May Devotion: 2013
My soul doth magnify the Lord
St. Therese of Lisieux once said that she wanted
to be a priest. That has caused the proponents of women priests to sign her up
for the cause. But you need to read on and see why she said such a thing. She
did not want to celebrate Mass but be able to preach and specifically preach on
Our Lady because she had heard so many bad sermons on the Blessed Mother. I
suspect that most lay folks have had at some time or other the same attitude. I
certainly have on those rare occasions, when I have to listen to some priest
other than Fr. Duncan preach.
The fact is that the saint got what she wished
for: she has had a much larger congregation to preach to than any priest. Her Autobiography is to this day a best
seller and has been translated into over fifty languages.
What St. Therese said she would do, if she could
preach on Our Lady was to stick to what the Bible says about her. I guess I had
better follow her advice.
Some would maintain that there is really not
much said about here in Scripture and it is true you can fairly easily list the
passages in the Bible which refer to her: Annunciation, Visitation, Birth of
Jesus, Presentation of the Lord, Jesus lost in the Temple, two appearances in
the middle of the Gospels, one when Mary and the family are looking for Jesus
and at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee, at the Foot of the Cross and with the
apostles on the Day of Pentecost.
Not much maybe but enough. It is quality not
quantity. She appears at the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke,
where the question is who is this child? Only Mary knows at first, she has been
told by the angel, and then Mary, Elizabeth and little John the Baptist know
and for thirty years or so that is it. John the Baptist in Elizabeth’s womb can
only give a kick of recognition. But Elizabeth herself, full of Holy Spirit,
figures out something that it will take the theologians three or four centuries
to figure out, namely that the Mary is the Mother of the Lord.
That, said Dr. Mascall, is the most important
and most theological title Mary has: the Mother of God –the Theotokos. That is
how come she is a virgin, that is how come there are angels at the birth of
Jesus, this how come her Son is always in the temple. The importance of Mary
then and now is she points to and tells us who her Son is. And I might mention
in case St. Therese is listening in that she said “Mary is more mother than
queen.” Again Dr. Mascall: there is more that might be said of Mary and it is
not necessarily wrong to do so but this is what all Christians must say of her
not only or even primarily to understand her but to understand who Jesus is.
The remarkable thing about the Mother of Jesus
is that with apparently a small amount of information we can clearly form a
picture of her character. St. Luke tells us more than once that Mary “kept
these things in her heart.” So we know, whoever else Jesus was talking about
when he said “blessed are those who hear the word and keep it,” he was
certainly talking about his mother.
The Annunciation anticipates the Wedding at Cana
and the Wedding at Cana confirms the Annunciation: “Be it unto me according to
thy word” and “do whatever he tells you.”
At the heart of every conversion, every Christian vocation, every kind of following Jesus stands the fiat, the assent to the will of the Father expressed in the Son and confirmed in the Holy Spirit. By the same token Mary appears in the story as the first evangelist, the first to proclaim the Gospel of her Son, and she can only say to those who would follow Jesus what she herself had to say at the Annunciation and at Cana: “do what he tells you.”
At the foot of the Cross and on the Day of
Pentecost “the Mother of Jesus was there.” She was there doing what she had
always done: quietly and faithfully assenting to the word of the Lord and
treasuring these things in her heart. Christian conversion is not simply having
a dramatic experience and it’s all over. Christian conversion is sticking with
Jesus to the end. Perhaps a quality that many mothers have but always the mark
of authentically following Jesus.
These things show us why the Christian Tradition
has never been able to ignore Mary, to forget about her, to say that she
doesn’t really matter. Whatever form devotion to her may take and wherever
theological speculation may go, it always leads us back to her Son.
My soul doth magnify the Lord
2 comments:
Fr. Allen, if I may ask: Would you be able to post each Sunday homily? I understand that it might be too much trouble to transcribe, so is there the possibility of your uploading your notes via a word doc scan? In no way am I trying to create add'l work for you, so if this is an add'l time-chewer, no worries. Respectfully, Brent
It is not a problem. So yes. I always write out something rudimentary and sometimes I end up saying something different, as was the case with last Sunday's homily.
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