Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
1 January 2014
1 January 2014
Well, we’ve made it . . . the end of one
year, and the beginning of another. It really seems, in some way, that we only
began 2013 just the other day, and here we are now, welcoming 2014.
But what we celebrate here, today, goes
beyond time and space. Remember, our celebration of the Mass is where, once
again, eternity enters into time, and our Savior is once again made present in
the guise of bread and wine. We enter this day, as we do every Sunday, in fact,
into the “eighth day.” This concept is an ancient one in the Church. We know
that God created the world in six days, and on the seventh He rested. That
first day of the week, when Jesus rose from the dead, has been presented to us
from the earliest days of the Church as the “eighth day”, for it becomes for us
the reality that while we live in time and space, we are ultimately destined
for eternity.
We see this notion of our entrance into
the eighth day first in our baptism, where we are plunged into the waters of
sin and death, into the waters existing in time and space, and arise to an
eternal reality of becoming a son or daughter of God. This is why the
traditional baptismal font is shaped as an octagon, just as ours is here. Also,
our church building that we sit in is an octagon, a reminder that when we enter
in this place to worship our God, we leave the reality of our temporal
existence and enter into the reality of the eternal promises that are to come.
Today, we celebrate not just New Year’s Day or the first day of January, or the
first day of 2014, but the eighth day of the Christmas Octave – those eight
days in which we celebrate the joy of the first Christmas, since our joy cannot
simply be contained to one day.
So what does this have to do with Mary?
Step back in time with me to the year
325. The great Council of Nicea was called to discuss some pretty relevant
issues and debates going on in the Church at that time. Most importantly, we
see the debate around the heresy of Arianism. Arian was a bishop who was
teaching that Jesus was the greatest human ever created, but He was not God. (It
was a heated debate in many ways. An example of this is that a certain bishop
named Nicholas [now known as Saint
Nicholas] got so enraged over this heretical teaching that he punched Arius in
the face!) The understanding and teaching promulgated at that council is that
the Son and the Father share the same substance – homoousios in Greek, “consubstantial” in English, a word that was
introduced to the Creed we say each week, and that we will recite in a few
moments. This notion of the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son, as
well as understanding the hypostatic union of Jesus – that He is, in fact, both
God and man – aids our understanding of the mystery that Jesus Christ is truly
“God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made.”
Fast forward to the year 431. During the
great Council of Ephesus, the bishops were trying to understand Mary’s relation
to Jesus. Yes, they all agreed that Mary gave birth to Jesus, but could she
truly be the Theotokos, the
“God-bearer”, or “Mother of God”, as some were calling her? Arianism was
rearing its little head once more, and some were doubting how a human could
give birth to God. Some were also fearing that people were making Mary God
because of this strange, new title. Yet, elementary logic won out: If Jesus is
God, and Mary gave birth to Jesus, then she IS the Mother of God. This does not
claim her with holding divinity within or by herself; but, rather, affirms that
our God became flesh – was incarnated – and entered into the world by a normal,
human birth, and that the hypostatic union remained intact. Jesus was no less
divine by His human birth, and Mary was no more a god because of this event.
What we celebrate here, today, is rooted
in what we celebrated eight days ago at Christmas: that “the Word became flesh
and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). Our God who exists in that eighth day entered
time so that we could eventually become eternal. And at each Mass, we pray that
we may “come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled Himself to share in
our humanity.”
Mary, as the Theotokos, and through her glorious Assumption, shares now
completely in that eighth day – body and soul. She, once again, is the model
for what we hope to become. Yet she could only be that model because of her
submission to the will of God in her life.
And now she models for us, as the Mother
of God, how WE are called to bear and give birth to Christ in this world.
Through our reception of her Son through our participation at the Table of the
World and the Altar of Sacrifice, we allow ourselves to become impregnated with
the person of Jesus Christ, taking Him into the very depths of our being, and allowing
the very essence of who we are to be transformed into the image of Christ,
thereby giving birth to Him in the world through our thoughts, words and
actions.
Yet, here and now, we enter into the
celebration of the eighth day; we receive that foretaste of the eternal joy
that is to come, that joy which Mary shares in completely. However, we have to
be willing like Mary to bear and give birth to God in this world – to be the
hands and feet of Christ, to be His body in this world, as we pray each month
in the words of our patron, Saint Teresa of Avila. We celebrate that fact that
Mary, through her submission to God’s will, models for us how we, too, need to
be open to the submission of God’s will in our lives, aware of the fact that we
are joined to Him in a most intimate way through our reception of the Word and,
most especially, the Eucharist.
My brothers and sisters, what we
celebrate today should continue to raise our humanity to yearn for the promises
of the divinity that we are called to share in through our stepping out of time
and space and into the foretaste of the eighth day, that eternity where our God
dwells. Yet, like Mary, we are called to bear Christ in our flesh, so that our
God may continue to abide in this world through those whom He loves so dearly
and tenderly.
May this New Year of 2014 be for you and
yours not just a time of blessedness and joy, but of true openness and to the
submission to God’s will, so that through our humility, we may come to know and
share in the divinity of Jesus Christ in the fullness of the Kingdom of God.
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Enjoy the journey . . .
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