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Question
Dear Father Angelo,
I have been thinking about these two questions for a while.
1) Is there a difference between Jesus’ body after resurrection and Mary’s body after assumption?
2) Mary speaks very little in the Gospels. Can we assume that many stories of Jesus’ life, such as the Annunciation, Joseph’s dream, the visit to St. Elizabeth with the related Magnificat and Zechariah’s Benedictus, the details of Jesus’ birth, the escape to Egypt, the presentation to the Temple, etc., were narrated, to the evangelists or to other people, by Mary herself?
Thanks for your always clear answers.
Raffaele
Answer
Dear Raffaele,
1. Regarding your first question: there is no difference between the risen body of Jesus and the body of Mary after assumption, except for their own identity. St. Paul says that Jesus “will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be conformed to his glorified body by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.” (Phil. 3,21)
2. What is true for Our Lady will also be true for each of us. The Lord, by virtue of His divine power, will transfigure the body where we now live, which is subject to many miseries and infirmities, and ultimately to the corruption of death, to conform it to His glorious body.
3. Regarding your second question: the events of Jesus’ childhood cannot have any other original source than Our Lady.
St. Luke, in the prologue to his Gospel, says that others before him had tried to put the events of Christ’s life in order.
The first source has been the narration of “those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word from the beginning” (Luke 1,2).
Putting together the two expressions “those who were eyewitnesses from the beginning” and “ministers of the word”, it becomes evident that he is talking about the Apostles and Jesus’ immediate disciples.
4. But from whom did the Apostles and the disciples learn the events regarding Jesus’ childhood?
There is just one possible answer: from Our Lady.
Here is what Benedict XVI (J. Ratzinger) writes on this topic:
“Where do Matthew and Luke learn the story they tell? What are their sources? Joachim Gnilka rightly says in this regard that it is evidently a matter of family traditions.
Luke sometimes mentions that Mary herself, the Mother of Jesus, was one of his sources, and he does so in a particular way when he says in 2,51 that “His mother pondered all these things in her heart”, or in 2,19, that “As for Mary, she treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart”.
Only she could report the event of the Annunciation, which had no human witnesses. Naturally, modern “critical” exegesis will suggest that such connections are rather naïve.
But why shouldn’t such a tradition be there, preserved and at the same time theologically modeled in the closest circle?
Why should Luke have made up the sentence about Mary keeping words and events in her heart, if there was no concrete reference?
Why should he have spoken about her “reflecting” on words (2,19; also 1,29), if nothing was known about it? (Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, pp. 24-25)
5. Benedict XVI does not conclude that Saint Luke drew directly from Our Lady, but certainly from those who learned directly from Her.
Regarding the fact that Marian traditions appeared relatively late, Benedict XVI “finds the explanation in the discretion of the Mother and the circles around her: the sacred events about the “morning” of her life could not become a public tradition while she herself was still alive” (Ib., p. 25).
I thank you for the questions, I remember you to the Lord and I bless you.
Father Angelo
