Jesus did not ask us at anytime to pray to Mary or through Mary because he is the only mediator between God and man. If Jesus indeed wanted us to honor Mary in a special way and pray through her than why was this his response:
And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it. (Luke 11: 27, 28).
Ok, i didn’t write this, so if you have a problem with it, don’t ask me, I got it off of a website called
CatholicOutlook.com
Common Objections:
“In Luke 11:27-28, a woman tried to honor Mary, and Jesus rebuked her.”
by Gary Hoge
The passage in question reads,
As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it” (Luke 11:27-8).
Some see this woman in the crowd as some sort of “proto-Catholic” who was trying to exalt Mary at the expense of Jesus, and who was swiftly rebuked for it. But only Protestant bias would see this woman’s statement as a compliment to Mary. Clearly, it was a compliment to Jesus, not Mary. The woman was saying in effect, “Your mother (whoever she is) is so blessed and lucky to have a son like you!” Obviously, this woman had no idea who Jesus’ mother was, and so she was not praising her; she was praising Jesus. “You are so wonderful! Blessed is the mother who bore you, blessed is town where you were raised, blessed is the ground you walk on,” etc.
The woman’s comment, then, had little to do with Mary directly, it was mainly a gushing kind of superficial celebrity-worship aimed at Jesus. And although it’s not clear from the translation quoted above, I don’t believe that Jesus rebuked the woman for this. According to the
Analytical Lexicon to the Greek New Testament, the word translated “rather,”
menoun, is “a combination of particles serving to take up what has just preceded, [to] either emphasize or to correct:
indeed, really, truly, rather.”
1 The translators of the
New International Version, quoted above, believed that Jesus meant to correct, but I believe He meant to emphasize, and so I believe this passage should be translated:
As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” He replied, “Indeed, blessed are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”
Jesus appears to have picked up on what the woman said, and turned it around, saying, in effect, “Yes, my mother is blessed, and so is everyone else who, like her, hears the word of God and obeys it.” In using his mother as an example of the blessing that comes from faithful obedience to the word of God, Jesus echoed Luke 1:45: “Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished!”
This episode, then, does not demonstrate that it is wrong to honor Mary. On the contrary, the Bible says that all generations will call her blessed (Luke 1:48). Besides, no one can honor her more than God has already honored her by making her the mother of His Son. Jesus was not refuting the idea that His mother was blessed, he was simply pointing out that all are blessed who, like her, faithfully obey the word of God.
, Paul says to some sailors, “Wherefore I pray you to take some meat.” In other words, “I ask you to eat some meat.” There are literally hundreds of examples of the word “pray” used in this manner in the King James Bible:
