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| Fr. Ives Congar O.P. |
SAN - Nov 21
Presentation
of Our Lady-l
A Reading 'In the Virgin Mary and the Temple', by Fr.
Yves Congar *
THE only occasions on which the Gospels express1y
mention the Virgin Mary in connection with the Temple are in the account of her
Purification and of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple (Lk 2,
23-38), the annual journey to Jerusalem of his parents for the Feast of the
Passover (Lk 2~41) and the finding of the child Jesus in the Temple
after four days' absence on his part and three of anxious searching by his
parents (Lk 2, 42-50). To
these very brief indications, the piety of Christians very soon added the idea
of the presentation of Mary in the Temple at the age of three to be
consecrated to the service of God, We are dealing here with a symbolical representation
of a profound spiritua1 reality about which the tradition and the doctrine of
the Church provide us with valid information. Mary, predestined to be the
Mother of Jesus, true God and true man, and to be worthy of her vocation, was
prepared by the gift of exceptional graces and lived with unfailing fidelity a
most pure life of inner consecration to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. As
the type of all faithful souls and of the Church herself, Mary expressed spiritually
and supremely in her life that ''presentation'' which, for each one of us, is
to begin by the service of faith and to be consummated in heaven.
It
is obvious that the tradition and doctrine of the Church may, without falling a
prey to the imaginary productions of the apocrypha, propound statements concerning
the status of the Mother of God in relation either to the Jewish or the
messianic temple going far beyond what we are explicitly told in the three
short passages from the Gospel which narrate the incidents mentioned above, If
Mary is the Mother of God, she has a special relation to the body of Christ
which is the true temple-to his physical body and doubtless also, in a certain
sense, to his body the Church, She is herself a temple of God in a quite
specific and sublime way, both because Christ was within her from the moment of
his conception until that of his birth, and because of the exceptional spirttua1
gifts she received in preparation for her divine motherhood and as a reward for
her free acceptance of this vocation (Lk. 1,38), not only after the
Annunciation but during the whole of her life. Hence the liturgy-the Oriental
1iturgy in particular-shows a profound understand of the mystery of Mary when
it constantly uses the texts concerning the Temple and the tabernacle in order
to express it.
* The Mystery of the Temple , Westminster (Maryland) 1962, 254-255,
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