See attachment ;)

It seems that every year, I encounter someone asking about this song. Yes, it has theological problems along with tacky music. I also seem to routinely run into those who tell me how Jesus gradually developed knowledge of who he might be or become. Yeah, right!

I am no Patristics scholar, so I can't readily pinpoint anything from the Fathers on the specificity of the BVM's foreknowledge, but Scripture is clear that she and Joseph were given fundamental pieces of general foreknowledge.

There may be private revelation about the specificity of foreknowledge, but that would not be something that bound the faithful.

For what it's worth, when I meditate on the Sorrowful Mysteries, I find it help to compare and contrast our Lord's and the BVM's intertwining suffering, our Lord being perfectly aware of what would unfold, and the BVM only more generally, so that our Lord had the immense pain of certainty* and the BVM the other immense pain of uncertainty, with important touch points, as it were.

Starting off as our Lord leaves the Upper Room, consider our Lord's farewell to his Mother.

* As in, if we knew what were going to happen to us, we'd never get out of bed...

I remember doing a choral arrangement of this song back during my salad days of Methodism - we called it the "Three Stooges Song" because the opening sounded for all the world like "Larry, Moe and Curly".

Funny what pops into your mind after a while!

The Magnificat makes it pretty clear that she did, in fact, "know." And as it is directly from the Bible, there is no reason for Protestants to think otherwise.

Well, melo, if I came across as intolerant, then I apologize. My intention is never to judge. As for demagoguery, I really don't see that, here.

Sometimes good people sing bad music. I do it. (No comment as to whether I'm a good person.) I don't have a problem with it. Talented people can even sometimes make bad music enjoyable to hear.

I stand by my judgement that the music in question is not very good, and that the lyrics paint a picture of Mary that I find contrary to what I find in scripture and Church teaching. My judgment. Good, talented, people can disagree. I'm not judging others, but stating my opinion.

The flip side of this Advent/Christmas music question is, why not look to the wealth of traditional music for these two seasons? Richard Terry received a British knighthood for his work with modern publications of medieval and renaissance carols and songs, a number of them with B.V.M. as the subject. Edgar Pettman also modernized some really great carols - besides "The Angel Gabriel". These are all "folk music", although from a bygone era, but with solid Theology.

Michael et al, did this song pick a fight with CMAA? Nope.
And there will be those with bad judgment and bad aesthetic taste among us always, just like the poor in riches and spirit.
The point about its inefficacy for liturgical has been made here. It's settled.

Not sure how a song can pick a fight or not. But a song that is popular, requested, and problematic is the perfect candidate for CMAA discussion.

"And he said to them, 'How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?' And they did not understand the saying which he spoke to them. 51 And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart." Luke 2:49-51

It would seem that there is an extent to which Mary does not know everything, and that Christ's divinity is revealed to her gradually, as it is to the Apostles.

He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High;
and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David,
and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever;
and of his kingdom there will be no end.” …

“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you;
therefore the child to be born will be called holy,
the Son of God. (Lk 1:32-33, 35b)

But these are titles that are given to David and Solomon as well, denoting their special relationship with God as the anointed one, or Messiah/Christ. To read into it as saying that Mary understood or definitely knew that Jesus was God incarnate is working from our Post-Resurrection/Pentecost knowledge of God, and forgetting that at the time, the idea of the Jewish God becoming man was utterly inconceivable and unprecedented. And it still is now, if we allow ourselves to view the mystery with the new eyes of Advent.

Mary was told a lot, but the extent to which she understood was probably limited by her situation within salvation history, which would have understood the titles given by Gabriel in a non-Divine, but still extraordinary way. Mary probably understood that there was something unprecedented going on, but God becoming man is so extraordinary, that it was probably revealed to her over time.

As for the Immaculate Conception, it was necessary for Christ to deliver Mary, he just delivered her more perfectly than anyone else: pre-emptively, rather than after the fact. The moment in which he would provide salvation from sin was yet to come, at the Passion and Death, so there's nothing outright contradictory in the song. Just perhaps a lack of finesse for the sake of poetry. And of course you could get into how Christ's entire life was effective for the remission of sin… But I won't.

And as far as what Christ knew, the Post Conciliar theory that I think best fits is that Christ perpetually had the natural knowledge provided by the Beatific Vision and his nature as the Word of God, but within his human mind/brain, he was supernaturally limited by his human capacity and development. Like how you can show the image of the Cross to a child, and they can know and experience it, but they won't come to understand it until they've grown. So Christ was given in His human intellect what was necessary for his mission, so particulars like knowing peoples thoughts, but first and foremost, he always knew of his identity as Son and of his Mission. Though the extent to which an embryo can understand or comprehend infused knowledge of its nature as God is obviously limited. I think it's like if you can imagine that child having experience of the Cross at all times, from the moment of conception, that knowledge is always there, even if the child cannot fully understand or explain it, it's there and the child always has knowledge and communion with it.

Whew. That was a nice break. Back to studying for finals! Ora pro me!

hey

I am not surprised Mary and Joseph were a bit ticked with their 12 year old son. especially if they knew they just lost GOD!

It has nothing to do with being a bully. Songs are not troubled children. They don't have feelings. They aren't hurt by criticism. They don't care;they can't care. They are not living beings.

MichaelDickson et al are in fact living beings with feelings.

emo...melo....hmmm.

None of you are discussing the song save for Michael and, by extension, Vilyanor. There is, however, a great amount of posturing and semantics. And point of fact, it is about bullying, on more than one level. That no one has advanced Steve Collins' tactic, aided by Julie's example, says a great deal about the mindset.
And for the record, the contention that songs are not living beings, advanced just to win a pathetic argument, flies in the face of what aesthetics teaches, informs and inspires us all.

It has nothing to do with being a bully. Songs are not troubled children. They don't have feelings. They aren't hurt by criticism. They don't care;they can't care. They are not living beings.

I'm not an STD, but might this qualify as an argument by reductionis ad absurdam? I'm sure I screwed that Latin up. What is to be expected of a know-nothing?
I'm weary of this dreadful catfight just to prove supremacy. And my friends, this is what it has devolved into, REGENT OF THE HILL. If this is what CMAA wants, no true discussion, no reasonable attitudes, then by all means call me out personally and close your circle.

I repeat: it's a SONG. It does not have feelings.

But I surely do have feelings about the song, and they are not good ones. ;-)

Yeah, but I have seen some of those lettermen and hot girlfriends a few years later when they were no longer hot or athletic. Not a pretty picture. LOL. I am talking about Mary of questionable knowledge, not the other titles mentioned since the original post.

@MichaelDickson

Thank you! Yeah, this is pretty much all theological theorizing, you're free to believe differently. Which isn't to say it's just made up willy-nilly, it comes from the analogy of faith and living tradition, but it's a theory that can't really be proven.

I don't really think the problem of the Immaculate Conception is really a problem, because Mary's preservation of sin is a preemptive saving that looks forward to and is effected by the cross. Mary is saved, and redeemed like the rest of us, just in a timey-wimey, before the linear time way, and more perfectly than the rest of us. Christ delivers Mary on the Cross, just as the rest of us, but he does it through time, because he's God and can do that. Mary would not have been preserved from original sin without the Cross. It's all very wobbly-wobbly timey-wimey. It's related to the transcendence of time in the Mass, or how people in the Old Testament could receive the necessary grace for their callings before Christ's coming. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Christ is the center point, the True Event of history, and all else, before and after, looks to that event.

Catholics tend to focus on the part which seems to deny the Immaculate Conception. True, she was delivered, and it is the same grace, the meritorious cause of which is the Passion. But, God sees the Passion and Mary's conception in one glancs, hence it could be applied to her before it happened in time.

The song implies that she did not know and that she was amazed just as the rest of us would be. Baloney. The Greek of the salutation (kecharitomene) is used twice in the New Testament, never in the Old. Mary would have known that.

The part about his ruling the nations is a bit stupid: Gabriel said “his kingdom shall have no end”!

Sure. Our Lady didn't know everything all at once. The piercing of her heart by Simeon and losing him in Jerusalem are two examples of this. But she and Joseph were not surprised. They knew he was the Messiah since they knew Isaiah’s prophecy. And it seems this would have been made even more certain after the Visitation.

If Our Lady had to learn all these things as do the rest of us, she wouldn’t have asked for his help at Cana. The apostles contrast to Our Lady in this, I think. And if she had a limited understanding of the Incarnation insofar as that was outside of the Jewish view of God, it is reasonable that she was more capable of understanding than the rest of us and thus was not surprised at all when the shepherds and Magi came, even if she could not yet articulate why they came, i.e. that he is the Son made flesh.

1. As to the question, "Mary, did you know?" the song seems to never answer "yes" or "no."

2. Few liturgical troubadours are able to write both a good text and good music. Similarly few pop troubadours have the talent of John Lennon. The text of this particular song is trite. I'll write more on this if anyone wants to argue the opposite position, namely, that the text is great.

3. The lack of knowledge of several commenters about how the gospels were formed is shocking. One could easily think that this is a forum for fundamentalist Christians, and that Saints Matthew and Luke interviewed the Blessed Mother (and, for Matthew, Saint Joseph) before they penned their infancy narratives. St. Mark may have known the mother of Jesus, but he has no infancy narrative. If someone knows nothing about this matter, it would be better that he or she does some serious reading before offering up what amounts to pious piffle.

If someone knows nothing about this matter, it would be better that he or she does some serious reading before offering up what amounts to pious piffle.

The insults continue to grow.

About Fr. K's point regarding Scripture: I agree with him in part. The Church believes that the Gospels contain true historical information, but Holy Mother Church does not place Her full authority behind every line of the Gospel narratives about the birth of our Lord and require us to treat them as literally, exactly true. The Magisterium has not addressed all those details and confirmed them down to the last letter.

The stories of the angelic messages to Our Lady and to St. Joseph might include some embellishment. (That would be part of how the early Church expressed some of the truths they held about our Lord.) Mary and Joseph might not really have received all those details which are described in the gospels' angelic words. So we should be careful about saying what they knew or not.

For the purpose of discussing the song, it is sufficient to say: Scripture depicts Mary as knowing these various things, and if the song doesn't reflect that, it is a shortcoming about the song.

It's almost as if some here think that God is the author of Sacred Scripture. (Purple, as you wish.)

(Yes, to anticipate, I've read the subsequent parts of the Catechism. And yes, it's complicated. That's my point. One need not have a naive, uninformed, hermeneutics to draw some of the lessons that have been drawn, here. I neither endorse nor reject those lessons, here. My point is that there is no need to suppose that people are being hermeneutically stupid.)

Mary knew because God is not a rapist. Uninformed consent is no consent at all. That said, I think it is possible that there were things that Mary didn't understand/remember, or put out of her mind consciously/unconsciously.

Considering the episode of finding Jesus in the Temple, Scripture doesn't claim or imply particularly detailed foreknowledge for the BVM.

TimTheEnchanter

If Mary knew Jesus was God, then she ALREADY knew that 'all things were possible with God'. Therefore, she 'knew' that Jesus could walk on water, cure a blind man, turn water into wine, etc. She 'knew' that he could call down a legion of angels at a moments notice. She knew. She is not God, but her abilities and prowess are far beyond anything any human can conjure up.

For more information on the amazing BVM, read de Montforts True Devotion.