Saturday of the Twenty-Seventh Week in Ordinary Time Yr 2 2024

Title

Blessed are those made one with Christ

Outline

Our gospel reading is unusual:

“Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” He replied, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”

And yet we say about our blessed mother, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” In fact, in the Eastern version we add, “For you have born Christ, the Savior of the world.”

Ah, yes, but it was not the act of bearing and nursing a child that merits blessing. This is not the blessing that Hannah had in bearing Samuel or David’s mother had in bearing him (we do not know if she lived to see him rule) nor that of Bathsheba in bearing Solomon. This was a royal birth, but it was not type of royal birth. It is a birth that started a new chain of hearing the word of God and observing it. It was a pregnancy that began with a yes to the word of God not a yes to a marriage. This was a yes that started a new order of being, a new birth, a new type of existence, an existence in Christ. It is not that she was the mother of the king, but that in her yes and bearing Jesus she became the mother of “all children of God” of which she was one, and the reason they were clothed, not with swaddling clothes but “with Christ”.

And that new order of humanity broke down the distinctions of our humanity, of status and gender and race, and made us “all one in Christ Jesus.” And she who baptized Christ in her amniotic fluid had already been baptized by Christ in her own conception in that amniotic fluid of her mother.

Now the implications of this are stupendous

We have plenty of distinctions in our world, even within the Church. There are 23, I believe, Uniate communities within Holy Mother Church and well as cultural distinctions in the one mass among various cultures. Last week I participated in one of them, my diocese of incardination, an English form of the one rite.

And there are various ranks and orders and the like within the one Church, and even more in the world.

But in that “yes” of Mary to the Word of God and our “yes” to the Word of God in baptism we are all one in Christ, for in the New Jerusalem come to earth we will all be worshippers in the one liturgy with the one high priest as we move beyond human words and are caught up in the word of Christ.

Thus even now that is how we are to treat people - we honor all “in Christ” and Mary because she is both “in” and the source of our being “in Christ” in that she said “yes” first.