can go to her
not only because she is Christ’s queen mother but because she is ours. (Ibid.,
123)
Divine motherhood is the place where God wants Christians
to meet Christ, their brother. I’ll say it again: adelphos means “from the same womb.” What establishes brotherhood,
then, is motherhood. For Mary to have given us her Son is remarkable. But for
Jesus to have given His mother to us—the very people who crucified Him and
sinned against His Father—that’s something great beyond imagining! After giving
us His mother, we can be sure that there’s nothing He would withhold. (Ibid.,
135-36)
For those wondering how Hahn
gets around this and defends the perpetual virginity, on p. 104 he appeals to
the Hebrew meaning of “brother” (אח) as having a wide semantic domain,
one that includes near-relatives and cousins.
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