This feast is one of the reasons I love the Blessed Virgin. Having given her fiat – her “yes” – to God, she now shows concern for her elder relative who is also with child. She goes to visit her in a great act of hospitality, which is one of the virtues Paul admonished the Romans to follow in our first reading today. Perhaps because of her faith and her great concern for Elizabeth, Elizabeth’s own child begins to rejoice in the womb, recognizing his Lord and the great woman who would bring him to human life.
While we don’t have an exact account of what happened at that visit, we do have the Church’s recollection of its spirit, as told through Luke the Evangelist. The whole feeling of this Gospel story is one of great joy, which is perhaps why this is one of the joyful mysteries of the holy Rosary. Both Elizabeth and Mary represent the Church in the telling of the story. Because just as Elizabeth was moved by the faith and generosity of Mary, so the Church continues to be edified by her example of faith and charity. And just as Mary rejoiced in what God was doing in her life, so the Church continues to rejoice at the mighty acts of God in every person, time and place.
The Gospel reading ends with the great song called the Magnificat which is Mary’s song of praise to God for the wonders he has done throughout all time, but also in her own life. We too should make that our own song as we continue to be overjoyed by the great acts of God, shepherding us all through our own lives, and intervening in our world and society to bring grace to a world darkened by sin. We, too, can pray with Mary, “From this day all generations will call me blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.”
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
Tag: Blessed Virgin Mary
-
The Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
-
The Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary
On this, the octave day of the Assumption of Mary, we celebrate another great Marian event, the memorial of the Queenship of Mary. Today we celebrate the fifth glorious mystery of the rosary: Mary is crowned Queen of heaven and earth. The Queenship of Mary has been celebrated ever since Venerable Pope Pius XII instituted this celebration in 1954. But the feast itself is rooted in Sacred Scripture. In the Old Testament, the mothers of the king had great influence in court. Certainly this would be the case between Mary and Jesus; we know that Mary’s intercession is a powerful force for our good. The Queenship of Mary, though, is most properly understood as a sharing in the Kingship of Christ the King. St. Paul speaks of the crown that awaited him after a long life, filled with fighting the good fight. And we know that that same crown – the crown that comes from Christ himself – awaits all who believe in Jesus and live lives of faith.
The origin of Mary’s crown, I think, can be seen at the very end of today’s Gospel reading. Having heard the overwhelming news from the angel Gabriel, Mary responds in faith: “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Her faith, a faith that responded to the Lord’s call even though the details were not clear, is the kind of faith we’re all called to model. This kind of faith responds to God’s movement with absolute trust in his providence. Mary models that kind of response for us, and perhaps her reward, too, is a model of what we can hope to receive. Just as she responded in faith and was rewarded with a crown of glory, so we too can hope to have the same crown if we live the kind of faith she did.And that’s the goal of our spiritual lives, brothers and sisters. We are to discern God’s call and respond with faith that leaves the details to God alone. Mary is always the model for us. She paves the way to living the Gospel as we are all called to do. But Mary is also the intercessor for us. She knew the difficulties and the sorrows that taking up the cross of the Gospel means for us, so we can depend on her intercession to help us through it. So on this feast day of her crowning, may we all look at our own calls in this life, and respond with her fiat: “Let it be done for me according to your word.”
-
The Immaculate Heart of Mary
Today’s Gospel story is a fitting one, I think, for this celebration of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The evangelist tells us that Mary’s heart was filled with wonder. There are a few stories in the Gospels that end with that wonderful line: “and his mother kept all these things in her heart.” I think the moms here can understand the sentiment of these lines. I think any mother is amazed at the things their children learn to do, but Mary’s wonderment goes beyond even that: she is amazed at the coming of age of Jesus Christ as the Son of God. She knew her child would be special, and when you read these stories you can just imagine how astounded she is at times. Her heart was filled with wonder.
At other places in the Gospel, I imagine her heart is filled with fear. She began to see, I am sure, that the wonderful things her son was doing were not universally appreciated. She must have known that the authorities were displeased and were plotting against him. She probably worried that he would be in danger, which of course he was. Her heart was filled with fear.
Toward the end of the Gospel, her heart is certainly filled with sorrow. As she stood at the foot of the cross, her son, the love of her life, is put to death. The Stabat Materhymn calls that well to mind: “At the cross her station keeping, stood the mournful mother weeping, close to Jesus at the last.” The prophet Simeon had foretold her sorrow when she and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple. Her heart was filled with sorrow.
At the end of the Gospel, her heart must have been filled with joy. Jesus’ death was not the end of the story. Not only did his life not end at the grave, now the power of the grave is smashed to oblivion by the power of the resurrection. In those first hours after his resurrection, she shared the joy of the other women and the disciples. Her heart was filled with joy.
And as the community went forward in the book of Acts to preach the Good News and to make the Gospel known to every corner of the world, Mary’s heart was filled with love. That love that she had for her son, that love that she received from God, she now shared as the first of the disciples. Her place in the community was an honored one, but one that she took up with great passion. Her heart was filled with love.
For us, perhaps, the best news is that, through it all, her heart was always filled with faith. That faith allowed her to respond to God’s call through the angel Gabriel with fiat: “let it be done to me according to your word.” Because of Mary’s faith, the unfolding of God’s plan for the salvation of every person came to fruition. We are here this morning, to some extent because of her faith, that faith that allowed her to experience the wonder, sustained her through fear and sorrow, and brought life to the joy and love she experienced. She kept all these things in her heart, that heart that was always filled with faith.
-
The Solemnity of the Annunciation
Fear keeps us from doing all sorts of things the Lord wants for us. If we would truly let go of our fear and cling to our God, just imagine what he could do in us and through us. Ahaz was King of Israel, a mighty commander, but yet was so afraid of God and what God might do that he refused to ask for a sign. He was such an ineffective leader that he had good reason to be afraid. Perhaps he knew how far he had strayed from God’s commands, and he was afraid to engage God on any level. He would prefer to cut himself off from God rather than give himself over to the amazing power of God’s presence in his life and his rule.
But his weakness did not disrupt the promise. In the fullness of time, God’s messenger came to a young woman named Mary and proposed to accomplish in her life the sign for which Ahaz was too afraid to ask. The difference, though, was that Mary heeded the initial words of the angel that have resounded through Salvation history ever since: “Do not be afraid.” And, thanks be to God, Mary abandoned her fear and instead sang her fiat, her great “yes” to God’s plan for her, and for all of us. “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.”
And we know what happened from there. Mary certainly knew that none of that could be accomplished through her own efforts, but she absolutely knew that God could do whatever he undertook. Nothing would be impossible for God, and she trusted in that, and because of that, we have the great hope of our salvation. We owe everything to Mary’s cooperation with God’s plan.
And so the promise comes to us. We have the great sign of which Ahaz was afraid, but in which Mary rejoiced. We too are told that God can accomplish much in our own lives, if we would abandon our fears and cling to the hope of God’s presence and action in our lives. Can we too be the handmaids of the Lord? Are we bold enough to say, “Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will?” All we have to do is to remember the first thing the angel said to Mary: “Do not be afraid.”
-
The Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
In every age of the world, people have needed hope. Because in every age of the world, there has been unbelievable hardship. There has always been war, and disease, and poverty, and oppression, and alienation, and all the rest. There has always been sin, and broken relationships, and impure desires and that feeling of emptiness that hardens our hearts. Evil has run rampant from the fall of humanity and ever onward. And the weight of all of that could be crushing – if we didn’t have hope.
And I don’t need to be abstract about this. We certainly have been and still are dealing with one of the most prolific pandemics of our time. Just when we think things will go back to normal, a variant emerges that causes concern all over again. No one can agree on what to do to keep people well, and an illness becomes even worse: a source of division, as if we needed another one. Our pulling out of the endless conflict in Afghanistan causes renewed violence in the region. Wildfires are destroying whole regions and are plaguing ever more locations of the earth, and violent weather batters many other places. In our own lives we have the illness and death of loved ones; family members alienating one another; loss of employment; and that’s just to name a few. There’s no way we could live with all that – if we didn’t have hope.
And I don’t mean hope in the Pollyanna sense. I’m not going to tell you, “don’t worry – everything will work out all right” because, honestly, some things just won’t. The hope that I think we can find in today’s Liturgy is the theological virtue that reminds us that this is not all there is; this is not as good as it gets. Our readings remind us that there has been and still is, and perhaps always will be incredible evil in this world, but evil doesn’t get the final say – not for Jesus, not for Mary, and not for us. One look at the way things work in our world and in our lives could convince us that this has all been an unbelievable failure – if we didn’t have hope.
Today, we joyfully celebrate the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which dates back to the very earliest days of the Church, all the way back to the days of the apostles. It was known that Mary had “fallen asleep” and that there is a “Tomb of Mary” close to Mount Zion, where the early Christian community had lived. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 tells us that, after Mary’s death, the apostles opened the tomb, finding it empty, and concluded that she had been taken bodily into heaven. The tradition was spoken about by the various fathers of the Church, and in the eighth century, St. John Damascene wrote, “Although the body was duly buried, it did not remain in the state of death, neither was it dissolved by decay … You were transferred to your heavenly home, O Lady, Queen and Mother of God in truth.” The current celebration of Mary’s Assumption has taken place since 1950, when Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma of the Assumption of Mary in his encyclical, Munificentissimus Deus, saying: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven.”
The hope that we find in the doctrine of the Assumption is summed up in the Preface to today’s Eucharistic Prayer, which I will sing in a few minutes. Listen to the beautiful words of that prayer:
For today the Virgin Mother of God
was assumed into heaven
as the beginning and image
of your Church’s coming to perfection
and a sign of sure hope and comfort to your pilgrim people…The Church knows well that our pilgrim way in this world would be filled with evil. But the Church courageously believes that this world’s experience isn’t the be-all and end-all of our existence: we have much to look forward to in the life to come. Our Savior himself foretold as much in John’s gospel when he said, “I have told you this so that you might have peace in me. In the world you will have trouble, but take courage, I have conquered the world.” (John 16:33) This, brothers and sisters in Christ, is our hope, and this is the hope that we celebrate today.
The reason the Church reveres Mary as much as she does, and celebrates this feast with so much joy, is because Mary’s life is the icon of the Church. What is important for us to see in this feast is that it proclaims with all the joy the Church has at her disposal that what happened to Mary can happen and will happen for us who believe. We too have the promise of eternal life in heaven, where death and sin and pain will no longer have power over us. Because Christ caught his Blessed Mother back up into his life in heaven, we know that we too can be caught up with his life in heaven. On that great day, death, the last enemy, will be completely destroyed, as Saint Paul tells us today. That is our hope: our unbelievably gracious, completely unmerited, lovingly-bestowed hope.
Mary’s life wasn’t always easy, but Mary’s life was redeemed. That is good news for us who have difficult lives or fine it hard to live our faith. Because there are those among us too who have family lives that are made difficult by external circumstances. There are those among us whose children go in directions that put them in danger. There are those among us who have to watch a child die. But because Mary suffered these sorrows too, and yet was exalted, we can hope for the day when that which she was given and which we have been promised will surely be ours. We can and do hope in this salvation every day of our lives. It’s what makes our lives livable; it’s what gives us the strength to keep going, in the midst of so much difficulty.
Today’s readings can seem pretty fantastic, in the sense that we don’t know what to believe about them. The reading from revelation has a dragon sweeping a third of the stars from the sky, and a child being caught up to heaven. But really, I don’t think that’s too hard to grasp. We have all been through things in our lives when it felt like a third of the stars had fallen out of the sky. There is that evil dragon that seeks us out and wants to devour the hope that we have, but the child of that hope has been taken up to heaven, and we can go there one day too, if we believe, and repent, and cling to Christ who is our hope.
Mary’s song of praise in today’s gospel reading, which the Church prays every evening in Vespers, echoes the hope we have in this feast of the Assumption:
He has come to the help of his servant Israel
for he has remembered his promise of mercy,
the promise he made to our fathers,
to Abraham and his children forever.Life is hard. It always has been, and probably always will be. But this life is not all there is. As we walk through this life on our pilgrim way to God’s kingdom, we walk always in the presence of our God who sees us, who notices our pain and sorrow, who grieves with us and laughs with us, who never lets go of us, and who gives us hope beyond anything we deserve. As we live our lives here on earth, we find ourselves straining toward heaven, looking up for our redemption, knowing that where Mary has gone, we hope to follow.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
-
Monday of the Twelfth Week of Ordinary Time (Beginning of Vacation Bible School)
God is absolutely, always, faithful to his promises.
In our first reading tonight, God makes a promise to Abram, later to be called Abraham. God calls on him to make an act of faith and go to a foreign land to become a great nation. This would be a great miracle, because Abram and his wife Sarai, were childless into their old age, and had given up hope of ever having a child. God promised to give Abram descendants and a land to live on, and God, who is absolutely, always, faithful to his promises did just that: Abram’s descendants are numerous and they inherited the land as God promised.
In our Gospel reading tonight, Jesus calls his disciples, including us, to stop judging, so that we might have forgiveness for our own sins. If we are always looking for faults in our brothers and sisters, we can’t see the goodness of God in them, nor can they see it in us. But if we admit our own faults, and forgive the faults of others, we are open to the forgiveness that Jesus promises. And God, who is absolutely, always, faithful to his promises, does just that: he forgives us time and time again.
Today we begin our parish Vacation Bible School, where we will travel with Mary to the many places that she has appeared to people over the centuries. Mary was faithful to God’s plan for her life, and because of that, she gave birth to Jesus our Savior. She was the first of all the disciples and a witness to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Over the centuries, she continued to bring God’s love and mercy to people all over the world, causing many people to come to believe in God and receive his grace through the Sacraments of the Church. She has appeared to people in Fatima, Medjugorje, Lourdes, Knock, and Guadalupe, just to name a few! And every time she appeared, she helped people to know that God loves them and forgives them and is absolutely, always, faithful to his promises.
When I was in the Holy Land in 2019, I got to visit the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth. It was a wonderful place, because we know that is the house where Mary lived, where she heard God’s plan from the Angel Gabriel, and where she and Saint Joseph raised Jesus. But all that is in the Basilica now are the interior walls of the house and the foundation. The outside walls and roof are all gone. You might think they caught fire or were destroyed in the centuries since, but that’s not the case.
Just on the eve of the house being destroyed by infidels during the Crusades, the house, which had survived similar attacks in the past, was picked up during the night, and brought by angels to what is now Yugoslavia. Shepherds, who worked in the nearby fields, came one morning to see a house that had never been there before, and contained an altar, a statue of Mary, and a Crucifix. The priest of the parish, who was crippled with arthritis, prayed to know where the house had come from, and Mary answered him in a dream:
“’Know that his house,’ she said, ‘is the same in which I was born and brought up. Here, at the Annunciation….I conceived the Creator of all things. Here, the Word of the Eternal Father became man. The altar which was brought with the house was consecrated by Peter, the Prince of the Apostles. This house has now come to your shores by the power of God….And now in order that you may bear testimony of all these things, be healed. Your unexpected and sudden recovery shall confirm the truth of what I have declared to you.’”
The priest was cured, and the house was venerated for three years, before it was once again moved by angels. This time, people saw it getting moved, and ended up in the Marche region of Italy. Unfortunately bandits surrounded the house, and Our Lord moved the house again, this time to Lecanati. This caused a fight between the brothers that owned the property, and so the house was moved again, finally, to Loreto in Italy, where it remains today.
During that time, scientists went to the Holy Land to examine the spot in Nazareth where the house had been. They were able to confirm that the house is the same size as its foundation that remained in Nazareth, and that the building materials were all those used in Nazareth, and not in any of the places the house had moved to! Over the years, of course, people came to visit and pray at the house, and many people were cured of illnesses there, just as the priest in Yugoslavia had been.
During this week of Vacation Bible School, you will learn that Mary has continued to make the love and mercy of God in Jesus known all throughout the world. She is the first and greatest of all the disciples of Jesus. And through her intercession, many miracles have taken place, and lives have been changed. Because God is absolutely, always, faithful to his promises.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God,
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. -
The Fourth Sunday of Advent
Do you remember the best gift you ever got? What was it? Who gave it to you? How long did it last? Do you still have it?
Every gift is a little different: some are big, some are small, some make a lasting impact, some are used up and soon forgotten. The best gifts, I think, are those that create a memory of good times; perhaps the best gifts are those that can be shared.
God gives us gifts too. And some are big, and some are small, but all of them are important to us and to others. In this season of giving, I’d like to take a moment to talk about God’s gifts, and how they are to be enjoyed. There are four points I want to make.
First, God’s gifts are given to be used. They’re not supposed to be like an action figure that is to be kept in its package and preserved so it can be sold in ten years for a lot of money on eBay! They aren’t like the “good china” some of us have and almost never use. They’re supposed to be used for our happiness and God’s glory. So if it’s a talent for sports, we ought to play. If it’s intelligence, we ought to study and research and invent. If it’s creativity, we ought to paint or act or sing. Keeping it in a box and denying it is an insult to the Giver.
Second, God’s gifts are never just for us. God gifts us in ways that we can build up our community and our world and help people to come to know God’s love for them. Always. Mary never could have kept Jesus to herself, and we’re not supposed to keep our gifts to ourselves either.
Third, we will never know how wonderful our gifts are until we share them with others. Our gifts are supposed to create memories and bring people together and help people to know God. When that happens, the full wonder of those gifts will be revealed to us and in us, and we will enjoy them in ways we never could have before we shared them.
Finally, we don’t lose our gifts when we share them. They don’t get used up when we give them away. Just as Mary didn’t lose her Son when she gave him to the world, so we won’t lose what God has given us when we share it with others. That’s just how God’s gifts are.
In today’s Gospel, Mary received a gift. I don’t know how any of us would feel about that kind of gift, but Mary received it in faith, because Mary was full of grace. She received the gift of a Savior before anyone else did; her fiat meant that she received salvation before it was ever played out on earth. It was the best gift ever, and she got to watch it all unfold before her. Some of it was difficult and painful, but so much of had to be amazing.
Because of Mary’s faith, God was able to send the best gift possible to be shared with all of us: the gift of his only-begotten Son. Jesus took on our flesh as a little baby, and grew to become a man like us in all things but sin. He walked among the people of his time and helped them to know of God’s kingdom. Though he was without sin, he eventually took on our sins and went to the cross for all of us, dying to pay the price for our sins, and canceling out the power that sin and death had to keep us from God. Because of Mary’s faith, we received the gift of salvation, if we are open to accept it.
And just like all our other gifts from God, those same four principles apply: we have to use, or live our salvation; we have to share the gift of salvation with others; salvation becomes more wonderful every time someone else is saved, and salvation is not something that ever gets used up – it’s meant for everyone.
So this is a bit of a “pep talk” for the coming feast of Christmas and how we should receive and live that gift of salvation. Let’s be clear: we always need a Savior. We are sinful, and in our sinfulness we could never enter into relationship with God. And in this year, our need for a Savior seems to be even greater: the darkness of a pandemic and the sadness of racial unrest and all the other societal unrest we have endured this past year. This year has been hard on families and workers and schools and just about everybody. We need to be people of faith and follow our Savior more than ever. And we have to be people who share that gift with others, pointing them to the love and salvation we have in Jesus.
Our salvation, our relationship with God, is a gift, and it’s up to us to spread it around. It’s a shame if someone doesn’t know about God and his love for them. But if they don’t know because we didn’t use our gifts to tell them, then it’s a sin. This is the season for giving gifts. The very best gift you can give to anyone is a relationship with God. Whether it’s your children, or coworkers, or people in the neighborhood, your gift will do so much to make the world a better place. All we have to do is respond like Mary: “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your word.”
-
Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Holy Mother of God
And Mary kept all these things,
reflecting on them in her heart.This is definitely the kind of reflection a mom would do. Saint Luke notes all throughout Jesus’ young life that Mary kept the events of Jesus’ life and reflected on them in her heart. At the visit of the shepherds, and again after finding Jesus in the temple, Mary kept those memories for later reflection. Maybe she understood them, or perhaps had to work them out later, but keeping them in her heart, she was able to ponder the Word. She got to savor those moments over and over; it shows us the joy of Mary’s heart as a mother.
This idea of Mary reflecting on these things in her heart almost reminds me of a kind of It’s kind of scrapbook of memories in her heart, and I found myself wishing during these Christmas days, that I could take a look at that scrapbook. She had a first-hand view of how Jesus grew in wisdom and grace, and as Luke tells the story, her perspective of God’s work in the life of her family had to be incredible.
Mary’s reflection on the life of Jesus is really a model for us. Keeping those events close to her and reflecting on them later is her way of reflecting on the Word of God. Whether she understood them at the time or not, she didn’t just live through the moment and move on. Sadly, in our frantic-paced lives, we do that all too often. But Mary went back to those events later in her life – even after the death and resurrection of Jesus – and came to a new understanding guided by the Holy Spirit. And thank God she did that. It’s probably her later reflection on those events that made the early Church Evangelist able to record them and pass them on to us. I can just imagine Mary sharing those reflections with Luke and the other disciples.
We too, must reflect on the Word of God. We have to put ourselves in the presence of the Story, and ponder it in our hearts. If we’re confused by Scripture, we have Mary as our patron to help us reflect on that Word and come to understand it, guided as we are by the Holy Spirit. But we also have her encouragement to keep those Scriptures in the scrapbook of our hearts, to keep coming back to them. That’s the only way the Spirit can work on us and help us to come to new and more beautiful understandings of the Word of God, and in doing that, to come to a renewed and vibrant relationship with our Lord. But we have to do that following the example of Mary’s reflective pondering, or just like everything else in our lives, we’ll fly through the moment and miss it.
In Advent, I encouraged all of us to take some quiet, reflective time to be with the Lord. Today Mary shows us how to do that, pondering her God incarnate in her own arms. Imagine that! The Incarnation is definitely a mystery worth pondering!
If we would make a resolution for this new year, maybe it could be to follow Mary’s example. Maybe we could set aside some time on a regular basis – even just those five minutes – to put ourselves in the presence of the Word of God. And not just here at Mass, although that’s a good start. But maybe in private prayer or even in an organized Bible Study – we have a few of them going on in our parish on a regular basis. If we regularly open ourselves up to the Word of God, maybe we too could come to new and more beautiful understandings of the Scriptures; and a closer and more beautiful relationship with Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word of God.
Mary, mother of God the Word, help us to understand the Word as you did. Help us to ponder the great mystery of the Incarnation and savor its joy every day.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God:
That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. -
The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Advent is a season of anticipation: God’s promises echo through the Old Testament, and in these Advent days, we see those promises coming to fruition in exciting and world-changing ways. Today’s feast is a glorious glimpse of that reality.
We are honored today to celebrate the patronal feast day of our parish and of our nation, the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. This, of course, celebrates Mary’s conception, not that of Jesus, which we celebrate on the feast of the Annunciation. Blessed Pope Pius IX instituted the solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary on December 8, 1854, when he proclaimed as truth the dogma that our Lady was conceived free from the stain of original sin.
This feast celebrates the belief that God loved the world so much that he sent his only Son to be our Savior, and gave to him a human mother who was chosen before the world began to be holy and blameless in his sight. This feast is a sign for us of the nearness of our salvation; that the plan God had for us before the world ever took shape was coming to fruition.
The readings chosen for this day paint the picture. In the reading from Genesis, we have the story of the fall. The man and the woman had eaten of the fruit of the tree that God had forbidden them to eat. Because of this, they were ashamed and covered over their nakedness. God noticed that, and asked about it. Of course, he already knew what was going on: they had discovered the forbidden tree and eaten its fruit. They had given in to temptation and had grasped at something that was not God, in an effort to become their own god.
Thus begins the pattern of sin and deliverance that cycles all through the scriptures. God extends a way to salvation to his people, the people reject it and go their own way. God forgives, and extends a new way to salvation. Thank God he never gets tired of pursuing humankind and offering salvation, or we would be in dire straits. It all comes to perfection in the event we celebrate today. Salvation was always God’s plan for us and he won’t rest until that plan comes to perfection. That is why St. Paul tells the Ephesians, and us, today: “He chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him. In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ…”
And so, in these Advent days, we await the unfolding of the plan for salvation that began at the very dawn of the world in all its wonder. God always intended to provide an incredible way for his people to return to them, and that was by taking flesh and walking among us as a man. He began this by preparing for his birth through the Immaculate Virgin Mary – never stained by sin, because the one who conquered sin and death had already delivered her from sin. He was then to be born into our midst and to take on our form. With Mary’s fiat in today’s Gospel, God enters our world in the most intimate way possible, by becoming vulnerable, taking our flesh as one like us. Mary’s lived faith – possible because of her Immaculate Conception – makes possible our own lives of faith and our journeys to God.
Our celebration today is a foreshadowing of God’s plan for us. Because Mary was conceived without sin, we can see that sin was never intended to rule us. Because God selected Mary from the beginning, we can see that we were chosen before we were ever in our mother’s womb. Because Mary received salvific grace from the moment of her conception, we can catch a glimpse of what is to come for all of us one day. Mary’s deliverance from sin and death was made possible by the death and resurrection of her Son Jesus, who deeply desires that we all be delivered in that way too.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.
-
The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Today’s Gospel can be a confusing one, perhaps even a little difficult to hear. It’s very disconcerting to see Jesus as being callous to his mother and not receiving her when she came to visit. But our gut – or rather our faith – tells us that Jesus and Mary had a relationship that transcended that kind of thing. It wasn’t that Jesus didn’t care about Mary; it’s just that he knew he really didn’t have to worry about her. She had been filled with grace from the moment of her conception, and would never be without the benefit of that grace.
Theirs was a relationship in which Jesus instinctively knew that his mother was okay and he needed to attend more to the people he ministered. And it is for that reason we celebrate Mary’s presentation today. As with Mary’s birth, we don’t really know anything official about Mary’s presentation in the temple. An unhistorical account tells us that her parents, Anna and Joachim, offered Mary to God in the Temple when she was three years old. This was to carry out a promise made to God when Anna was still childless.
Though it cannot be proven historically, Mary’s presentation has an important theological purpose. It continues the impact of the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and of the birth of Mary. It emphasizes that the holiness conferred on Mary from the beginning of her life on earth continued through her early childhood and beyond. We celebrate Mary, full of grace from the moment of her conception and all throughout her life.
We pray the words of Mary in the Responsorial Psalm today: “The Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name.” Mary was always aware of the amazing grace that sustained her throughout her own very difficult life-long mission. We are graced like that too, and we celebrate that grace with Mary today.
Pray for us, O holy Mother of God; that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.
You must be logged in to post a comment.