Do you really think the universe is organised like an oriental despotism? Do you really think Jesus intended to set up a royal court in Heaven? Does he seem particularly fond of court ritual and pageantry to you in the gospels? When he hands his mother over to his disciples’ care, is he doing it from a royal throne?
The account in Kings makes clear the circumstances of why Solomon took a Queen Mother, and they are not great. Bathsheba herself is one of those types and shadows that only work if you don’t look too closely – stolen from her poor husband by a King and punished along with him for the King’s sin and installed as Queen of Israel because the sins of her son exceed those of his father in taking on so many whores of foreign lands that picking one particular wife as Queen is a political and family impossibility.
There is something obscene about it to me – I can just about recognise an innocent and loving Mary in Bathsheba when she is the wife of Uriah the Hittite, but when she is made to get involved in court affairs, she is loaded down with royal titles and honours because she is subject to degradation and punishment for sins not her fault at all. One comes with the other. If you yourself are a king or queen, in reality or fantasy, then it is pleasing to imagine that you can have the honours without the degradation, as a cope, but if you are free from worshipping real kings and gangsters – and I hope you are – then why abuse the Mother of God by subjecting her to this and saying “you so remind me of Bathsheba that I can’t help myself…”