Mary, Mother of God

The Theotokos — Byzantine icon, 14th century — The Theotokos Peribleptos — Byzantine icon, 14th century, Moscow Kremlin — image: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Theotokos — defined at the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431

Of all the titles given to Mary by the Catholic Church, this is the oldest and the deepest. It is also the title from which all the others flow. Before Immaculate Conception, before Assumption, before Queen of Heaven, the Christian people called her by a single Greek word: Theotokos. The God-bearer. The Mother of God.

It is a startling phrase. To call any creature the Mother of God seems, at first, almost too much to say. And yet to refuse to say it is to refuse to confess who Jesus is.

What the dogma says

Mary is truly the Mother of God — not because she is the source of Christ’s divinity (only the Father is that), but because the One she conceived and bore is fully and truly God. Jesus is one Person with two natures, divine and human. Mary is the mother of that one Person. Therefore she is the mother of God-made-man.

The Council of Ephesus, in the year 431, made this clear in response to a teaching of Nestorius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, who wished to call Mary only Christotokos — “the Mother of Christ” — rather than Theotokos. The Council saw that this distinction would split Christ into two persons: a divine person and a human person, only loosely joined. The Christian faith, however, holds that Christ is one Person.

If anyone does not confess that Emmanuel is truly God, and that therefore the holy Virgin is the Mother of God (Theotokos), inasmuch as in the flesh she bore the Word of God made flesh, let him be anathema.
— Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431

In Scripture: “the mother of my Lord”

The earliest Christian witness to this title is found in the Gospel itself. When Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus, visits her cousin Elizabeth, the older woman cries out in astonishment:

“Why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” — Luke 1:43

Elizabeth calls Mary “the mother of my Lord.” In the Old Testament, “Lord” (the Greek Kyrios, translating the Hebrew Adonai) was the word reserved for God. Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, recognizes that the child in Mary’s womb is God; and so she does not hesitate to call Mary the mother of God. The first Theotokos proclamation in history is given by a pregnant woman to her pregnant cousin, in the hill country of Judea, before the Word made flesh was even born.

The Jewish roots: the Queen Mother of David’s house

For first-century Jews who heard Elizabeth’s words, the title “the mother of my Lord” carried a meaning beyond what readers of English may quickly catch. In the kingdom of David and Solomon, the king’s mother — the Gebirah, the “Great Lady” — held an official position of honor and intercession in the royal court.

When Solomon takes the throne in the First Book of Kings, his mother Bathsheba comes before him to ask a favor for someone else. The text says (1 Kings 2:19): “The king rose to meet her, and bowed down to her; then he sat on his throne, and had a seat brought for the king’s mother; and she sat on his right.” The queen mother sits at the king’s right hand. She intercedes; her word is heard.

In the Davidic kingdom, the wife of the king is not the queen — the mother of the king is. Across the kings of Judah, the biblical text records the name of the queen mother almost every time. She is the one to whom petitioners come; she is the one who carries their requests to her royal son.

When Elizabeth calls Mary “the mother of my Lord,” she is naming Mary the Gebirah of the new and eternal kingdom. The royal Son she bears is the Son of David and the Son of God. The Mother of the King is the Queen Mother. She does not displace her Son; she sits at His right hand and intercedes for His people. This is the Jewish heart of Mary’s motherhood — and it is the foundation of every Hail Mary ever prayed.

The witness of the Church Fathers

The title Theotokos was being used in the prayers of the Christian people long before any council defined it. The earliest known Marian prayer, the Sub tuum praesidium, dating from around the year 250, addresses her by this very title:

Beneath your protection we take refuge, O Theotokos. Despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.
— Sub tuum praesidium, c. A.D. 250

In the third and fourth centuries, Athanasius of Alexandria, defender of the divinity of Christ against the Arians, called Mary Theotokos as a matter of course. So did Cyril of Alexandria, the great defender of the title at Ephesus. The faithful in Egypt, Syria, and Greece sang her praises by this name in their liturgies. The Council of 431 did not invent the title; it confirmed what the Church had been singing for centuries.

The Council was a moment of profound joy for the people of Ephesus, a city whose own great history of devotion to Mary stretched back to the earliest Christian generations. When the bishops emerged with the decree, the people of the city processed by torchlight through the streets in celebration.

A spiritual reflection

When you call Mary the Mother of God, you are not exalting her above her Son. You are confessing who her Son is. Every word of love offered to her is also a confession of His divinity, and every prayer to her ascends through her to Him. To honor the Mother is to honor the Son who chose her. The mother of my Lord — Elizabeth’s little, astonished phrase — is the door through which all of Marian devotion enters.