"DO NOT BE AFRAID, MARY."

Homily for December 20th: Luke 1:26-38.

          “Do not be afraid, Mary,” the angel says to the young teenage girl in today’s gospel reading. Her angelic visitor came direct from God. The encounter with the divine is never casual or routine. Mary’s response to the angel’s message, that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, shows her to be the model of trusting faith

          Yet Mary’s faith was blind. She doubted and questioned. “How can this be?” Mary asked the angel who told her she would conceive her child without a human father. What Mary questioned, however, was not so much God, as her own ability to understand God and his plan for her life. Even in the midst of perplexity, however, Mary confessed that God knew best, even if she could not understand what he was about: “May it be done to me according to your word,” she told the angel.

          That assent to God’s plan for her was not a one-time thing.  It had to be constantly renewed, through many sufferings. The first was the humiliation of being an unmarried mother in a little village where everybody knew everyone else’s business, and gossip was rife. Later Simeon told Mary that her Son would be “a sign which men reject,” and that Mary herself would be “pierced with a sword” (Lk 2:35). 

          Upon reaching manhood, Jesus left his mother, as he demanded that his followers should leave their parents.  At Jesus’ farewell meal with his closest friends there was, apparently, no place for his mother — though there was a place for her the next day, at Calvary. There, at the cross, Simeon’s prophecy, that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart, was fulfilled. Yet Mary went on trusting even when — as long ago — she “did not understand” (Lk 2:50).    

          Can there be any doubt that it is precisely this trusting faith of Mary’s which we American Catholics need today?  Which of us can fully explain or understand all that we have experienced in recent years? Today, more than ever, we need the kind of faith which Mary had, the faith she models for us: faith which continues to trust in God even amid things we do not understand and cannot explain.

          Faith in this sense is not something we can summon up by willpower. Faith, the Catechism tells us, “is a supernatural gift from God” (No. 179). And who can doubt that this faith will be given to us in the measure in which we invoke the prayer of the woman who herself modeled this faith, whom Jesus gave as mother to his best friend — and so to all his friends — as he died on the cross? (Cf. Jn. 19:27) And so I invite you to supply the conclusion to the homily, by responding to the age-old prayer based on the angel’s words to Mary in today’s gospel:

          Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among

          women and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.

          L  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of

          our death.  Amen.