You Don’t Need Mary As Your Mediator. You Need Christ Alone.
A "to-the-point" style of writing on an important doctrine.
The Main Point
Not only do you not need Mary in order to get to Jesus. You should not go to Mary to get to Jesus. Jesus Christ is the only Mediator between God and Man. While Jesus is the only Mediator between God and Man there is no Mediator between Jesus and Man.
What A Respected Catholic Has Said
Augustine once said, “Mary was more blessed in accepting the faith of Christ than in conceiving the flesh of Christ. To someone who said, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore you,’ [Jesus] replied, ‘Rather, blessed are they who hear the word of God and keep it.’ Finally, for His brothers, His relatives according to the flesh who did not believe in Him, of what advantage was that relationship? Even her maternal relationship would have done Mary no good unless she had borne Christ more happily in her heart than in her flesh.”
The Importance of Mary & The Greater Importance of Jesus
To be sure, Mary is hugely important to the history of redemption. She is not so important in the sense that God was dependent upon her or that she added anything to God. Yet, she is very important in the narrative of Scripture. Mary was someone who had saving faith. She grew in godliness. She was given the unique privilege of giving birth to the Messiah. Yet, she needed to be saved from her own sins and sinful nature just like everyone else. She gave birth to Jesus so that she too could be saved by Jesus alone.
The Bible makes it very clear that Jesus alone is to be seen as the Mediator we go to. 1 Timothy 2:5-6 says, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.” The emphasis here is that we ought not to get distracted by any other teaching—false teaching—that says that there are other ways to God. Jesus is the way (Jn. 14:6).
We need a Mediator between us and God but we don’t need a Mediator between us and Jesus. Jesus is God in our flesh. In His very Person He is the bridge between God and Man. The very reason that God the Son took on flesh was for the purpose of being the one way for sinners to get to God.
Can We Pray To Mary?
“But, does that mean we can’t pray to Mary?” The Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church says, “When we pray to [Mary], we are adhering with her to the plan of the Father, who sends his Son to save all men. Like the beloved disciple we welcome Jesus’ mother into our homes, for she has become the mother of all the living. We can pray with and to her” (part 4, § 1, ch. 2, art. 2, ¶ 2679). Do we accept that as truth or not?
First off, nowhere in Scripture does it say to pray to Mary. On the contrary, there are numerous places where we are told to pray to Christ (Acts 7:55-60; Rom. 10:13; 1 Cor. 1:2; 16:22; 2 Cor. 12:8; 1 Tim. 1:5-6; Heb. 4:15; 7:25; Rev. 22:20). Jesus is the only Mediator between God and Man so that we might go directly to Jesus rather than to anyone or anything else. All other ways are idolatrous, sinful, and heretical.
In the 1566 Reformed Confession, The Second Helvetic Confession, chapter 5 says, “We do not adore, worship, or pray to the saints in heaven, or to other divine beings, and we do not acknowledge them as our intercessors or mediators before the Father in heaven.” Our very own Westminster Confession of Faith 21.2 says, “Religious worship is to be given to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and to him alone, not to angels, saints, or any other creature, and since the fall, not without a mediator, nor in the mediation of any other but of Christ alone.” There are 13 sections of Scripture cited for this one sentence. And the Reformers were not developing something new. They were “re-forming” the Church to believe what the Church has always believed.
Conclusion
Brothers and sisters, the good news is that you can go right to Jesus. Do not go anywhere else or to anyone else. Go right to Him right now! Go to Him with your sins. Go to Him with your doubts. Go to Him with your hurts and pains. He is gentle and lowly more than anyone else. (Mt. 11:28-30). He is more forgiving than anyone else (1 Jn. 1:9). He is God in our flesh and He bids you to come to Him.