Happy New Year!
I pray that our Good God will bless all of you richly in 2017.
May Mary, Mother of God, keep you and protect you throughout the year.
Homily: Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God – Cycle A
It’s no secret that I am not the
world’s biggest fan of all of the secular, year-end holiday stuff that has
attached itself to our celebration of the Lord’s birth on Christmas. I’m talking about all of the sentimental
holiday things—like brightly decorated trees with gaily wrapped presents
underneath, snow falling in the moonlight, and egg nog by the fireplace while
listening to songs that speak about all of these things without ever making
reference to the reason why there is a holiday in the first place: the Child
born in Bethlehem who is God and the Savior of the human race. Those of you who heard my homily for
Christmas know that I spoke about how all of these things have become signs
that we have “objectified” Christmas: that is, we’ve turned what was a
subjective reality (a reality in which real people had real experiences) into
an object to be manipulated for our own pleasure and amusement.
You’ll also remember that I proposed a
way for us to break free from this objectification of Christmas: a return to an
understanding of the original event and what it meant to those involved and to
the world. I invited us to imagine a
people suffering under a great oppression—a people of strong faith in their God
who had promised to send them a leader who would free them from their
suffering—who then hear that the one who had been promised had, indeed, been
born; and that through this imagining we would begin to understand the great
prophecies that Isaiah had made about the Messiah and how the infancy
narratives in the Gospels point to their fulfillment in the birth of
Jesus. I invited us to imagine the
smelly, dirty, and yet gloriously real reality of the original event so as to
put our modern-day celebration in its proper perspective; thus ensuring that
would not objectify it, but rather celebrate it for what it truly is: the day
that our salvation came to us.
I recount all of this today because
this day, the octave day of Christmas, the day in which we honor Mary under the
title “the Holy Mother of God”, gives us another opportunity to shake off our
“objectifications” of Christ’s birth and get back to the real subjects who had experienced
this world-changing event. Today we make
a bold statement: that Mary, in every way a human being, is the Mother of God,
that is, the Mother of the Infinite Being through whom all things in the
universe exist and without whom no things exist. That’s crazy, right? How can a human being, who would not exist if
it wasn’t for the pre-existence of God, never the less be the Mother of God? If you’ve never thought of this before, then
you’re not engaging your faith enough and therefore your New Year’s resolution
is to open your catechism in 2017 and read it through, asking the hard
questions and then letting it explain them through the richness of nearly 2000
years of thinking on God’s revelation (Got it?). If you have thought about this before, then
you are in good company. This very
belief was challenged for these very reasons nearly 1600 years ago.
In 431, in the city of Ephesus, an
ecumenical council was held to resolve this issue. Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople at
the time, contended that it was heretical to call Mary the “Mother of God” for
the very reasons to which I’ve already alluded.
Since God is eternal, Nestorius argued, to say that God has a mother is
contradictory: because for someone to have a mother indicates that there was
some sort of birth, or beginning, to that person’s life, which with God simply
cannot be. He contended that she could
be called “Mother of Jesus”, but not “Mother of God”.
St. Cyril, who was the bishop of
Alexandria, knew that this couldn’t be true, because he knew that for Jesus to
be able to accomplish his saving work for us he had to be both fully human and fully divine and that there could be
no separation or “compartmentalization” of the two. He also knew that in the hearts of the
faithful (i.e. the whole Church for the previous four centuries) Mary had been
honored as Mother of God, and so he knew that he couldn’t give way to Nestorius’
erroneous thinking and thus contradict what had already been held as true
(though not concretely defined as such) for nearly four centuries.
Legend has it that crowds of people
waited outside the basilica during the last days of the council waiting to hear
what the bishops had decided the truth was about Mary. When the bishops emerged and definitively
declared that Mary was, indeed, the Mother of God, the crowd erupted with joy
that the bishops had confirmed what they already knew in their hearts was
true. They purportedly carried the
bishops through the streets along with images of Our Lady, singing songs and
praising God that Mary is, indeed, the Mother of God.
This is important to us today for two
reasons: One is that, in preserving for us the mysterious declaration that Mary
is truly the Mother of God (because she is the Mother of Jesus, who is the Son
of God), who Jesus is for us is also preserved (that is, God incarnate: the
fullness of whose humanity made it possible that his death and resurrection
from the dead—both in the flesh!—would redeem our sins and make eternal life
possible for us once again). And so we
see that, if Mary cannot be called the Mother of God, then there is no reason
for us to celebrate Christmas: because without the fullness of Jesus’ divinity
(and, therefore, the fullness of Mary’s Divine Maternity), the day of our
salvation has not come for us and we must lament that eternal life still is not
possible for us.
Second, in preserving for us the
mysterious declaration that Mary is truly the Mother of God, we also preserve
the reality that God, in spite of all that he has revealed to us, is still
clouded in mystery for us. In other
words, by not having a “how” to explain the “what” of Mary’s Divine Motherhood,
we preserve our right relationship with God: the relationship that acknowledges
that he is the all-powerful, pre-existent Being and that we are his creatures
who will never fully understand his wisdom or his power. This humility before the mystery that is God
helps to prevent us from “objectifying” events like Christ’s birth (and, thus,
appropriating it into something that fits into our lives and makes us feel good
instead of moving us more deeply into the mystery of who God is in himself),
which can only deepen our love for him as we contemplate the great love that he
must have for us to act in our lives in these ways.
My brothers and sisters, this is the
example that Mary herself gives us. When
the shepherds came to see the baby Jesus, they revealed to Mary and Joseph all
that they had seen and heard in the field: Angels in the air revealing the
birth of the child and singing songs glorifying God. Mary didn’t press the shepherds to explain
how all of that could have possibly happened, but rather, as the Gospels relate
to us, she and all there “were amazed by what had been told them by the
shepherds … and Mary kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her
heart.” Mary allowed herself to dwell
within the mystery of what had been revealed and there she encountered deeply
the One who had revealed it: God in her son.
As we enter into this new year, the
challenge for each of us is to allow ourselves to dwell within the mystery of
how God has revealed himself to us so as to open ourselves to encountering
there God’s presence in the unexpected: like in a little child, born into
poverty in a little town in ancient Palestine, or under the appearance of bread
and wine right here on this altar. If we
can do this, my brothers and sisters, the Lord will “bless us and keep us” in
2017.
May the peace of God, which is beyond
all understanding, keep your hearts and your minds in the knowledge and love of
God and of his son, our Lord Jesus Christ so that you, too, may enjoy this
blessing in the New Year.
Given
at All Saints Parish: Logansport, IN
December
31st, 2016 & January 1st, 2017
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