|
 |
|
Homilies are posted no later than during the week
prior to the Sunday they are needed |
|
|
Mary the Mother of God
|
Solemnity
of Mary, Mother of God - Cycle C
Luke 2:16-21
Do you recall the story? Jesus was taking His morning walk through
heaven. He met there nasty people who should be in the other place.
Angrily He went to the front gates to bawl Peter out. In his defense,
the apostle said, "Lord, when the unworthy come here, I chase them away
and tell them to go to hell. But then they go to the back door, knock
softly, and your mother sneaks them in." The Christ smiled and
apologized to Peter. He promised to go fishing with him soon. Then He
whistled softly as He went off to have lunch with Mozart and Bach.
Fulton Sheen gave a talk to priests in 1974. He began by quoting a
professor from the University of California. The professor claimed that
whenever one hears a good word about the Blessed Virgin Mary, one can
be sure the author is a Protestant. Also he said if one reads a bad
word about the Mother of God, one may suspect the author is a Catholic.
The memorable archbishop conceded that this was an exaggeration. But in
the next breath he mentioned that "it must be said that two of the best
books on the Blessed Virgin were written by Protestants." The
first was called a Treatise on Mary by the monks of Taize. The
second was Meditations on the Rosary by Methodist minister Neville Ward.
I leave you to your own judgment on the university professor's point
and Sheen's reaction.
But what is certain is that our American bishops said that a recent
August 15 Feast of the Assumption was not a Holy Day of obligation. It
fell on a Monday. Accordingly, very few Catholics took themselves to
Mass to honor this extraordinary woman. The parishes about me had but
one Liturgy and that sparsely attended. Somehow I felt the only mother
God ever had, in the words of Vincent McCorry, deserved much better.
Ironically, though, in that same month and year an edition of that most
secular of magazines, The New Yorker, did not ignore the Virgin. The
weekly in a full page piece alluded to a book The Jewish 100: a Ranking
of the Most Influential Jews of All Time. The author is a Jewish
gentleman, Michael Shapiro. Predictably he placed Moses as number one.
And Jesus was second. But what was surprising to The New Yorker editor
was that Mr Shapiro listed Mary in his top 100.
The New Yorker speaks. "We put the question to Mr Shapiro: Why the
Virgin Mary? `She made the church user- friendly,' Mr Shapiro
explained. `She made it into a softer place.'"
Ironically enough, as Fulton Sheen might tell us, once again a
non-Catholic was kind to our remarkable Mary. On the other hand, many
of her own kinsfolk are very shabby to her.
Very few of us I wager would quibble with the on-target insights of
Mary's fellow Jew, Michael Shapiro. She surely has made the Church
user-friendly and a softer place. As Elizabeth Johnson has put it,
"Mary embodies the female face of God. She does this as a merciful
mother who will not let one of her children be lost." We are all in her
debt for that dimension of her character in the now and here. Many of
us may even be more in her debt at the time of our death.
But in fact Mr Shapiro is simply reminding us of an old concept.
Artists of the medieval period often painted the Virgin with a
voluminous cloak. Their inference was that all of us could get under
it. There, if necessary, we could hide and seek sanctuary and support
from her. She would be our own back door into Heaven.
I heard a preacher speak of a mother who goes each visiting day to
spend time with her daughter in a psychiatric hospital. The daughter
has been estranged from her for years. She refuses in the rudest way
possible to meet with her mother. Still the next visiting day finds the
mother back again hoping to speak with her child. The preacher wisely
compared this mother to Mary who never gives up on anyone of us no
matter how wretched we are.
Sheen said whenever there is a decline in purity or the sanctity of
marriage, there is a decline in devotion to Mary. He says it falls on
us to revive that devotion by reviving it in our lives. Would anyone
quarrel with his conclusion?
|
|
http://www.st.ignatius.net/pastor.html
Mary the Mother of God
|
Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God:
The Integration of Physical
and the Spiritual
The
title of today’s celebration is an expression we use often, but if we
step back from it we can see that it is rather shocking. The
title of the feast is the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. We
use that title of Mary every time we say the Hail Mary, “Holy Mary
Mother of God Pray for us sinners”. But, what do we mean by
it? We certainly do not believe that Mary was a goddess.
That’s polytheism and paganism. The understanding of today’s
feast flows from and understanding of whom Jesus is. We believe
that Jesus Christ is one person, with two natures, human and divine.
There is only one Jesus, but he is both God and Man. At Christmas
we celebrate the Eternal Word of God, the Second Person of the Holy
Trinity, becoming One with us: “The Word Became Flesh and dwelt among
us.” The One who was for all eternity divine, takes upon himself
in time a human nature. Mary is the Mother of the Eternal One who
has taken a human nature through her. She is therefore, the
mother of God.
That’s the theological side of today’s feast. Let’s look at the
spiritual side by focusing in on Mary. Mary is the paragon of a
person of faith. She has an interior relationship with God that
renders His Presence so real in her life that she conceived His
Presence in her heart before she conceived His Presence in her
womb. This is the way that St. Augustine explained Mary’s
interior life.
Ultimately, faith is the integration of the spiritual and the physical,
the invisible and the visible. Faith is an interior relationship
with the Source of All There Is. Externally, faith is the way we
deal with the world. Through faith we make the relationship to the
spiritual, physical. With faith we make the relationship to the
invisible, visible. Through faith Mary made her relationship to God
visible. The spiritual became physical. The Word of God
became flesh and dwelt among us. The physical birth of the
eternal Son of God is the result of Mary being thoroughly “full of
grace.”
She
is the best of us. She is the one with the most profound
relationship with God. Yet, the gospels continually note that
Mary steps aside from the astounding events surrounding the birth of
Jesus and, for that matter, His entire life. Mary ponders things in her
heart, the scripture says. Why does St. Luke even bother to note
that? Certainly any one who was present at the Nativity would
ponder this within their heart. Certainly, anyone who is told by
an old man in the Temple that her child would be the cause of the rise
and fall of many and that a sword would pierce her heart would dwell on
this for the rest of her life. Certainly, anyone who searched for a
missing 12 year old and found Him teaching learned men would wonder
what all this was about. Why does the Gospel of Luke mention this
“pondering in her heart” over and over again? Perhaps, because the
Gospel of Luke wants to emphasize that Mary is not just an simple and
ignorant bystander to the event of salvation. She is quite aware
that God is working His miracle of redemption for His people. She
is also aware that her role in God’s plan is be sure the focus is on
the divine initiative, not on her. She allowed God to work without
obscuring His actions with her own interventions. This is the
very essence of the spiritual life: to allow God’s work to be seen, and
His Presence to be experienced in us and through us without deflecting
the attention to us, The great American spiritual writer, Thomas
Merton, put it this way: Mary is in the highest sense a person because
she does not obscure God’s light in her being. When we celebrate the
Feast of Mary, the Mother of God, we celebrate Mary being a
person in the highest sense. She is the one who allowed the
spiritual to become physical without allowing herself to diminish His
work, His very being, with her own physical limitations.
We
are all so unlike Mary. We want others to be well aware of our
participation in the spiritual. We want others to be well aware
of our holiness so they might be thoroughly impressed with us. We
forget that if we allow the attention to focus on us we are obscuring
the Presence of God trying to work through us. Mary, the paragon of
faith, the Mother of God, must be our model for the Christian
life. If we really want to be people of God we have got to be
sure that the focus of all we do as Christians is on God, not on
ourselves. If and when we do this than the spiritual is able to
become physical and our faith is able to become real.
No,
Mary is not a goddess. Her faith life has shown us all how to bring God
to earth and how to allow others to experience the spiritual become
physical, the Word Become Flesh. She is the Mother of God.
Today we ask her to help us to have the faith, humility and courage to
allow God to become real in our lives, in our families and in our
world. May, Mary, Mother of God, teach us how to bring Jesus to a
world that longs for Him.
|
|
http://www.geocities.com/seapadre_1999/
* available in Spanish - see
Spanish homilies
Mary the Mother of God
|
|
|
http://www.agreeley.com/homilies.html
Mary the Mother of God
|
|
|
http://www.saintvincentarchabbey.org/homilies/index.lasso
Mary the Mother of God
|
|
|
http://www.christusrex.org/www1/mcitl/lowhome.html Meeting Christ in the Liturgy
Mary the Mother of God
|
Solemnity
of Mary, Mother of God
Numbers 6, 22-27; Psalm 67, 2-3.5.6.8; Galatians 4, 4-7; St. Luke 2,
16-21
Quickly after acclaiming the birth of the Messiah we turn with equal
wonder in contemplation of his mother, immaculate and therefore "full
of grace", who does not know man because she has vowed herself to
perpetual virginity and whom all generations have called "blessed": the
Blessed Virgin Mary.
We proclaim and preach the marvel God has brought forth in her,
granting her a unique role in our redemption as "Mother of God".
"Mary is the Virgo Praedicanda, that is, the Virgin who is to be
proclaimed, to be heralded, literally, to be preached. We are
accustomed to preach abroad that which is wonderful, strange, rare,
novel, important. Thus when our Lord was coming, St. John the Baptist
preached Him; then, the Apostles went into the wide world and preached
Christ. What is the highest, the rarest, the choicest prerogative of
Mary? It is that she was without sin... This then is why she is the
Virgo Praedicanda; she is deserving to be preached abroad because she
never committed any sin...
"Preaching is a gradual work: first one lesson, then another. Thus were
the heathen brought into the Church gradually. And in like manner, the
preaching of Mary to the children of the Church, and the devotion paid
to her by successive ages. Not so much was preached about her in early
times as in later. First she was preached as the Virgin of
Virgins--then as the Mother of God--then as glorious in her
Assumption--then as the Advocate of sinners--then as Immaculate in her
Conception. And this last has been the special preaching of the present
century; and thus that which is earliest in her own history is the
latest in the Church's recognition of her." (John Cardinal Newman)
Called in the Gospels "the mother of Jesus," Mary is acclaimed by
Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Spirit and even before the birth of
her son, as "the mother of my Lord." (Lk 1:43; Jn 2:1; 19:25; cf. Mt
13:55; et. al.) In fact, the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy
Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other
than the Father's eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity.
Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly "Mother of God"
(Theotokos). (Council of Ephesus (431): DS 251.) (CCC 495)
I look forward to meeting you here again next week as, together, we
"meet Christ in the liturgy", Father Cusick
(Publish with permission.) www.christusrex.org/www1/mcitl/
|
|
http://www.ctk-thornbury.org.uk/
Mary the Mother of God
|
|
|
Father Bonar will not be posting homilies for Cycle B to allow himself
time for other projects. His collection of homilies (including homilies
for Cycle B) is available at www.clydebonar.com.
Mary the Mother of God |
|
|
These
homilies may be copied and adapted for your own use;
however, they may not be commercially published without permission of
the author. |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
