The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
A few weeks ago, some fellow teachers and I spent a few days with a professor in a deep study of the works of the Gawain Poet, an anonymous medieval poet supposed to have written “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” among several other works. In the poem, Sir Gawain courageously (or foolishly?) agrees to a strange challenge from a mysterious Green Knight, a challenge that could cost him his head come next Christmas. The professor explained that the meaning of the entire 101-stanza poem hinges on just one phrase used to describe King Arthur: “child gered”. It appears in Middle English only once, in this very poem. Did it mean child-like or child-ish?
As an English teacher, I must admit my delight that our understanding of today’s Gospel—and our understanding of Mary, the Church, and our faith—hinges on how we interpret a single word that appears precisely once in Scripture, and indeed in all of the Greek as far as we know.
In the standard Catholic translation of the Bible, Luke 1:28 reads: “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” “Full of grace” comes from St. Jerome’s Latin, gratia plena. But if we go back to the original Greek, the word used is kecharitōmenē.
This word is incredibly rich. It comes from charitoō, meaning “to grace”. But here it’s in a form that tells us so much about Mary: it’s a title spoken directly to her, it shows that God is the one acting, and it reveals that what God did in her was completed in the past and continues into the present. In other words, Mary isn’t just someone who received grace—she’s someone who remains in the state created by that grace.
This worthy word, on my view, provides the foundation for us to understand so much of our faith. Mary’s fiat is an act of freedom that is made possible by God’s grace. The Lord graced the place where he would dwell and Mary cooperated. Mary is the Theotokos, the God-bearer, because of her unique place in salvation history—no one else is kecharitōmenē. And, of course, Mary is the New Eve because she is granted the grace that was not yet present in the Old Testament, when sin was made known but not yet overcome.
Mary is the model for our Church, which must receive the Lord, embody Him, and share Him with the world. So too is Mary the model for our own personal faith, which eschews the prideful and self-promoting ways of the world and instead demands receptivity, humility, and obedience.
Sir Gawain struggles throughout his quest to stay blameless and pure, but he certainly knows well which of God’s creatures to model himself after. For the poet writes:
One thought pulled him through above all other things:
the fortitude he found in the five joys
which Mary had conceived in her son, our Saviour.
For precisely that reason the princely rider
had the shape of her image inside his shield,
so by catching her eye his courage would not crack.
Daniel Gray is a teacher and writer living in Central Texas. An adult convert to Catholicism, he loves his faith-filled and inspiring wife, Regina, his toddler son, Ezra, and his floppy daughter, Eloise. He writes short reflections on the Catholic life at Backward Progress.
