What justification do we have for the attention we give to Mary?

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kdganey1991

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Wasn’t Jael called blessed, too? Why exactly does Mary deserve all of this attention? How do we know this is Mary and not anything fishy…?

I’m in a period of doubt, please quote as much scripture as possible.
 
Have you read the tracts on Mary that are available on this website?
 
kdganey1991 said:
Wasn’t Jael called blessed, too? Why exactly does Mary deserve all of this attention? How do we know this is Mary and not anything fishy…?

I’m in a period of doubt, please quote as much scripture as possible.
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Methinks you are frequenting far too many anti-Catholic websites. No one, except OT scholars, and anti-Catholic / anti-Orthodox bigots even knows of Jael. What I do know is that Jesus did not choose her.

You REALLY need a copy of Catholicism for Dummies. Really. Like, badly. Today, if possible. You will be confused and wander no more.
 
Mary is the Mother of God. She gave birth to God himself. She had to be free from any stain of Sin Original or Actual.
 
God honored Mary above all other women in history. To me, that justifies oir attention and veneration.
 
Jael gets her props from Deborah’s song:

“Blessed above women be Jael,
The wife of Heber the Kenite,
Extolled above women in the tent.”

The point seems to be that she was extolled above women who stay in the tent, because she acted like a warrior. Not bad on the Israeli heroine scale.

Of course, Deborah also did her warleader stuff, but she didn’t extol herself, obviously!

And yes, there’s definitely a connection between the praise of Jael by Deborah and Barak, and the greeting of Elizabeth praising Mary and Jesus. You’re supposed to get that, if you’re an early Jewish or Gentile Christian steeped in the OT Scriptures. Jael and Deborah were famous; so Elizabeth was comparing herself to the older prophetess Deborah and Mary to the younger Jael. It probably gave them both courage, since both Deborah and Jael had done strange stuff for the Lord; and Elizabeth was acting as a prophetess that very moment, so she had a right to compare herself to Deborah.

You can get into all sorts of other comparisons, as Scripture commentators often have done. For example, Mary the Woman stomping the head of the serpent (by bearing Jesus and by obeying God sinlessly) just like Jael spiked the head of Sisera when the Lord delivered him into the hand of a Woman. Barak being a bit shy about acting as warleader is like Elizabeth’s husband Zechariah not believing the angel. And so on.
 
Wasn’t Jael the one who took a tent-peg and drove it through the head of the opposing general? I thought everyone knew of her, especially feminists - I had no idea she had any importance to the anti-Catholic movements.
 
Khalid said:
Wasn’t Jael the one who took a tent-peg and drove it through the head of the opposing general? I thought everyone knew of her, especially feminists - I had no idea she had any importance to the anti-Catholic movements.
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Only because she is also called “blessed.” Since the advent of search engines, a world full of anti-Catholics have now found her name. So, what else to do but use it in attacks against Mary. The fact that this argument is nonsensical makes no apparent difference.
 
Consider Mary as she really is. Everybody glorifies Our Lady. Of course she is to be glorified. She is the Mother of God. But I would like to tell of her ordinary life. There are many women like me who feel that she is so high up that nobody can touch her. It is true that she is high up, but she is also very ordinary.
What did she do all day? I imagine she washed and scrubbed and cleaned. She was married to a carpenter. She wasn’t a big shot in Nazareth. Nazareth was a small town. Joseph wasn’t a big shot, just a carpenter. She tended to her husband and Son, especially when he was small. She cooked, she scrubbed and she washed and wove and attended to the garden and did the laundry. Our Lady was the first person who really knew how to do the will of God in its minute details.
I revel in her normality because she is ordinary and at the same time extraordinary. It was an ordinary household and that is a most fantastic thing. Our Lord chose for his mother a working woman; that’s what she was, a working woman.

more at:
madonnahouse.org/publications/passiton/Pass-It-On-011.htm
 
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