'A full measure of honour': Jeremy Taylor and the Mother of the Messiah

Throughout Advent, I will be posting some Marian extracts from Jeremy Taylor's Great Exemplar, demonstrating how in Taylor we see that a thoroughly Protestant understanding (evident, for example, in his Dissuasive, with its robust critique of Tridentine Marian practices) is no barrier to a tender reverence for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

We begin today with words from the outset of Taylor's account of 'The History of the Conception of Jesus'. Here we see how Taylor's depiction of the Blessed Virgin evinces love and reverence, a quiet joy that the grace of God had prepared her for "a full measure of honour":

In the days of Herod the king, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth to a holy maid called Mary, espoused to Joseph; and found her in a capacity and excellent disposition to receive the greatest honour that ever was done to the daughters of men. Her employment was holy and pious, her person young, her years florid and springing, her body chaste, her mind humble, and a rare repository of divine graces. She was full of grace and excellencies. And God poured upon her a full measure of honour, in making her the mother of the Messias.

The reference to the honour of "making her the mother of the Messias" might make us pause. Why not 'Mother of God'? Taylor, after all, was quite used to referring to the Blessed Virgin after that manner - it was not at all controversial for divines of the Church of England. His use at this point of "the mother of the Messias", however, roots the Blessed Virgin in the hopes of Israel, hopes with which Taylor opened The Great Exemplar:

When the fulness of time was come, after the frequent repetition of promises, the expectation of the Jewish nation, the longings and tedious waitings of all holy persons, 'the departure of the sceptre from Judah, and the lawgiver from be tween his feet' ...

Mary, as Taylor oft confessed, is the God-bearer. But she is the God-bearer precisely because Israel's hopes are fulfilled, because the longings of prophets, priests, and kings over centuries have to come to pass in the Child she carries, because she is "the mother of the Messias". This title is indeed "a measure of full honour", for there is no Incarnation apart from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, no Emmanuel apart from the ancient covenant people. To reverence the Daughter of Sion as the Mother of the Messiah is indeed "a full measure of honour", for "Abraham rejoiced to see my day: and he saw it, as was glad".

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