Learning from Mary How To Receive God’s Blessing and Live With Rejoicing Spirits, 13th Saturday (I), July 8, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Monastery of Saint Anne, Swieta Anna, Poland
Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary
July 8, 2023
Gen 27:1-5.15-29, Ps 135, Mt 9:14-17

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

• Today as we make this Marian pilgrimage to the great shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa and here to the Monastery of St. Anne her mother, it’s a day on which we’re called to strengthen our relationship with Our Lady, as a fellow disciple of the Lord Jesus, as the mother God the Father chose for his Son and that Son from the Cross chose for us, as a great intercessor who prays for us like she did the young couple in Cana of Galilee. In the readings the Church gives us today, there are two different spiritual lessons, both of which are illustrated beautifully in the life of our Lady. Let’s take them in turn.
• In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, there is a story that at first glance easily scandalizes many Jews and Christians, because it appears as if God is endorsing the intentional deception of an old blind father by his wife and by his second-born son. It seems as if Jacob receives the blessing of God because he had been blessed by his father Isaac as a result of his lying to his father and even taking the Lord’s name in vain. But Jacob was blessed not because of his deception, not even because of his father Isaac’s benediction, but because God wanted to communicate a much greater lesson than that of primogeniture (Esau’s being first-born). Throughout Sacred Scripture God regularly chooses the least and makes them great. We know that later God will choose David even though he was the least of his brothers and chose Gideon even though he was the least of his family and his family the least of all the tribes in Midian. As St. Paul tells the first Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 1:27-29), God routinely chooses the weak and makes them strong, he regularly selects the lowly and exalts them, while at the same time humbling those whose expectations were not based on God’s expectations. That is what we see here, in the case of Jacob and Esau. God was choosing the second-born son and making him the one through whom the promise he had made to his grandfather Abraham would be fulfilled. God’s ways are not our ways. His thoughts are not our thoughts.
• We see this lesson played out in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary as well. She was an unknown girl in a place, Nazareth, from which some would ask whether any good could come. Yet, as she herself would sing at the Visitation, the Lord “looked upon his handmaid’s lowliness” and “from now on [would] all ages call me blessed,” because “the Mighty One has done great things for me. … His mercy is from age to age to those who fear him. … He has thrown down the rulers from their thrones but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things; the rich he has sent away empty … according to his promise to our fathers, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” Because of the homage Christians out of love have given to Mary over the last 2,000 years, we can sometimes forget that she was exalted precisely because of her humility. She wasn’t anyone whom the world would have chosen for the greatest human vocation of all time, but God chose her and blessed her from the first instant of our life in the womb of the St. Anne. 
• The second lesson about the Christian life as exemplified by Mary, found in today’s Gospel, is just as important. Yesterday we pondered the scene of Jesus’ eating in the house of St. Matthew surrounded by sinners. The Pharisees were disgusted that Jesus would convene with sinners in such a way. The followers of St. John the Baptist, unlike the Pharisees, did not immediately presume Jesus to be in the wrong; John, after all, had spent his adult life trying to bring sinners to conversion at the Jordan. While they didn’t object to Jesus’ being with tax collectors and sinners, they did object to his feasting. They didn’t want to accuse him personally, however, and so they went to him and asked why his disciples were not fasting as they fasted with John and as the Pharisees were accustomed to fast. They expected at least Jesus’ disciples would fasting for the conversion of sinners rather than sharing feasts with them. Jesus in response gives a very important principle. In order to understand it, however, a little Greek is helpful. In the English translation of St. Matthew’s words, Jesus uses an expression “wedding guests,” but in the original Greek the more literal transliteration would be “sons of the bridal chamber.” Jesus asks how the groomsmen, how the bridesmaids, how those who are the closest of all to the bride and groom could possibly be fasting while the wedding celebration was ongoing. None of us goes to a wedding reception to fast, and if we did, people might thing we would be disproportionately emphasizing something out of context; it would, in fact, almost be sinful to fast or to mourn when such a wedding feast is ongoing. Jesus was describing that while he is with us, we should be full of joy, feasting, celebrating, and happy to share the table with those who likewise want to share in the joy of the bridegroom. By this image, Jesus is describing the type of joy he wants all of us to have as routine aspect of who we are. He would say later in this same Gospel passage, that when the bridegroom is taken away from them — to “take away” is the same verb that would be used to describe the action of “ripping” Jesus out of the Garden of Gethsemane — then they would fast. They will fast not the way others fasted, but they would fast for the presence of the Lord, to enter into the passion of Jesus so that they might be able to receive the fruits of that Paschal mystery.
• The new way that they would be fasting, and why, are alluded to by Jesus in the two images that he uses. The first image that Jesus uses is the image of a patch. He says no one sews a new patch on an old set of clothing, because the new patch when it shrinks will tear the old fabric. Jesus had come not to “patch up” the difficulties in Judaism but to give us new clothing. He had come to clothe us in himself. He had come to give us a baptismal garment, which is the garment that the sons and the daughters of the wedding chamber are meant to wear eternally. Jesus is describing a revolutionary newness to the way we are supposed to relate to him. He is not coming to bring us from 95 to 100. He is coming to give us a new life. But we need a new receptivity to be able to embrace that gift. Jesus uses the word “fullness” in his expression of how the fullness of the patch will lead to the tearing. Jesus is that fullness. He contains all of God’s divinity. And we need to be the proper type of receptacle in order to receive that plenitude. And that leads us to the second image of Jesus employs. Jesus says that we do not pour new wine into old wineskins; we need new wine skins that will breathe as the new wine is fermenting so that neither wine nor wineskins will be lost. Jesus is describing for us that we need to receive him who is the new wine in a totally different way than many of the Jews were prepared. Receiving the new wine of his new life is not going to work in the taut wineskins of a rigid Judaism. What is needed is the fullness of a new form of the worship of God that Jesus is giving, bringing to fulfillment what he had revealed to the Jews in days prior.
• We see in Mary, first, the joy that’s supposed to characterize the nuptials of God with the human race. The Archangel Gabriel greeted her with the words, “Rejoice, you who have been filled with grace, the Lord is with you,” giving her the fundamental reason for joy, because of the presence of the Lord with us and within us. We likewise see in her Magnificat how her spirit rejoices in God her Savior. Christians have called Mary “cause of our joy” because by her whole-hearted fiat she brought into the world the one who would later say he had come “so that my joy may be in you and your joy be made complete.” The Bridegroom is indeed with us and so the fundamental Christian reaction must be, like Mary, to rejoice. We still fast, because there are parts of us and the world that are not fully with the Bridegroom, and we do this with special focus during the Lenten season of conversion. But with Mary we celebrate the gift of God’s love, his being with us always until the end of time, his having risen from the dead and having made eternal life with him possible. We also see in Mary how to be that fitting receptacle, that new wineskin, in which we are called to receive the ever fermenting new wine of divine love. She was that new person who could receive what God wanted to give and by baptism God has given us new wineskins to receive the same extraordinary gift.
• Today as we seek to grow in our Marian devotion so that Mary can lead us, like St. John Paul II said she led him, to re-live her mystery in Christ, we rejoice with her in how God has chosen us, too, in our lowliness to receive his blessing. We rejoice with her not just to be sons of the bridal chamber, but in fact to become Christ’s mystical bride, seeking to be, with Mary, the happiest bride of all time. We ask the Lord through her intercession to give us ever new receptivity to the newness of life he wishes to pour within us. And as we prepare for the consummation of the nuptial union between Christ and the Church and praise the Lord for his goodness, we ask for the grace that, with many others moved by our joy and Mary’s prayers, we might come to the eternal wedding banquet to celebrate forever with Jesus, with Our Lady, with SS. Joachim and Anne, with St. John Paul, and with all the sinners Christ has saved!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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