“Men have crowded all her glory into a single phrase, ‘the Mother of God’. No one can say anything greater of her or to her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees.

—Martin Luther

Commentary on the Maqniticat

To many Christians the role of Mary as Mother of God and also their Mother finds no support in the New Testament. But Martin Luther from his study of the scriptures could write in 1529:

“Mary is the Mother of Jesus and the Mother of us all. If Christ be ours... all that He has must be ours, and His Mother also must be ours.”

The simple gospel fact is that Jesus had a mother and that that mother had a mission in the plan of Salvation. In our human history there would have been no Fatherhood of God without the Motherhood of Mary, for God became man in the normal way of men through a mother. Had He been only a man who lived and died and was forgotten then she too could be ignored and forgotten.

But the Jesus who was born of Mary expanded into mankind, making Mary the mother of mankind. Jesus is Christianity— Mary, the mother of Christianity. Anyone who honestly considers this basic Christian truth can never say Mary is irrelevant, for nothing that mattered to Jesus can be irrelevant.

And Mary mattered to Jesus:

The person who sets his life on being one with Jesus, of following His teaching and imitating Him oftentimes overlooks the very first act of Jesus in the plan of Redemption: He first gave Himself to Mary.

And in the end, from the cross, He gave her to us.

The great goal of the Christian is to be identified with Jesus, to be one with Him. In this sense Mary was the first Christian and her purpose, now, is to bring that same Jesus to His fullness as He lives on in us. “For we,” says St. Paul, “are the Body of Christ.”