The Theotokos in Luke

Luke’s Gospel is the richest source in the whole New Testament for the Mother of God: the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity, the Presentation, and the finding in the Temple survive only in its first two chapters, and from them the Church draws the scriptural ground of the title Theotokos and the substance of her Marian hymnography. This file sets out the Lukan infancy narrative as that source, traces the texts the Fathers and the councils built upon, and notes the traditional inference that the Virgin herself stands behind Luke’s account.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

The Gospel That Gives Us the Mother of God

What the Church knows of the Mother of God from the years before the Passion she knows almost entirely from Luke. Matthew’s infancy narrative is told from Joseph’s side and centers on the magi and the flight into Egypt (Matthew 1–2); Mark and John have no infancy narrative at all, and John names the Virgin only at Cana and at the Cross (John 2:1–11; 19:25–27). It is Luke who narrates the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity at Bethlehem with the shepherds, the circumcision and naming, the Presentation in the Temple with Symeon and Anna, and the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus among the teachers (Luke 1:26–2:52). The Orthodox liturgical commemoration of the Theotokos — the feasts of the Annunciation (March 25) and the Meeting of the Lord (February 2), and much of the daily office — rests on this material (see Great Feasts). The infancy narrative is, in this sense, the Church’s primary written portrait of the Virgin, just as the later tradition would make Luke the first to portray her in icon (see The First Iconographer).

The Annunciation: Kecharitomene and the Fiat

The center of Luke’s Mariology is the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38). The angel Gabriel is sent to a virgin betrothed to Joseph, “and the virgin’s name was Mary” (Luke 1:27), and greets her with words the Church has never ceased to repeat: chaire, kecharitomene, “Hail, O favored one” or, in the older rendering that the Latin Ave, gratia plena preserved, “Hail, full of grace” (Luke 1:28). The greeting itself is doubly significant. The verb chaire is the imperative “rejoice,” and the Akathist hymn would later build its entire structure on this single word, hailing the Virgin again and again with Chaire — the angelic salutation turned into the Church’s litany of praise (Akathist to the Theotokos, Ikos 1; cf. the Annunciation troparion). And the participle kecharitomene, a perfect passive of the verb “to grace,” names Mary as one already and abidingly graced by God — the term the Fathers read as marking the singular favor by which she was prepared to bear the Word (Luke 1:28; see Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 1999).

The dialogue that follows is the model the Church holds up of free obedience. To Gabriel’s announcement that she will conceive and bear a son whose kingdom shall have no end (Luke 1:31–33), Mary asks “How shall this be, since I know not a man?” (Luke 1:34), and receives the answer that “the Holy Spirit will come upon thee, and the power of the Most High will overshadow thee; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Her response is the fiat, the consent the whole tradition treasures: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38). The Fathers read this fiat as the hinge of salvation history. Where Eve’s disobedience had bound the race, Mary’s obedient yes loosed it: Irenaeus develops the parallel at length, calling the Virgin’s obedience the “cause of salvation” that undid the knot of Eve’s disobedience (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.22.4; 5.19.1; trans. Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, 1885). This “New Eve” reading, rooted in Luke 1:38, became one of the foundations of Orthodox Mariology (see The Theotokos).

The Visitation and the Root of Theotokos

From Nazareth Mary goes “with haste” into the hill country to Elizabeth, and the Visitation (Luke 1:39–56) supplies the second half of what would become the Church’s most-repeated Marian salutation. At Mary’s greeting the babe leaps in Elizabeth’s womb, and Elizabeth, filled with the Holy Spirit, cries out: “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!” — words joined to Gabriel’s Ave in the prayer the West calls the Ave Maria and the East knows in the festal hymnody (Luke 1:42). Elizabeth then asks, “And whence is this to me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43). This phrase, he meter tou Kyriou mou, “the mother of my Lord,” is the scriptural seed of the title Theotokos, “the one who gives birth to God.” For if the child in Mary’s womb is “the Lord,” then she who bears him is the mother of the Lord — and the Council of Ephesus (431), against Nestorius, defined precisely this: that the one born of Mary is true God, and that Mary is therefore rightly called Theotokos, God-bearer (Council of Ephesus, 431; cf. Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius). The dogma defined at Ephesus is not an addition to the Gospel but the drawing-out of what Luke 1:43 already confesses on the lips of Elizabeth (see Christology; The Theotokos).

To this Mary answers with the Magnificat, her own song of praise (Luke 1:46–55), in which she declares that “henceforth all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48) — a prophecy the Church fulfils every time she sings the canticle at Orthros and crowns it with “More honorable than the cherubim.” That song is treated in its own place (see The Magnificat).

“She Kept All These Things in Her Heart”

Twice in the infancy narrative Luke pauses to tell us that the Virgin treasured and pondered what she had seen. After the shepherds report the angelic message at the Nativity, “Mary kept all these things, pondering them in her heart” (Luke 2:19); and after the finding in the Temple, “his mother kept all these sayings in her heart” (Luke 2:51). The Fathers and the later tradition have read these notices as a quiet signal of Luke’s source. Since these are the most intimate scenes of the Virgin’s life — the angel’s words, the conception, the things said at the manger — the inference is drawn that they reached Luke, directly or indirectly, from Mary herself, who had kept and pondered them. This is a traditional and devotional inference rather than a datum the text states: Luke names no source for the infancy narrative, and modern scholars debate whether chapters 1–2 rest on a Palestinian Marian tradition, a Baptist source, or Luke’s own composition in a Septuagintal idiom (Brown, The Birth of the Messiah, 1993; Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX, 1981). The double “she kept these things” remains, at the least, Luke’s own indication that the Virgin’s interior remembrance stands behind his narrative.

The Nativity, the Presentation, and the Sword

The remainder of Luke 2 fills out the portrait. At the Nativity Mary brings forth her firstborn son, wraps him in swaddling clothes, and lays him in a manger, and the shepherds come at the angels’ word (Luke 2:6–20). At the Presentation, forty days on, the holy parents bring the child to the Temple, and the aged Symeon takes him up and blesses God for the salvation prepared “before the face of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel” (Luke 2:30–32) — the Nunc Dimittis sung at Orthodox Vespers. Symeon then turns to Mary with a word the Church reads as the prophecy of her co-suffering at the Cross: this child is set “for the fall and rising of many in Israel,” and “a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also” (Luke 2:34–35). The sword of Symeon is taken up throughout Orthodox hymnography as the figure of the Virgin’s compassion at Golgotha. Finally, the finding of the twelve-year-old Christ among the teachers in the Temple (Luke 2:41–52) — the only canonical episode from the Lord’s boyhood — closes with the same note of maternal remembrance, his mother keeping all these sayings in her heart (Luke 2:51), and so seals the whole infancy narrative as the Gospel of the Theotokos.

References

The Holy Bible. Quotations follow the Authorized (King James) Version with reference to the Greek of Luke; LXX numbering noted where relevant.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies. Trans. in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885. (The New Eve and the obedience of Mary at 3.22.4 and 5.19.1.)
Council of Ephesus (431). Definition against Nestorius affirming the title Theotokos; with Cyril of Alexandria, Second Letter to Nestorius.
Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah. Updated ed. New York: Doubleday, 1993. (The Lukan infancy narrative and the question of its sources.)
Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke I–IX. Anchor Bible 28. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
Gambero, Luigi. Mary and the Fathers of the Church. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999. (Patristic reading of kecharitomene and the Annunciation.)
The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The Annunciation and the Meeting of the Lord in Orthodox hymnography.)