Mother of God
Theotokos. It’s an old word, and one from an old language (ancient Greek), so it’s not readily on our tongues in twenty-first century America. It means “Mother of God,” or “God-bearer,” and while the phrase of “Mother of God” is understandably strange to our ears, it does not mean that God in His eternal, divine nature has a mother, as though there is some preexisting spiritual being that bore His own. What it means is that Mary, a virgin young woman in first-century Palestine, bore in her womb the very God of creation. Theotokos refers to the reality that the baby whose birth we celebrate on Christmas was God Himself.
This reality, that Jesus Christ, even as a tiny baby in His mother’s womb, is Himself the actual eternal God, was the single biggest mystery and source of controversy in the first five centuries of the Christian church’s history. How could an eternal God have a body of flesh and blood, a body that slept and ate and grew hungry and died? How could Jesus Himself be God and yet also pray to God, and call God His Father? And how did the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus said was the great comforter to come after He returned to be with His Father, fit into all of this?
The doctrines of the Trinity and the hypostatic union of Christ’s two natures (human and divine) were outlined during these first five or so centuries in order to account for all of the Biblical data, all of what Scripture taught about Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The Councils of Nicaea (325 A.D.), Constantinople (381 A.D.), Ephesus (431 A.D.), and Chalcedon (451 A.D.) involved hundreds of Christian bishops consulting Scripture, debating the truth or falsehood of certain claims about God and Christ, and sorting through the implications of all of those claims in order to arrive at what was true about God and Jesus Christ. Many of these men were willing to spend their whole lives, some even to die, in order to know and proclaim what was true about Jesus the Christ. We are very used to debating television shows, movies, and sports teams in our day and place, but most of us are unfamiliar with the idea of strenuous, impassioned debate about what is true concerning God and His Christ and His Word. But it was a feature of the well and honestly lived life to fathers of our faith like Athanasius, Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, and John Chrysostom.
The debate over the word Theotokos came later in these councils (Ephesus and Chalcedon), and while I don’t want to adjudicate the entire struggle, I do want to bring one strand of it to your minds in the hopes it can bless your Christmas season. In the first half of the 400s A.D., Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria (the second most prosperous city in the Roman Empire) defended the use of the word, while Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople (the new capital of the Roman Empire as of about 325 A.D.) said it should not be used. Nestorius proposed instead the word “Christotokos,” which meant “Mother of Christ” or “Christ-bearer.”
While calling Mary “Mother of God” may feel strange to us, and I don’t believe a Christian must use that phrase, the Council of Ephesus was correct in proclaiming that the phrase was true. The baby inside Mary’s womb was not merely a special human baby. It was not merely a collection of cells awaiting the divine to be breathed into it at a later date. Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, was absolutely right when she said that Mary, pregnant with Jesus, is already a mother and that the baby inside her is already her Lord.
In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah, and she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.”
Luke 1:39-45
Notice this: The Holy Spirit fills Elizabeth to have her call Mary’s baby her Lord and to say that the angelic prophecy about the baby was from the Lord. Elizabeth, under the prompting of the Holy Spirit, says the in utero baby Jesus is her Lord and that the Lord is the One whose Word Mary believed. The Lord is both the source of the prophecy about this baby and the baby Himself.
At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of God in the flesh. God chose to take on flesh, to be like us in all but sin, to find us and rescue us and intercede for us and bless us. God was in Mary’s womb, and it was the birth and life and sacrifice and worship of God that she pondered in her heart when shepherds told her that angels had given them the very good news of His birth.
When the angels went away from them into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has made known to us.” And they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in a manger. And when they saw it, they made known the saying that had been told them concerning this child. And all who heard it wondered at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
Luke 2:15-20
God chose to be born as we are born, chose to live and die for all of His people, those who would believe in His Name, and God is now at the right hand of God, interceding for all of those people.
Mary bore God in her womb, who chose to take on flesh and dwell among us that we might become His children. May we ponder what she pondered, and treasure up in our own hearts the great mystery she did.
God is our Christmas, very God of very God. May it be merry and blessed!
He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
John 1:10-13