Mary, Mother of believers

Mary is the mother of believers in the sense that Abraham is called the father of believers. Abraham inaugurated the old covenant (Gen 17: 1-27) by an act of fiat which recalls the fiat of Mary at the dawn of the New Testament.

Mary is invited to repeat the act of faith such as that of Abraham the father of believers. God who had reconciled sterility and motherhood in Sarah and in Elizabeth, can reconcile in Mary both virginity and motherhood: “nothing is impossible with God” (Lk 1:37). The word of the angel to Mary echoes the Word of God in the apparition of the three angels at the oak of Mamre (cf. Gen 18:1-15). Sarah laughed, saying to herself, “Truly, can I bear a son?” God then said to Abraham who had fervently believed in the promise of posterity, “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” (Gen 18:14).

In the beginning Abraham embodied all Israel in himself: he received God’s promise for Israel and affected the initial act of faith which set in train the succession of blessings. At the Annunciation a new embodiment of Israel took place in Mary, the handmaid of the Lord; she received the promise of God for the new Israel, the Church. Abraham believed in the Lord and this was reckoned to him as righteousness. As with Abraham, so with Mary; she gave glory to God (cf. Lk 1:46) in the conviction that what He had once promised, he was powerful enough to accomplish. She who at the first believed in the Incarnation of the Son of God our Saviour has remained for all Christians an example of a pure act of faith, founded solely on grace and the Word of God.