Let Us Glorify The Lord!
The Mysteries of Glory
✨ The Glorious Mysteries
Let Us Glorify the Risen Lord
The Glorious Mysteries are in reference to the great events by which God completes His work of redemption and glorifies His Church. They are what guide the Christian in their efforts and their beliefs, for as St. Paul said to the Corinthians:
Everything the Christian holds rests on the events of glory: the Lord risen, ascended, and reigning, His Spirit poured out on the Church, and the first of the redeemed already taken up into the glory He won.
The first three Glorious Mysteries are so central to the Christian faith because of the nature of each event, how it is brought about, and what it reveals about our own nature as children of God. They are Christological through and through: the Resurrection, the Ascension, and the Descent of the Holy Ghost are events of Christ Himself and of the Church He founded.
The last two mysteries are about the Blessed Virgin Mary, on the face of it. Yet they too are Christological at their core. What happens to her could not have happened apart from her relation to Christ as His Mother, and this is most obvious in the fifth mystery, her queenship, which exists wholly by reference to her Son the King. Her glory is never a rival to His; it is a reflection of it, the first and fullest instance of what He promises all the redeemed.
Each mystery is described briefly below. Tap any to enter its full meditation and scriptural rosary.
To echo St. Paul, the Christian faith would be in vain if Christ had not risen from death. By His defeat of death He shows Himself to be not only the Lord of Life but the Lord of Death, having redeemed us from the wages of our sins.
A crucial aspect of this mystery is the manner in which it occurs, set against how the Blessed Virgin Mary is assumed in the fourth mystery. As we proclaim in the Creed, "He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father Almighty, from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead."
Most easily recognized as the day of Pentecost. In Acts, the Holy Ghost comes down in fulfillment of Christ's promise to send the Counselor from the Father, to guide and sustain the Church He founded upon Peter as its Rock.
At the natural end of her life, Christ assumed His Mother, body and soul, into heaven. It was defined as dogma by Pope Pius XII in 1950. She is the first of the redeemed to share fully in the glory of her Son, a sign of the hope held out to us all.
We see an overt allusion to her queenship in Revelation, in the woman crowned with twelve stars who labors in birth. Her crown is not a rival to Christ's; in a Davidic kingdom the queen is the mother of the king, and she is the Mother of the King of Kings.
The single most important distinction in the Glorious Mysteries is the one between the second and the fourth: how Christ enters heaven, and how His Mother does. To confuse them is to misunderstand both.
This is why her Assumption takes its place among the assumptions of Scripture, of Enoch, whom "God took" (Genesis 5:24), and of Elijah, carried up in the fiery chariot (2 Kings 2:11). Moses is the debated case: Scripture says he died and God buried him, so that no one could find his grave (Deuteronomy 34:5-6), yet his appearance at the Transfiguration has long been read as suggestive of glory. What Scripture attests plainly for Enoch and Elijah, Sacred Tradition holds for Mary, defined as dogma in 1950.
The Assumption does not make Mary divine. It makes her the first Christian, the first of the redeemed to receive in full what Christ has promised to all who are His: the resurrection and glorification of the body. Where Christ ascends as Head, Mary is assumed as the most perfect member of His Body, and we follow behind her in hope.
Many Protestant denominations object that calling Mary "Queen" detracts from Christ. The objection misses two things.
First, the kind of kingdom heaven is. It is a Davidic kingdom, for Christ is the fulfillment of the promise God made to David that his throne would be established forever (2 Samuel 7:12-13). Second, and following from the first, in a Davidic court the queen was not the wife of the king; if she were, David and Solomon with their many wives would have had a multitude of queens. The queen was the gebirah, the queen mother, the mother of the reigning king.
When Bathsheba came before her son King Solomon to bring a petition, "the king rose to meet her, and bowed down to her; then he sat on his throne, and had a seat brought for the king's mother; and she sat on his right hand" (1 Kings 2:19). The mother of the king is enthroned at his right hand, and she intercedes with him on behalf of the people.
So it is with Mary. Her queenship is not a rival crown; it is a derived one, wholly dependent on the kingship of her Son. She is Queen precisely because He is King, and she reigns only by pointing to Him and interceding with Him for us.
The Mother of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Blessed Virgin Mary. To honor the Queen Mother is to honor the King who gave her the honor.
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