Mary Mother of God (A), Conservations with Consequences Podcast, December 31, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God, Year A
December 31, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of the brief homily, please click below:

The text that guided the homily was: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us as we mark the transition from one year to the next, thanking God for all of the graces he’s given us in 2022 and begging his help that 2023 will be a true “year of Lord.” As we make this transition, the Church has us turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ponder in particular the ongoing mystery and reality of her motherhood, because Mary’s maternity and the passing of time are intimately connected. St. Paul tells us, “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman … so that we might receive adoption as sons.” The fullness of time is precisely the moment when Mary’s fiat allowed the eternal to enter into time, when the Son of God took on her humanity and entered our world, changing human history into salvation history. Therefore, Mary is not just the Mother of God-with-us but the Mother of all of us entrusted to her by that Son when he died so that we might live.
• At the transition of one civil year to the next, when we’re all led to think about the passage of time, about all that has happened during the past year and all that might occur in the year to come, the Church has us turn to our Mother Mary to show us how to live it with faith, no matter what occurs. Little did Mary expect, as she was beginning the Jewish New Year about 6 BC, that that year would inaugurate the “fullness of time” that St. Paul describes, that God would “send his Son, born of a woman,” and that she would be that woman. Little did she know she would receive a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, conceive and carry the Son of God in her womb, put her life at risk for conceiving a child from someone other than by her husband Joseph, give birth to Jesus in Bethlehem in the midst of poverty and rejection, receive as surprise guests shepherds, angels and wise men from afar, present him in the Temple as Simeon announced that he would be a sign of contradiction, have Herod hunt down her Son to kill him and have to flee in the middle of the night to Egypt. What a year that must have been!And that was just the beginning of the adventure.
• The Church sets Mary before us today as a model of faith and trust in God as we begin 2023 because she, like us, needed faith, needed trust in God, to journey into the unknown. As we commence the new year, not having any idea what it will bring, she gives us her maternal confidence in faith that whatever comes, whether seemingly good or bad — tremendous happiness or sadness, births and conversions of loved ones or unexpected deaths, even our own, great advances for the Church or colossal failures — that whatever comes, whether seemingly adverse or propitious, Christ wants to incorporate into his saving mission, even making his grace super-abound when sin abounds.
• After faith, the second way Mary seeks to mother us as we transition from one civil year to another is by helping us acquire a contemplative heart like hers. In this Sunday’s Gospel of the visit of the Shepherds to Bethlehem, after Mary had heard all that they had told her about what the angels had said to them, St. Luke tells us that she “kept all of these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” Pope Benedict, for whom the whole Church is now praying, talked about Mary’s contemplative heart in his apostolic exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church. He said that Mary, “ever attentive to God’s word, lives completely attuned to that word; she treasures in her heart the events of her Son, piecing them together as if in a single mosaic.” He said she shows us all in the Church how to piece together all of the events of our life to the events of Jesus’ life and to understand our ups and downs within God’s plan of salvation. Mary wants to help us to develop a similar contemplative heart. On Christmas morning, the Church has us ponder the prologue to St. John’s Gospel in which St. John tells us, “Of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace” (Jn 1:16). The graces God wants us to receive and respond to in 2023 are building on the graces he gave us in 2022, 2021 and beyond. Many of these graces have built on those he gave to our parents and grandparents, as well as graces he gave to the Church before us, to priests and religious, to so many popes. This means that the events of the past year and the events of the new aren’t random. Every year is like a new chapter in a book, but it’s not a new book. It’s building on what God has been trying to do in our life up until now, what he’s done for the world in Christ, what he did all the way back to Creation. In order to live well the new chapter, we need to see how what will fill the at-present blank pages of the new chapter is related to what has already come. Every gift this year — including the caresses of the crosses with which he will bless us and the Church — is building upon so many gifts that God has already given. But we need a contemplative heart, a heart that connects the dots and treasures everything God gives, in order to perceive it. That’s the second thing Mary wants to mother us to learn.
• The third and last thing we’ll ponder is more specifically how Mary seeks to mother us and make us capable of mothering Jesus and others in Jesus’ name. In nature as well as in supernatural world, mothers normally teach their daughters how to mother their grandkids. Mary likewise wants to train us to cooperate with, and share in, her maternity. I’ll never tire of pondering St. Ambrose’s great insight that Pope Benedict loved to cite, that even though Jesus has only one mother according to the flesh, in faith Christ is called to be the progeny of us all. We are called to conceive the word we hear interiorly and let that word gestate and grow to be so big that eventually — as if we were “ten months pregnant” — we need to give birth to the word, together with our flesh, in the midst of the world. This is a two-step process: first by letting Mary mother us, to help us conceive her Son, the Word of God, within and let him grow; second, by letting Mary help us to bring that Word to birth and grow in others. Christ knows we need this double gift, which is why on Calvary he entrusted us to his own Mother’s maternal genius. St. John Paul II that Mary’s acceptance of us as her spiritual children was part of her original fiat, part of her allowing her entire life to develop according to God’s word, including his words on Golgotha, “Behold your son.” Her mothering of us is not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit, in which she seeks to help us “hear the word of God and keep it,” what will make us, indeed, brothers, and sisters, and mothers of Jesus (Lk 11:28, Lk 8:20-21). She adds each of us as tesserae in the mosaic of love that is her heart, together with the love she has for her Son. When a woman, as we know, is the mother of many children, she still has a unique, unrepeatable and intimate relationship with each one, and what is true for motherhood according to the flesh is also valid for motherhood in the order of the Spirit. Mary seeks to help each of us entrusted to her become fully conformed to her Son.
• The great way we renew ourselves in devotion to Mary’s motherhood and to our identity as her beloved daughters and sons is at Mass, by which we enter into time into the eternal event of Calvary, when Jesus, giving his body and blood for our salvation, gave us to his Mother and gave his mother to each of us. St. John Paul II wanted us in the Eucharist to ponder Mary’s maternal love of her Son as a means to grasp better not only how to receive Jesus in Holy Communion but also to understand more profoundly how Mary loves each of us. “Is not the enraptured gaze of Mary as she contemplated the face of the newborn Christ and cradled him in her arms,” he asked, “that unparalleled model of love which should inspire us every time we receive Eucharistic communion?” He continued, “Mary lived her Eucharistic faith even before the institution of the Eucharist, by the very fact that she offered her virginal womb for the Incarnation of God’s Word. … At the Annunciation Mary conceived the Son of God in the physical reality of his body and blood, thus anticipating within herself what to some degree happens sacramentally in every believer who receives, under the signs of bread and wine, the Lord’s body and blood. As a result, there is a profound analogy between the Fiat that Mary said in reply to the angel, and the Amen that every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. Mary was asked to believe that the One whom she conceived ‘through the Holy Spirit’ was ‘the Son of God’ (Lk 1:30-35). In continuity with the Virgin’s faith, in the Eucharistic mystery we are asked to believe that the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.” At Mass Mary seeks to mother us to receive her Son in faith before we receive his body and blood within. She wants to nurture us to offer our hearts and whole bodies as tabernacles for his incarnation. She wants to help our whole life become an “Amen!” so that our existence will develop in accordance with the Word made Flesh we are privileged receive. And in embracing Him, we are in turn embraced by her who has never ceased embracing him, and we and the Church are helped by her to continue to embrace him in each person we meet, whom she loves with a maternal heart.
• As we begin this new civil year and pray for the grace that it will be truly a “year of the Lord,” we, together with the whole Church cry out, “Alma Redemptoris Mater!” Hail, Mother of the Redeemer! “Succurre cadenti, surgere qui curat populo!” Hasten to help your stumbling children who cry out to you! Mary, Mother of Jesus, please be a mother to us now and throughout the year! Amen!

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download