King, kingdom, and reign of God in Mariology

**Queen of Angels**

*As appears to us alive and true, Mary,*
*In the integrity of your splendid and innocent being,*
*In the spiritual and bodily beauty*
*Of all your immaculate humanity,*
*In the vital and extatic triumph*
*Proper to the resurrection of the purest,*
*Kindest, ideal and most real woman*
*That earth ever produced,*
*And that heaven will forever preserve.*

*Saints, orators, artists, poets*
*Have given you images of incomparable lyricism.*
*The vision of you in glory and fullness of life,*
*As it fills the soul with joy and prayer,*
*Reflects in our world the wisdom that should guide us.*

*If our destiny is different from yours,*
*The final destiny immediately fulfilled in you*
*And anticipated on the day of ultimate joy*
*In which death will be conquered and human flesh will rise again,*
*Similar to your celestial Mother, it is not different.*

*It were the angels who carried you to heaven.*
*Holy Mary, the pure ones will join you up above.*

**On the Reign of God**

*Because He is Creator, God is King of His creation, He has complete power over it, enjoys an inalienable kingship over it.*

*As this kingship necessarily arises from creation, both in the sense of producing beings and their persistence in existence, it cannot be delegated to anyone else. Therefore, Our Lady does not participate in the kingship of the Creator.*

*But she is in the best position, as *Mother of the Creator*, to understand, admire, and adore this kingship. She is His first worshipper. And here we truly see one aspect of the *Magnificat*. Mary exalts God and rejoices in Him, because this Eternal King deigned to look at her despite her smallness, because He accomplished great things in her, because He governs the universe with mercy and justice, because He cared especially for His people Israel.*

*In the Old Testament, the kingship of God is an important theme that inspires prophetic oracles and above all numerous psalms. Mary read, recited, and meditated assiduously these grand texts. No one better than she understood their unfathomable richness and no one else but she was carried away by those texts in the great current of adoration that the angels sing without end before the most perfect of creatures.*

*During her earthly existence, she was the first worshipper of God’s kingship, and now in heaven, as *Queen of Angels*, she is the queen of worshippers of this kingship!*

*When litanies say that *Our Lady is*:*

*The Queen of Angels,*
*The Queen of Patriarchs,*
*The Queen of Prophets,*
*The Queen of Apostles,*

• the queen of martyrs,
• the queen of confessors,
• the queen of virgins,
• the queen of all saints,

The term “queen” is not strictly in the sense of true royalty, but it simply attributes to Mary the noblest possible title, evokes her greatness and sanctity that place her above all perfect creatures of God and above all venerable characters in humanity.

In what sense can we say Our Lady is a queen?

The term “queen” is used in three different situations:

1) for a female ruler.

2) for the wife of a king.

3) for the mother of a king.

The first two meanings are clearly excluded in the case of Our Lady, but the third fits her perfectly since she is the mother of Jesus, King of creation and King of his spiritual kingdom. Calling Our Lady a “queen” means recognizing her divine motherhood and the kingship of Jesus, her Son, who is God.

The royal power of God

The royal power of God, that is, the action God exerts over believers to transform and make them just, can be considered from two perspectives:

• both from God’s side who exerts this action, justifying, governing,
• and from the side of the believer who accepts this divine action, submits to it, adheres with greater or lesser intensity to God’s will for him.

To clearly express this double aspect, one would need to use the passive of the verb reign: God reigns and the believer is “reigned over.”

If we apply this distinction to Our Lady, obviously she does not have a direct role in the royal power regarding God, but an indirect one. When we pray in the Father’s Prayer: “Come to us your kingdom“, we implore God, with unprecedented audacity, to extend and intensify his sovereign action among our brothers and sisters.

Our Lady lived fully the Father’s Prayer, even before Jesus composed it as an official prayer for his disciples. After Jesus formulated it, she penetrated all its riches better than anyone else. Furthermore, if we, poor sinners, can pray that God’s sovereign action be extended and intensified in us and others, how much more and better does Our Lady do this prayer and never cease to offer it to heaven!

Our Lady is the first to implore God that his kingdom come among believers. However, her role is even greater when considering the royal power of God from the aspect of the believer who receives it, who is “reigned over.”

**Due to His infinite respect for the freedom of human creatures, God does not want to impose His sovereignty and subject the faithful to His action by force. The old saying goes: “What is received takes the form of the receiver.” Indeed, God’s sovereign action in each believer depends on the receptivity of the believer.**

**Which woman was more receptive than Mary?**

**In her, God had, so to speak, free hands. Never did the slightest resistance stop God’s action in the Heart of the Immaculate Conception.** Mary was the masterpiece of God’s real power and the most beautiful of His works.

**Her intelligence always accepted, without the least resistance, all the light that God wished to pour out upon her. Her intelligence was entirely illuminated by this light, and she surrendered herself to it without constraint, without the obstacle of those personal judgments from which we cannot escape. Even on earth, God reigned in her intelligence, as He does now in heaven.** Our Lady is the Mother of Faith, in Elizabeth’s words: **”Blessed are you who believed what the Lord has told you”** (Lk 1:45).

**Her will never sought to have a life of its own, because she desired God’s will with such intensity that she could not be distracted by other things. The “fiat” of the Annunciation does not carry the sense of resignation that we often attribute to it: **”As such proof cannot be avoided, my God, let it be!”**.** In Hebrew, it is the third-person imperative form of the verb to do, meaning an order given for something to be done. Our Lady did not resign herself to the Incarnation; rather, she willed it because God willed it and because God wanted her to want it. And this adherence to His will was the invariable disposition of her person in all circumstances of her life, both the most important and the insignificant.**

**This perfect fusion of Mary’s intelligence and will with God’s intelligence and will remained entirely free; it was not as if she had been petrified beforehand in God’s hands, but rather she allowed herself to be led by His impulses.**

**It is this real power of God in Mary, with her full consent, that she venerates and seeks to imitate in her devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.**

**The Kingdom of God**

**Today, we tend to refer to the Kingdom of God as something that will come at the end of the world. However, clear texts affirm that the Kingdom of God already existed during Jesus’ time and among the apostles. We only need to recall Jesus’ invectives against the followers of the law:**

– Lk 11:52 **”Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces; for you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in.”**

# Mt 23,13 «Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor do you allow those who would enter to go in.»

All verbs are in the past tense. Also in St Paul: «Be happy and grateful to the Father, who has made you partakers in the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son» (Col 1,12-13). Again, all verbs are in the past tense. Similarly in James 2,5: «Did not God choose the poor in this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom?» And also in Revelation: «He who loves us and redeemed us from our sins by his blood, has made us a kingdom of priests to God our Father» (1,5-6). And almost in the same terms: «You were slain and with your blood you redeemed for God people from every tribe, language, people, and nation, and made them a kingdom and priests to our God» (Rev 5,9-10).

As we can see, all verbs are in the past tense. Certainly, in other places, other verbs are also in the present or future, but this shows that the kingdom of God, as well as the Church, is not simply a reality of the past, but continues into the present and will continue into eternity.

Having thus recognized the identity between the kingdom of God and the Church, we arrive at the same definition for both: both the kingdom and the Church are Jesus and those who form his people or his body. St Paul specifies that «Christ is the head of the Church» (Eph 5,23) or that he is «the head of the body (which is) the Church» (Col 1,18). If we take the biblical image of God’s people, this people cannot separate itself from its head, from its king, and thus forms a kingdom. It is clear that while the objective reality of the kingdom is identical to that of the Church, the two concepts are not at all identical and have different connotations.

The kingdom is a Semitic notion, emphasizing the presence of the king. The Church is the Greek notion which stresses especially the men living in this community. But beyond this difference of perspective on our subjective concepts, we are always dealing with the same reality seen from two different angles.

So what is Mary’s place in this kingdom of God, or in the Church?

It is customary to say that the Church began both on the Cross and at Pentecost. But the Gospel explicitly relates the kingdom of God to John the Baptist’s preaching: «From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and violent men seize it» (Mt 11,12-13).

Thus, it seems that the Kingdom of God, which already existed in John the Baptist’s time, was truly gathered in the Incarnation. As we have seen, what is said about the kingdom refers to the Church. By answering “yes” to the Announcement, Our Lady allowed God to bring about the Incarnation and at the same time inaugurate His Kingdom. The title of “Mother of the Church,” officially conferred on Our Lady by Pope Paul VI, is therefore fully justified.

Mary is the first creature to be part of the Church, and we are all her remote successors. By giving Jesus Her physical body, she also gave Him Her spiritual body, which is the Church, of which She is the first member and from which we belong after Her, as She and with Her.

All subsequent events in Jesus’ life, including His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension, are part of the development of this Kingdom and therefore of the flourishing of the Church.

Similarly, all events in Our Lady’s life, such as Her Purification, encounter in the Temple, intervention at Cana, presence at the Cross, are part of Church life and constitute the first points of the tapestry that God continues to weave through us.

This belonging of Mary to the Kingdom of God and the Church, to which we also belong, reveals between her and us a communion, a kinship, of which we may not be fully aware.

Just as she could call the Church to which she belonged “my Church,” we can also say with her “our Church.”

Thus, we should view future events that will mark the future of the Kingdom of God: the Parousia, the general resurrection, the final judgment, and the offering to the Father. All these events will also be ecclesial.

The Parousia, or return of Jesus, will continue His first coming: Mary’s “fiat” allowed for the first and also for the second, by the very fact of having pronounced it once and for all in the name of all humanity.

Regarding the general resurrection, if Our Lady rose before Her Assumption, She became the first living stone of the Church, the first daughter of the Kingdom of God who triumphed over death, preceding us by following Jesus.

As for the final judgment, our ideas run the risk of being distorted, as in modern languages the term “judgment” is often taken in a negative sense: it assumes a guilty party and is exercised from above down, in the sense that the judge has superior authority over the one who is being judged.

Nothing of this exists in the Hebrew language, where to judge means “to take a decision,” which can be either favorable or unfavorable. It is in this sense that, according to Saint Paul, we will judge the angels: that is, we will all be associated with the manifestation of God’s eternal design, the wonders of His grace, mercy, and justice, both for angels as well as for humans and other creatures. And just as we, simple humans, applaud this wonderful work of God, this “mystery,” as Saint Paul would say, it is clear that Our Lady will also participate in it.

We will sing with her the song of Revelation (15:34; 16:5-7; 19:1-8). And among the triumphs of grace, we especially admire those related to the Immaculate Conception, the “Kekaritomene,” the Virgin of the Incarnation, the “Theotokos,” the Mother who is at the cross, the first human creature prostrated in body and soul in eternal adoration.

The “offering to the Father” of which Saint Paul speaks (1 Corinthians 15:22-28) will be the solemn entry of all the just with their souls and bodies into their definitive vocation, in the perpetual “alleluia” for which they were created.

Our Lady, meanwhile, was already fully immersed in this adoration since her Assumption. But being the Mother of the Church, she can then offer to the Father, in union with Jesus, the spiritual body of Christ that finally reached its fullness (“Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and knowledge of the Son of God, the perfect man, according to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” Ephesians 4:13).

And this offering will not only be of the fruits of her initial “fiat” but also of the fruits obtained through her mediation. Indeed, at the moment of this offering to the Father, which will represent the Advent of the Kingdom of God in full bloom, the real power and the Kingdom of God will be united. The real power of God, which is His sanctifying action in souls, is realized in all men of good will, Christians or not.

The Kingdom of God, which is the Church, includes both the just and sinners, as well as the parables of the tares, the miraculous catch of fish, the ten virgins, and even more clearly, the description of the universal judgment in Matthew 25:31-46. So that at the end of the world, all good pagans, all children of the sovereign power of God, all sanctified or justified faithful will be found in the Kingdom of God, while all bad children of the Church, unrepented sinners, will be excluded from this same kingdom (Matthew 13:39-42; 25:46; Revelation 21:8). And this offering will continue forever!

Those who link the foundation of the Kingdom of God with the end of the world, in an imaginary eschatology, cut Our Lady off and also exclude us from a vital continuity with these essential realizations.

St. Paul, on the contrary, tells us: “For just as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. But each one in his own order: first Christ, who is the firstfruits; then those who belong to Christ at his Parousia. Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father” (1 Corinthians 15:22-24). And all of God’s Kingdom, therefore, the whole Church, will participate in these great events: immediately after Christ, His Mother, and then gradually, all of us.

This is a *theology of hope* that could be seen afresh by emphasizing the organic continuity of the Kingdom and the Church, founded at the moment of the Incarnation, which develops until the *Parousia*, opening up in the glory of the Father. This hope is closely associated with Mary, because she would be “the source of the vast river that flows into eternity,” and from which each one of us is a drop.

All these points deserve deeper reflection, so as to extract their full potential. But they are indications that at least allow us to see that the perspectives for the realization of the Kingdom, as well as its foundation, are deeply renewed if we accept to recognize the equation: Kingdom = Church. Mary, who participated in the birth of the Church, therefore also participates in its *heavenly coronation* as queen of angels. Just as we, members of the Church, will participate.

To deepen the relationship between God’s reign and Mary’s role in Mariology, consult Pope John Paul II’s encyclical *Redemptoris Mater* on Mary and the Kingdom of God.

For further study: explore Mariology, Marian theology, Marian apparitions, and a *Post-Graduate Degree in Mariology*.