MARY, THE WOMAN OF FAITH

Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.  Num. 6: 22-27; Gal. 4:4-7, Luke 2:16-21

AIM: To present Mary as the model of trusting faith in the new year.

          A new year! What will it bring? Some great success? Humiliating failure?  Unexpected happiness, or sudden loss? Dramatic change, or just more of the same? Illness, suffering, or death? We cannot know what the new year will bring. The one certain thing about the future is its uncertainty. 

          As we venture into the unknown, the Church gives us, on this New Year’s Day, a feast in honor of Mary, the Mother of God. Does this mean that Mary is as important as her Son, equal even with God? Of course not. A glance at today’s readings dispels any such idea at once.

          The first reading contains the beautiful formula of blessing that Jesus would have learned as a boy in the synagogue school at Nazareth. It remains today the common property of both Jews and Christians. The second reading mentions Mary, but does not name her. “When the fullness of time had come,” Paul writes, “God sent his Son, born of a woman ...” That was Paul’s way of saying that Jesus was truly and completely human, as he was also truly and completely God. The gospel mentions Mary twice, but tells us simply that she “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” 

          Why does the Church dedicate this first day of the new year in a special way to Mary? Because Mary is, in a unique way, the woman of faith. While only on the threshold of her teens, Mary was asked by God to venture into an unknown future, filled with suffering, the purpose and end of which she could not possibly understand in advance. We think of the angel’s message to Mary, that she was to be the mother of God’s Son, as something wonderful. To Mary, however, it meant being an unmarried mother in a little village, where everyone knew everyone else’s business, and where gossip was rife.

          Did Mary understand the reason for the angel’s message, and where her assent would lead? How could she? Luke tells us that even years later, when Mary and Joseph found their twelve-year-old son in the Temple at Jerusalem after a frantic three-day search, they still “did not understand” Jesus’ words to them about having to be in his Father’s house (Lk 2:50).

          The faith which enabled Mary to accept her role in this mystery was no once-for-all thing. Her faith, like ours, needed to be constantly renewed amid suffering and misunderstanding. Joseph wanted to break their engagement. In the Jerusalem temple Mary heard the aged Simeon prophesy her Son’s rejection and his mother’s suffering. When her twelve-year-old Son told Mary and Joseph, who for three days had thought him lost in Jerusalem and sought him frantically, that he had to be in his Father’s house, Luke tells us that “they did not understand” what he was telling them. (Lk 2:50)

          There would be much more that Mary did not understand and could not understand. In time her Son left home. Often thereafter he seemed to be fulfilling his own command about “hating” parents and other close relatives, and one’s “own life too” (Lk 14:26). At Cana, the site of his first miracle, Jesus appeared to treat his mother with perplexing disrespect. Even at the Last Supper Jesus made no place, it seems, for his mother. Only at Calvary was she permitted to stand beside her now dying Son, along with “the disciple whom Jesus loved” — deliberately left anonymous, so that he can represent the ideal follower of Jesus Christ in every age and place. 

          There on Calvary Mary experienced the full truth of Simeon’s prophecy three decades before: that a sword would pierce her own soul. There she shared the anguish of her dying Son, as he cried: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Calvary was the final and greatest test of Mary’s faith, the place where she had to renew once again, as she had done so often before, the declaration of trusting faith with which she had begun: “Let it be done to me according to your world.”  

          The next three decades would bring Mary much more that she did not understand, and could not understand. She continued to trust God nonetheless. In trusting faith she endured her greatest suffering, and for her the most incomprehensible, as she watched her Son die a criminal’s death on Calvary. The final glimpse we have of Mary in the New Testament shows her to be still the woman of faith: joining with the friends of Jesus in prayer in the upper room at Jerusalem, before the outpouring of God’s Spirit at Pentecost, as Jesus had promised.  (Cf. Acts 1:24)

          The Church sets Mary before us today because she, like us, needed faith to journey into the unknown; because her faith can inspire in us the we faith we need for our journey into the unknown; and because Mary’s prayers support us on our pilgrim way. 

          Let me conclude with some words which evoke this trusting faith.  They were written in England about a century ago. As you listen, you may wish to imagine them being spoken to you by Mary, the woman of faith, as you cross the threshold of a new year.

          “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than a light, and safer than a known way.’”

[M. Louise Haskins; quoted by King George VI in his Christmas broadcast, 1939]