In the essay I referred to briefly yesterday (“A Space for God,” found in Mary: Mother of God, Braaten & Jenson, eds.) Robert Jenson asks why it’s important or significant to ask for Mary’s prayers specifically as Theotokos or Mater Dei rather than simply as “Saint Mary.”

His intriguing response is that Mary in some sense encompasses the entire company of heaven. He gets to this conclusion by retracing the history of Israel as God making a space for himself among human beings. “[I]f God is to have to do with his created world and not just coexist with it, and especially if he is also to allow creatures to have to do with him, he needs space in his creation from which to be present to other spaces therein and at which to allow creatures to locate him” (p. 51). The Ark of the Covenant, the Temple, the Scrolls of Torah, the Prophets, and the people themselves are a “space” that God creates to take up residence among us. “It is the space taken up, defined, by the people of Israel, which is, with sheer heaven, God’s space in this world” (p. 53).

What this has to do with Mary is that the entire history of Israel comes to a point in her assent to bearing the Son of God:

It is of course the heart of the Christian faith that God’s presence in Israel is gathered up and concentrated in Immanuel, God with us, in this one Israelite’s presence in Israel: he is in person the Temple’s shekinah, and the Word spoken by the prophets, and the Torah. And if that is so, then the space delineated by Israel to accommodate the presence of God is finally reduced and expanded to Mary’s womb, the container of Immanuel. We must note the singularity of Mary’s dogmatic title: she is not one in a series of God’s mothers, she is simply the Mother.

To what did Mary, after all, assent, when she said to Gabriel, “Fiat mihi,” “Let it happen to me”? Of course it was her womb that with these words she offered, to be God’s space in the world. The whole history of Israel had been God’s labor to take Israel as his space in the world. And it indeed was a labor, for Israel by her own account was a resistant people: again and again the Lord’s angel announced his advent, begged indeed for space, and again and again Israel’s answer was “Let it be, but not yet.” Gabriel’s mission to Mary was, so to speak, one last try, and this time the response did not temporize. (pp. 55-6)

The conclusion Jenson draws is that “[a]s the created space for God, Mary is Israel concentrated” (p. 56). She is also “the container not only of the uncontainable Son, but of all his sisters and brothers, of what Augustine called the totus Christus, the whole Christ, Christ with his body” (p. 56). Therefore, when we ask her to pray for us as Mother of God, we are “invok[ing] all God’s history with Israel at once” and asking the “whole company of heaven” to pray for us. Mary is both the summation of Israel and the Mother of the Church. Asking for Mary’s prayers, then, is a way of asking for the prayers of the entire church triumphant.

I’m not sure what exactly to make of Jenson’s argument; just thought I’d throw this out there in light of yesterday’s post…