Mary Crowned in Glory; Let us Praise, Worship, and Adore the King of Kings
Fifth Glorious Mystery
👑 The Coronation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Crowned in Glory — Because Her Son Is King
The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary is a mystery of importance for two reasons. The first is the cause of her queenship, which is nothing other than the Kingship of Jesus Christ. The second is that it prefigures the reward awaiting us in heaven.
Get the first right and every objection to the second falls away. Her crown is not her own. It is His.
To understand her queenship we must first understand His kingship, and not merely with the adjectives one usually attaches to kings, good or bad, powerful or meek. Jesus Christ is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Since He is God, as we proclaim in the Creed, "consubstantial with the Father, begotten not made," His nature is all-perfect, and so He is all-powerful, all-good, all-just, and meek besides.
But He is a King of a very particular sort, and here two distinct titles must be kept apart, because they carry two distinct offices.
Salem is the ancient name of Jerusalem, the Holy City where the Temple would stand for the worship of the One True God, and where the Davidic throne was set. So the final Davidic King is also the King-Priest of Melchizedek's order. And any priest who proclaims God, His Kingdom, and the salvation men so desperately need is thereby also a prophet. Hence the three offices of Jesus Christ: Priest, Prophet, and King, the munus triplex we met on the mountain of the Transfiguration.
Now everything turns on a single fact about the kingdom Christ inherits. In the Davidic court, the queen was not the wife of the king. Had she been, David and Solomon with their many wives would have had a multitude of queens, which is absurd. The queen was the gebirah, the Great Lady, the mother of the reigning king. And her office was to intercede.
See it happen. When Adonijah wanted a petition brought before King Solomon, he did not go to the king. He went to the king's mother and said, "Pray ask King Solomon, for he will not refuse you" (1 Kings 2:17). And then watch what the king does when his mother comes in:
The king rises. The king bows. The king enthrones his mother at his right hand, and there she intercedes for the people. That is the office of the queen mother in the kingdom of David, and Jesus Christ is the final King of David's line.
Mary is Queen for exactly one reason: she is the Mother of the King. Her queenship is not a rival crown but a derived one. It exists only because His kingship exists, and it points to nothing but Him.
Her intercession is written into Scripture at Cana, where she tells the servants, "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5). That is the whole of her queenly office in five words. She takes our need to her Son, and she sends us to Him. To serve the Queen is to serve the King.
Having perfectly united her will to God's, her role as Queen of Heaven and Earth is to bring all souls to her Son. She is still further set apart from us, for while we are the adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ and the adopted children of the Father, she alone is His Mother in the flesh, the Ark of the New Covenant.
The second reason this mystery matters is that her reward shows us ours. After we die and are judged, we pray to hear the words:
And the symbol of that reward is a crown: "when the chief Shepherd is manifested you will obtain the unfading crown of glory" (1 Peter 5:4). Why a crown for us? Because in Baptism we are made to share in the very nature and offices of Christ. We die to sin, are born again of the Holy Ghost, and are raised in Him, and so we come to share, in a far lesser degree, in His threefold office.
Hence the very title King of Kings. He is not only King over every earthly king who has ever existed or ever will, but those are kings of their own small kingdoms; He is King of the Kingdom of God, and He makes us its priests, its prophets, and its lesser kings and queens.
The fruit of this mystery is trust in the intercession of our Queen Mother, and with it the hope of our own eternal happiness. She sits at the right hand of her Son not to keep us from Him but to carry us to Him. Go to her with confidence; she will do at your asking exactly what she did at Cana, and turn you toward the King.
Pray each verse, then the Ave Maria. (Scripture follows the RSV-2CE, except the three Sirach verses; see the note below.)
(Douay) I am the mother of fair love,
(Douay) and of fear, and of knowledge, and of holy hope.
(Douay) In me is all grace of the way and of the truth, in me is all hope of life and of virtue.
And so the twenty mysteries close.
We began in a garden of Nazareth with an angel's greeting and a young woman's fiat. We followed the Word made flesh into a manger, a temple, a river, a wedding, a mountain, and an upper room. We walked with Him into a second garden where He sweat blood, and up a hill where He was lifted between two thieves. We stood at an empty tomb, watched Him ascend, and waited with His Mother for the fire. And here at the end we find her crowned, at the right hand of the Son she once carried.
The whole Rosary is one story told on a string of beads: God became man, suffered, died, rose, and reigns, and He means to bring us where He is. Mary is simply the first He brought there. The crown on her head is the promise of the crown prepared for every soul that keeps faith to the end.
She was made Queen to lead us to the King. So take up the beads again, and let her.
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