The Hail Mary Prayer
The “Hail Mary” prayer has always been dear to my heart, as it was one of the first prayers I ever learned. As a personal anecdote, I’ll share that when I first began following our Lord Jesus Christ almost six years ago, one of the first things I did was buy a statue of our Blessed Mother. I didn’t really know how to pray, and I felt kind of silly looking up prayers online, reading them off of a screen, and praying them in front of this statue. However, one night in prayer I looked up at the statue and focused on the beautiful face of Mary, and I was just filled with an intense understanding of her maternal love and care for me that existed not just in that moment, but, as I came to realize, had existed throughout my whole life. I’m not sure if I was praying the Hail Mary at that exact moment, but one thing I’ll always be sure of is the fact that I have a Mother in heaven who loves me more than any earthly woman ever could, and the Hail Mary has become intimately associated with this reality in my prayer life. And so, in honor of our Immaculate Queen and Mother, what follows will be a scriptural reflection on this beautiful prayer.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace
When used as a greeting, “hail,” Χαῖρε, is almost always followed by someone’s name or title. For example, Judas greeted our Lord with, “hail, Rabbi” (Matt 26:49), which was mockingly repeated by the Romans, “hail, King of the Jews” (Matt 27:29). Thus, the fact that the Archangel St. Gabriel greeted Mary with “hail, Full of Grace” (Lk 1:28), suggests that Mary’s name or title is κεχαριτωμένη, “Full of Grace.” This is significant because, throughout Scripture, names often express one’s role in the divine economy of salvation, especially when they’re altered (as in this case). For instance, in Genesis 17:5 Abram’s name was changed from “exalted father” to “father of many” or “Abraham,” in order to correspond to his role as “the heir of the world” (Rom 4:13). Likewise, since Mary was given the title “Full of Grace,” this suggests that her role in the economy of salvation is to be the Graced One, or, the one through whom God’s grace enters the world. Perhaps Mary only fulfilled this role once when she brought forth Grace Himself at our Lord’s Nativity, however, St. Paul assures us that “the gifts of God and His call are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29), and so there must be some sense in which our Lady acts as a mediatrix of grace throughout the rest of salvation history as well. Indeed, she does this by acting as “the Queen” who “stands at the right hand” of the King, and leads His people into the heavenly Palace (Ps 45:9-15).
The Lord is with thee
St. Matthew opens his Gospel by telling us that Jesus is “Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’” (Matt 1:22-23). The Evangelist then ends his Gospel account with Jesus promising His Church, “behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:20). In addition to this inclusio highlighting the divinity of Jesus, some have also noted that this motif of the Lord God being “with us” in the first book of the New Testament, is taken from the last book of the (Hebrew) Old Testament, Chronicles.1 This is because 2 Chronicles 36:23 directly parallels Matthew 28:18-20. King Cyrus was “given all the kingdoms of the earth,” just as our Lord Jesus was given “all authority in heaven and on earth”; Cyrus commissioned God’s people to “build the Lord a house at Jerusalem,” i.e. the Temple, just as Jesus commissioned His Apostles to “make disciples of all nations,” i.e. build up His house, the Church; and Cyrus assured every Israelite who took up this task that “the Lord his God is with him,” just as Jesus assured His Apostles that “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” God being “with us” is thus a motif that reveals not simply His dwelling place on earth, i.e. the old covenant Temple and the new covenant Church, but also the very means by which He gathers all people unto Himself. As such, Mary being told at the Annunciation, “the Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28), shows us that she’s not only the personal embodiment of God’s dwelling place the Church, but she is also, like the Church, a real instrument through whom God mediates salvation to the world.
This reality is further highlighted by another Old Testament connection. One of the only times this phrase, “the Lord is with you,” Κύριος μετὰ σοῦ, shows up in the (LXX) Old Testament is in Judges 6:12, “the angel of the Lord appeared to [Gideon] and said to him, ‘The Lord is with you, O mighty warrior.’” Joshua 1:9 echoes the same, “Do not be frightened [Joshua], and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” In both contexts, the promise of the Lord to be “with you” was given to a mighty warrior who was to lead God’s people in battle against His enemies. The fact that our Lady was given this same promise during the Annunciation therefore reveals that she is our Champion Leader, our intercessor and mediatrix in the war against Satan. It must be noted that our Blessed Mother being told, “the Lord is with you,” is part of a series of allusions to 2 Samuel 6 that identify her as the new Ark of the Covenant.2 This is significant because, in the context of another text that identifies Mary as the Ark, Revelation 11:19-12:1,3 we’re told about “a war” breaking out in heaven (Rev 12:7), and it ends by noting, “the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring” (Rev 12:17). Satan despises the children of Mary because just as the old Ark would bring victory for God’s people over their enemies (Num 10:35), so too does the new Ark, our Lady, bring victory for Christians over the principalities of darkness.
Blessed art thou among women
By calling Mary “blessed among women” (Lk 1:42), St. Elizabeth calls our minds back to the book of Judges. In Judges 4, we learn there was a Canaanite general named Sisera who was setting himself against the people of God. When the matriarch Deborah, “a mother in Israel” (Judg 5:7), got word of this, she prophesied that “the Lord would deliver Sisera into the hand of a woman” (Judg 4:9), which indeed came to pass. However, it wasn’t Deborah herself who carried this out, rather it was Jael who “struck Sisera” and “crushed his head,” for which she was called “most blessed among women” (Judg 5:24-26). This same motif is repeated in the book of Judith. The wicked Assyrian general Holofernes managed to capture Judith, however, after getting too drunk at a banquet, he let his guard down and enabled the heroine to cut his head off with a sword. For this mighty act, she was praised with the following words: “O daughter, you are blessed by the Most High God above all women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, who created the heavens and the earth, who has guided you to strike the head of the leader of our enemies” (Jth 13:18).
A woman striking or crushing the head of a serpentine figure should immediately remind us of Genesis 3:15, which the Latin Vulgate renders, “I will put enmity between you [the serpent] and the woman, and your seed and her seed: she shall crush your head.” Just as it can be said of the Church corporately, “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” (Rom 16:20), so too can this be said of our Lady, the embodiment of the Church, personally. Thus, to be “blessed among women” is to be the one who crushes the head of the serpent, which Mary does by being the Mother of Israel’s promised Messiah, and our chief intercessor in the spiritual war against “the leader of our enemies.”
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus
On the third day of creation, God made “herbs yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit” (Gen 1:11-12). The word “yielding,” זָרַע, is actually the verb-form of the word “seed,” זָ֫רַע, so a more literal translation is “herbs seeding seed.” This is important because, where do we see the verb-form of the word “fruit”? It’s in Genesis 1:26-28, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…’ And God said to them, ‘be fruitful and multiply.’” Just as herbs seed, so too are humans fruitful. This language tells us that, right from the beginning, mankind is associated with fruit trees. This makes sense of why the Psalter, which is broken up into five books corresponding to the five books of the Torah,4 starts with an allusion to this very idea from the beginning of the Torah, “blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked… He is like a tree” (Ps 1:1-3).
Understanding this enables us to properly look at “the tree of life” and its “fruit” in Genesis 2:9. Clearly, if humans are (typologically) trees, and they’re called to be “fruitful,” then the “fruit” of the tree of life is ultimately going to be a child. If you don’t believe me, recall how in Genesis 3:14-20, God prophesied that “the seed” of the woman (again, plant language) would defeat the serpent, and it’s in this context that the woman is first called Eve, or, the Mother of “the living,” חָֽי, which is derived from the same word used for the tree of “life,” הַֽחַיִּים֙. The seed of the woman is the fruit of the tree of life, because she is the Mother of Life. Of course, this suggests that the woman herself, whom the New Testament clearly identifies as Mary,5 is the tree of life. Thus by saying to the Holy Virgin, “blessed is the fruit of your womb” (Lk 1:42), St. Elizabeth was not only identifying her Son as the fruit of the tree of life, but also Mary as the tree of life.
This idea is masterfully picked up in St. John’s Gospel. Famously, John’s prologue begins with an allusion to Genesis 1:1, “in the beginning was the Word,” and then the Evangelist proceeds to document the beginning of Jesus’ ministry as taking place over the course of seven days (Day 1—John 1:19, Day 2—1:29, Day 3—1:35, Day 4—1:43, Days 5-7—2:1), with the Wedding of Cana happening on the seventh day. As I’ve argued before,6 the seventh day was the day on which Adam and Eve fell by eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, a fact that sheds enormous light on what was going on at Cana. Whereas in Genesis 3, “the woman” was deceived by the serpent into giving Adam the fruit that leads to death, John 2 shows Mary, identified as “the woman,” asking the Last Adam to provide the fruit that will (eventually) grant eternal life, wine, the species transformed into Christ’s blood at the Last Supper (cf. Jn 6:56). It was thus our Lady’s intercession at the Wedding of Cana that ended up bringing forth the fruit of the tree of life, the Eucharist. This ends up giving a beautiful Marian accent to Revelation 22:2, “On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Throughout all of Church history, our Lady continuously brings forth the fruit of her womb, our Lord Jesus Christ, for the salvation of our souls.
Holy Mary, Mother of God
In Luke 1:43, St. Elizabeth exclaims, “And why is this granted to me that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?” There are some who try to interpret Mary being the Mother of “the Lord” as a simple reference to her being the Mother of Jesus’ humanity, which has a mere human lordship. After all, “lord” doesn’t always refer to God, it can also refer to mere human lords or masters, and so maybe that’s all St. Elizabeth meant by this question. However, this interpretation is only possible if we strip Luke 1 of all its context.
As noted above, Luke 1 is constructed through a series of allusions to 2 Samuel 6, a text all about the Ark of the Covenant. For example, we’re told that Mary “arose with haste into a hill country, to a city of Judah” (Lk 1:39-40), just as King David “arose and went from Baale-Judah” to bring the Ark to a house on a hill (2 Sam 6:2-3); when Mary arrived at the house of St. Elizabeth, we learn that St. John the Baptist “leapt” in her womb and Elizabeth shouted “with a loud cry,” echoing how David “shouted” at the arrival of the Ark and “danced and leapt” before it (2 Sam 6:15-16); and finally, Mary remained with Elizabeth “about three months” (Lk 1:56), just as the Ark stayed in the house of Obed-edom for “three months” (2 Sam 6:11). I bring this up because Elizabeth’s question in Luke 1:43, “how is it that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?,” parallels David’s question in 2 Samuel 6:9, “how can the Ark of the Lord come to me?” Clearly, when David asked this question, the “Lord” he was referring to was the Lord God Almighty, and so if Elizabeth’s question was intentionally alluding to this verse, then she was indeed referring to Mary as the Mother of God.
Unlike what some believe, our Lady’s divine maternity isn’t just a title, nor is it merely a reference to an historical fact (i.e. that Mary mothered Christ our God). Rather, the Theotokos, the Mother of God, now eternally carries with her the presence of God, and this reality still bears fruit in the lives of Christians even today. Just as Obed-edom took the Ark of the Covenant into his own home and received the blessing of the Lord (2 Sam 6:11), so too was the Beloved Disciple, the image of all beloved disciples of Jesus, commanded to take the Virgin Mary “into his own home” (Jn 19:27), in order to receive the blessing of the same Lord. Thus, if we wish to share in this blessing today, we must all take our Lord’s Mother into our spiritual homes, our souls, and trust in the holy intercessory power she has before her divine Son.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths. Amen.
Luke 1 portrays our Blessed Mother as the Queen of God’s eternal Kingdom. During the Annunciation, the Archangel St. Gabriel told Mary that she would bear a Son who will “sit on the throne of His father David, and reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end” (Lk 1:32-33). As a faithful Jew, Mary would have remembered that in the Davidic monarchy, the mother of the King was the Queen of the Kingdom (cf. 1 Kg 1:16-17, 2:19-20, 14:21, 15:1-2, Jer 13:18). This means that if her Son was going to be the King of David’s house, then Mary was going to be the Queen. Indeed, this is a point that our Lady explicitly acknowledged in her Magnificat: “For he [God] has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden. For behold from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed… he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low estate” (Lk 1:48, 52). Mary affirmed that she was the one of low estate who was being exalted to her queenly throne. It must be noted that it’s in this very context that Mary says, “all generations shall call me blessed,” a phrase clearly taken from Psalm 45:17, wherein the Queen of an eternal Kingdom (cf. Ps 45:6) is told, “I will cause your name to be remembered in all generations; therefore nations will praise you forever and ever.”
This is important because, in the Davidic Kingdom, the Queen-Mother had authority. Psalm 45, the one that St. Luke directly applies to Mary, tells us that the Queen “stands at the right hand” of the King (Ps 45:4), which is the exact same phrase that Jesus used to describe His own relationship to the Father (Matt 22:44 cf. Ps 110:1). This suggests that, just as Jesus is at the right hand of the Father interceding for His people, so too is Mary at the right hand of her Son Jesus, also interceding for the people of her Kingdom. This idea seems to be confirmed by 1 Kings 2:13-18 when we see exactly what it means for the Davidic queens to be at the king’s right hand. In this story, Queen Bathsheba takes her “throne” at the “right” hand of her son King Solomon, and intercedes on behalf of Adonijah, and Solomon promises that he “will not refuse” his mother’s request. Obviously in the story, it seems like Solomon did refuse her request given he doesn’t spare Adonijah, however, as Peter Leithart argues, this is probably exactly what Bathsheba wanted, the destruction of one of her son’s enemies.7 Regardless, the point remains the same: the Queen-Mother is an intercessor before the King, and in one way or another, He will never refuse her requests.
It seems that this portrayal of Mary as our chief intercessor is picked up in John 19, wherein, as noted above, the Evangelist reveals Jesus as the new Adam, and Mary as the new Eve. Pilate’s famous phrase, “behold the Man” (Jn 19:5), pairs with Jesus’ statement on the Cross to John and Mary: “He said to his Mother, ‘Woman, behold, your son!’ Then He said to the disciple, ‘Behold, your Mother! And from that hour the disciple took her into his own household.’” (Jn 19:26-27). Just as “the woman” became “the mother of all living” or “Eve” (Gen 3:23), so too did Mary, the “woman,” become the Mother of all who are alive in Christ. And notice precisely when this was said, at the “hour” of Jesus’ death.8 It’s at the “hour of death” that Mary is fully revealed as the Queen-Mother of the Lord’s Kingdom, and thus the chief intercessor for His people, who, as mentioned, are represented by Jesus’ Beloved Disciple, St. John. It just so happens that John was the only apostle to experience a natural death, perhaps as a result of the Blessed Virgin’s intercession. Regardless, given the fact that we are to pattern our own deaths after that of Jesus’ (Matt 16:24-26), if His Mother was there for Him at that hour, being established as the chief intercessor for His people, she’ll also be there for us at our final hour, interceding on our behalf until the end.
Hail Mary, Full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our deaths. Amen.
See Seraphim Hamilton, “Bridging the Testaments With Immanuel.”
More on this below. Also see my article, “The Ark of the New Covenant.”
See my article, “The Assumption of Mary.”
The five sections of the Psalter are demarcated by Psalm 41:13, 72:20, 89:52, 106:48, and 150:6. That the Psalms are the par excellence meditation on the Torah (Law) explains why they begin like this: “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.” (Ps 1:1-2).
The whole context of Revelation 12 is the unfolding of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15. In this prophecy, there are three characters: the woman (Eve), the seed, and the serpent, and these match the three main figures of St. John’s vision: the woman, the child, and the dragon. If the latter two figures refer to individuals, i.e. Jesus and Satan, it would be odd if the woman didn’t as well, and if she does refer to an individual, the only one it could be is Mary. This is because the heavenly woman is the one who “gave birth to a male child, one who is to rule all the nations” (Revelation 12:5), i.e. she is the mother of the Messiah. For more, see my article, “The Assumption of Mary.”
See my article, “Sunday as the Day of the Lord.”
Peter Leithart, “Prayer For Enemies.”
Mary also underwent a kind of death here, as this was the fulfillment of St. Simeon’s prophecy, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Lk 2:35). For more, see my article, “Mary, Rachel, and the Moon.”