Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:2-3, 5, 6, 8; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21
Sisters and brothers, Happy New Year and a happy Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God!
Our Church has also celebrated New Year’s Day as the World Day of Peace since Pope St. Paul VI first connected this day to an ongoing prayer for and reflection on peace in our world in 1967. Peace is much richer than the mere absence of conflict. Perhaps the absence of conflict sometimes (if not frequently) can mask the absence of true peace in our world and in our relationships.
Since Mary’s time, Jesus’ time, and well before then, since the time the Book of Numbers from which we hear God’s blessing of peace through Aaron today was written, peace has been based on the multidimensional Hebrew word, shalom. Shalom can mean a simple, friendly greeting, like, “Hello,” “goodbye,” or “farewell.” It means peace in the fullest sense possible, the desire for wholeness, well-being, harmony, for ourselves and everybody.
From when I was an elementary school-aged child, I remember the Hebrew traditional song we learned in music class:
Shalom, chaverim. Shalom, chaverim.
Shalom, shalom.
L’hitra’ot, l’hitra’ot
Shalom, shalom.
Farewell (or greetings), my friends.
Farewell, my friends.
Peace! Peace!
Until we meet again, until we meet again.
Peace! Peace!
Aaron’s blessing of the people of Israel that we hear today in Numbers is similar in spirit to this little folk song. Aaron blesses the people of Israel in God’s words to him:
The LORD bless you and keep you,
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace [shalom].
Those of us who attend the 9:30 am Mass here at St. Joseph’s College with the Children’s Liturgy of the Word will be familiar with this blessing of Aaron. Our music ministry has been singing a lovely arrangement of it when our children go out for the Children’s Liturgy downstairs.
I have said that shalom, peace, is a multidimensional word. It is a word that suggests movement. Shalom can never be static or stationary. In the Book of Numbers, the Aaronic blessing, shalom begins as a gift of God, a gift we receive from looking upon the face of God, from God turning God’s face to look upon us and, in a word from Aaron’s blessing, shining on us.
Few natural events suggest peace—God’s love for us, for the world; calm, wholeness, well-being, harmony—than a sunrise. This is the first image in my mind when I think of God’s face “shining” upon us. Yet lately, often as soon as I picture a sunrise in my mind and connect it to God’s shalom, my mind is haunted by images from half a world away—say, on the evening news, from war zones like those of Gaza or Ukraine: Cities reduced to rubble. Yet the sun rises over the ruins, the loss of life. These images drive home for me how far we are—how far humanity is—from the peace God wills for the world. They emphasize for me how far we are from the shalom with which God shone his face on Aaron and Moses for the people of Israel; the shalom for which God sent his only-begotten Son into our world, born as one like us of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God. But still, far as we are from God’s perfection of shalom, God makes the sun rise over us, even over our ruins, our anti-shalom.
If God’s shalom is to be effective in our world, God invites us to do two things with it: First, treasure it, ponder it in our hearts and, second, go out “with haste,” with a joyful urgency, to hand it on to people we encounter. Shalom cannot stand pat if it is to be effective in our world in need of it; it must be actively put into motion!
Mary, Mother of God, Luke says to us today, “treasured all [the] words” of the shepherds “and pondered them in her heart.” This is the second of three times in which Luke’s account of Jesus’ infancy describes Mary as treasuring or pondering the mysteries of God’s shalom as they unfold. And each time Mary profoundly treasures or ponders is when perplexing, even frightening, peace-disrupting events are taking place around her.
First, the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she “will conceive in [her] womb and bear a son,” whom she is to name Jesus. Luke says that Mary ponders “what sort of greeting this might be.” Second is Mary’s encounter with the shepherds in today’s Gospel reading. By the time the shepherds have reached “Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger,” it seems that they have already told everybody they could “what had been told them about this child.” They had organized the baby shower, done the “gender reveal,” and everything, all before Mary had had a chance to breathe, to meet these excitable shepherds for the first time. Still, Mary treasures and ponders shalom, calm, wholeness, well-being, harmony at her very core. And, a third time, when Mary and Joseph find the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, teaching and listening to the teachers, after three days of frantic searching, again Mary keeps “all these things in her heart.”
Mary is the master of the first movement of shalom, treasuring and pondering. For the shepherds’ part, in today’s Gospel reading they are masters of the second movement of shalom, going with haste—with a joyful urgency—to communicate shalom once they have received it. The shepherds’ setting out “with haste to Bethlehem” and then returning just as quickly to their fields, “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen,” echoes Mary’s own action earlier in Luke’s Gospel of going “with haste” to visit Elizabeth when Mary learns that Elizabeth is pregnant with John the Baptist at the same time she is pregnant with Jesus. Mary is Mother of God, the God-bearer in both these movements of shalom: Treasuring-pondering and going out with haste, actively bearing shalom to the world.
The shepherds, Joseph the husband of Mary, and especially Mary, whom we celebrate today as Mother of God, are master communicators of shalom. They are models for us of how we can be God-bearers in the sense of peace-bearers, shalom-bearers to our world. For us to be consistent bearers, communicators of shalom in our world, in our relationships, households, among our friends, in our places of work and leisure, in our Church can be challenging.
I find it interesting that, in his Message for the World Day of Peace this year, Pope Francis reflects as deeply as he does on the effects of new and ever-developing technologies—in particular artificial intelligence—on peace in our world and our human relationships. “Progress in science and technology,” Pope Francis says, “insofar as it contributes to greater order in human society and greater fraternal communion and freedom… leads to the betterment of humanity and the transformation of the world.”
How science, technologies like AI, the media of social communications lead “to the betterment of humanity and the transformation of the world” depends on how we use them, regulate them toward “the integral development of all individuals and peoples.” Scientific and technological progress can bear great promise, but also great risk. Pope Francis says, and I think this is easy to see, that science and technology, the ways we communicate and gain knowledge, pose challenges not only for any understanding of the human person as sacred but also social. These pose challenges in ethics: Political, social, economic; challenges in the areas of international law and the resolution of armed conflict when nations create weapons that can cause greater destruction more remotely than ever before. Progress in science, technology, communication pose challenges for education, for upholding especially the God-given dignity of the poor and people in need, for alleviating poverty and need, for protection of the natural environment.
How are we, this community of faith here at St. Joseph’s College, to manage all this? Understandably, maybe many or most of us feel powerless to effect any good against great global dangers to human well-being, human relationships, human life. But we can start small, local. We can start by helping the poor when we can. We can start by consuming less of what we do not need to consume. We can start by challenging ourselves to think critically about the information we absorb from media; as Pope Francis asks, “What are the social and ethical aspects of the development and [our] uses of technology”? We can start by challenging ourselves to one or two simple acts of kindness a day if we are not already doing this.
We can start by imitating the way of Mary, Mother of God, of Joseph, of the shepherds: First, treasure and ponder. How am I—how are we—being called to be bearers of peace, shalom, to our world and in our human relationships? Second, go “with haste”: If we have peace, kindness, mercy, calm, truth, hope, love to communicate, do not hesitate to communicate it, by word or the simplest of actions, like a friendly smile!
And, most important of all, pray, all of us, for shalom in our relationships, our world. That is the prayer God gave Aaron to pray for the ancient people of Israel. That is the prayer of Mary, Mother of God, for us:
Shalom, chaverim… Peace, my friends.
The LORD bless you and keep you,
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
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