Homily for Sunday, 1 January 2023– The Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God (Octave of Christmas)

Readings of the day: Numbers 6:22-27; Psalm 67:1-2, 4-5, 6-7; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21

Happy New Year, sisters and brothers, and a Happy Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God!

For as long as I can remember, I have treasured the blessing God gives to the children of Israel through Moses and Aaron in the Book of Numbers. When I was a deacon and for my first year as a priest, I served at St. Kateri Tekakwitha Parish in Rochester, New York. Just inside the front door of our rectory at St. Kateri was this prayer. So, it seems appropriate that I offer us, my sisters and brothers of St. Joseph’s College, the same blessing: “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.”

Sisters and brothers in Jesus Christ, we are still in the season of Christmas. Today is what we call in the Church the Octave Day of Christmas, the eighth day of Christmas, including Christmas Day itself. And the Octave of Christmas, New Year’s Day, is always celebrated in our Church as the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

The Gospel reading we have heard today from Luke is the continuation of the Gospel reading many of us would have heard if we were at Mass on Christmas Eve. At Christmas Mass at Night, we hear of shepherds who receive a message from “an angel of the Lord” that the Saviour of the world, Jesus Christ, “has been born to us this day in the city of David,” Bethlehem. And the shepherds are to find this newborn Saviour, of all places, “wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

Today those shepherds have arrived at the place where Jesus was born, in a manger in Bethlehem. Luke’s Gospel says that the shepherds “went with haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger.” And the shepherds seem to have left in just as much haste as they arrived.

The shepherds who visited Jesus, Mary, and Joseph while Jesus was a newborn in the manger in Bethlehem also seem not to be the type to keep secrets too well (although who could blame them, really; they were the first people on Earth, besides Mary and Joseph, to meet God in the flesh). When the shepherds leave, Luke says, they tell everybody around them “what had been told them about this child.”

The shepherds’ news to the world was news worth proclaiming, that is for sure. It was amazing news, in fact: God, the Saviour of the world, born as a human infant in a manger in Bethlehem, City of David. Luke’s Gospel tells us that “all who heard [this] were amazed at what the shepherds told them.”

But Luke’s Gospel, characteristically so detailed about the events of Jesus’ life, so quickly passes over these amazing events of Jesus’ birth: “The child lying in the manger” tended to by Mary and Joseph, the shepherds arriving and then leaving the manger scene just as quickly, telling everybody they could find about the amazing events they had witnessed, and then returning to their fields, their livelihoods, but “glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen.”

These first eight days of Christmas have passed by so quickly, have they not? And that is even if we have found time to glorify and praise God for all we “have heard and seen,” all the times and all the people in whom we have encountered the human face of God in a special way. We are doing just that right now, sisters and brothers, the worship of the shepherds, glorifying and praising God for all we “have heard and seen.”

Yet it all happens so quickly. And, on this Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, we hardly hear anything about Mary. Rightly, especially because we are still very much in this Christmas season, our New Testament readings today, from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians and Luke’s Gospel, all focus on Jesus. We are still celebrating Jesus’ birth. So why, when we are still so focused on celebrating the Nativity of Jesus, do we insert today’s celebration of Mary as Mother of God into this Christmas season?

The doctrinal and historical reasons for celebrating the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God on this eighth day of Christmas are many and complicated. The Council of Ephesus in 431 gave Mary the official title of Mother of God, to distinguish from Mother of Christ, a popular title given to Mary at the time. This is to say that Mary is not only the mother of the human Jesus Christ, as if Jesus could not be God and human at the same time after his birth. So to give Mary the name Mother of God is, indirectly, an affirmation that Jesus the Christ, human from his conception in Mary’s womb, is also God.

Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, says that “clearly from the earliest times [of the Church] the Blessed Virgin is honoured under the title of Mother of God.” This is true, yet only since the mid-1700s has a day been set aside specifically to honour the motherhood of Mary, in a way that is not overshadowed by other important events in her life, like the Annunciation or her Assumption, body and soul, into heaven. And only since 1969, under Pope Paul VI (talk about recent!), has the feast day dedicated to the Maternity of the Blessed Virgin Mary been returned to January 1. Some countries, like Portugal, had celebrated the Maternity of Mary in October.

I like to think of this January 1, Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, as the Church’s Mothers’ Day of sorts. This celebration proposes for us Mary as the ultimate of mothers, the one chosen by God to bear his Son in human flesh into the world. And, for the same reason as I pray this on Mothers’ Day on the second Sunday in May, I pray (and I invite us to pray with me) for all mothers, still living on earth and those in heaven. I invite us to pray for all future mothers, would-be mothers who have had difficulty conceiving, mothers who are raising children in poverty and other difficult circumstances, and mothers whose children have died. Mothers of our Church, my sisters in Christ: I dedicate you to Mary, Mother of God and I ask Mary to bless you with joy, peace, and strength in your vocation as mothers.

I have been reflecting on how little Mary is featured in our readings today, how our New Testament readings focus mostly on Jesus. This is appropriate, especially since we are in the midst of the Christmas season. But Luke’s Gospel today includes one short mention of Mary, one I think is very important, particularly on this Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. Luke says that, as the shepherds arrived and then left the manger scene, and then told the world about Jesus’ birth to everybody’s amazement, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.”

Mary, ever the humble mother, our Mother and the model and Mother of the Church, gives us the ideal example of silently treasuring and pondering before her newborn Son, the Saviour of the world. I imagine the shepherds and everybody who visited Jesus, Mary, and Joseph during those days in Bethlehem, returning home more at peace than when they arrived at the manger scene. They returned home treasuring and pondering as Mary did, “glorifying and praising God.”

Sisters and brothers we, too, through this celebration of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, ask the Lord for the grace to treasure and ponder, to glorify and praise God by our words, our actions, our worship. May we be the living blessing to the world and everybody we meet—the blessing Jesus communicated to humble shepherds through his mother Mary, and that God gave the people of Israel through Moses and Aaron in the Book of Numbers: “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.”

Homily for Wednesday, 9 August 2017– Ferial

Wednesday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Numbers 13:1-2, 25, 14:1, 26a-29a, 34-35; Psalm 106:6-7ab, 13-14, 21-22, 23; Matthew 15:21-28

Is it possible, on the one hand, for the quality of our relationship with God, whether our fundamental relationship toward God is one of trust or one of fear, to affect our relationships with God’s creation; with one another? On the other hand, is the opposite also possible, when the quality of our relationships with creation; with one another are reflected in the quality of our relationship with God?

Our readings today, from Numbers and the Gospel of Matthew, suggest a connection between our relationships with the created world, with one another, and with God. In the Book of Numbers, we hear of the final preparation stages for the people of Israel to return home to the land God has promised them. Through Moses, God sends spies into “the land of Canaan” to scout the land the people of Israel are to settle. After forty days of scouting Canaan, the spies return and report on their spy mission to “Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the Israelites in the land of Paran.” Their report is mixed: Canaan is prosperous, flowing with “milk and honey.” And yet the scouts doubt the ability of the people of Israel to conquer both the land and the people of Canaan. The people of Canaan “are stronger than we,” the scouts report, “to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” The land of Canaan itself “is a land that devours its inhabitants.”

Indirectly, the scouts’ lack of confidence that the people of Israel could settle successfully in Canaan shows their lack of trust in God, who had promised this land to them. Their default relationship with God is one of fear. And so God’s promise, the inheritance of the land of Canaan, will be for the next generation. Because of the scouts’ lack of trust in God, shown by their unfavourable report about the land of Canaan and its people, their generation is left to perish in the desert.

Contrast the fear and lack of trust of the Israelites under Moses, of the scouts to Canaan in Numbers, with the boldness of the Canaanite woman (a pagan, not even a Jew!) who asks Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel to heal her daughter. The Canaanite woman would have had every reason to fear or doubt Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter of the demon. Jesus’ disciples try to send her away because she continues to pester them. Even Jesus does not seem too keen on helping the woman. Jesus’ first priority, he says to the woman, is to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus even seems, to our ears, harsh with the Canaanite woman (what this meant in Jesus’ time, if different from its meaning today, is difficult to say), likening her and her non-Israelite people to “dogs.”

Nevertheless, the Canaanite woman is not deterred. She even plays along with Jesus’ seemingly derogatory reference to her people. The Canaanite woman shows bold trust in Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter, trust that is clearly from God and that she reflects back to God in a kind of gift exchange. Jesus must acknowledge her deep trust in him and so in God, which is greater than that of most of his own people: “Great is your faith”!

Great is the faith of those people who show their trust in God by acknowledging and trusting God’s handiwork in creation and in our relationships with one another.   

Homily for Tuesday, 8 August 2017– Memorial of St. Dominic

Monday of the 21st week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Numbers 12:1-13; Psalm 51:3-4, 5-6ab, 6cd-7, 12-13; Matthew 14:22-36

This homily was given at St. Clare Church, Edmonton, AB, Canada.

How often have we read or prayed with a passage from the Bible, or heard the Word of God at Mass, when a verse or part of a verse catches our attention? Perhaps a few words feel out of place within the rest of the passage or reading.

Might the description in the Book of Numbers today of Moses as “very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth,” be one of those moments that catch our attention because this description breaks from the flow of the rest of the reading? Maybe because I am teaching here in Edmonton at St. Joseph’s College this summer, and I have been grading papers, I am becoming particularly sensitive to (among a few kinds of grammatical and other foibles) the overuse of superlatives.

For example, one of the most annoying tendencies ever (now, I am saying this for humorous effect) is when it might have been convincing enough to me to describe Moses as humble, but the writer describes Moses glowingly as humbler “than anyone else on the face of the earth.” My reaction to superlatives like this is often a skeptical, “Really”? Well, in this case, we hear a superlative from the divinely inspired Word of God, so I will take the writer of Numbers’ word for it.

But is this description of Moses, where we hear it in our first reading today, still not jarring; seemingly out of place within the context of our reading? Led by Aaron and Miriam, the people complain “against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married.” (This, again, is countercultural to most if not all of us. In Moses’ time, interethnic marriages were potentially scandalous; here today they are not). God defends Moses, afflicting Miriam with a skin disease because of her sin of having opposed Moses’ leadership unjustly. Aaron then pleads with Moses, and Moses with God, for forgiveness and for healing for Miriam.

Perhaps the stark contrast between Moses’ great humility and Aaron’s and Miriam’s lack thereof eventually enables Aaron and Miriam to recognize and ask forgiveness for their sin. Perhaps, in the reading we hear today from Matthew’s Gospel, the Pharisees and the scribes might have benefitted from a similar stark reminder of the differences between Jesus’ leadership and their own. For the Pharisees and scribes, “the tradition of the elders” had become an end in itself and a point of excessive, even sinful pride. The religious tradition, Jesus taught, was to serve the good of the people, not the other way around.

But Matthew does not break from the flow of his Gospel to emphasize for us that Jesus was so much humbler or a better leader than the Pharisees or the scribes, although he was. No, Matthew does not help us with superlatives! And today, while we acknowledge some people with superlative praise, how many people do we know who go about doing good works; who are holy, and yet humble and unassuming? I think of the likes of Mother Teresa, within the lifetime of most of us here.

St. Dominic, whose feast we celebrate today, taught his followers within the Order of Preachers he founded to preach the Gospel of humility by example. Early Dominicans were simply called “The Holy Preaching” for this reason. Their example is for each of us to strive for: To be “The Holy Preaching” ourselves; to preach Christ by example, with no need for superlatives.