Who Am I That the Mother of My Lord Should Come to Me?, Feast of the Visitation, May 31, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Feast of the Visitation
May 31, 2023
Zeph 3:14-18, Is 12:2-6, Lk 1:39-56

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Nine days ago, during a pilgrimage of Columbia University Students to the Holy Land, I had the privilege to lead them on the last day to the Ein Kerem, in the hill countries of Judah, to the place preserved from the earliest centuries where Zechariah’s and Elizabeth’s house was, where John the Baptist was born, and where the scene of today’s scene of the Visitation took place. It’s one of the most prayerful places, and most Marian, in the Holy Land.
• There are essentially three “stations” to the sanctuary. The first is a lower Church where tradition says, according to the words of St. Luke, that St. Elizabeth kept herself in seclusion for five months. It features three frescoes, one showing Zechariah’s incensing the sacrifice at the temple and praying, the second of the Visitation proper, the third of the killing of the holy innocents and the protection of St. John the Baptist from Herod’s henchman. It also preserves a well that some ascribed to the setting for the embrace between Mary and Elizabeth as well as a stone that Christians in the early centuries posited was used to hide the infant precursor from those who were seeking to kill all infant boys in the general vicinity of Bethlehem, including John, as witnessed in the pseudogospel of St. James 22-23. These three scenes all point to the drama of John’s birth and feels like a place where St. Elizabeth could have come to pray in thanks to God.
• In the upstairs Church, there is an extraordinary history lesson giving us the pre- and post-history of the Visitation. The prehistory involves frescoes of the great heroines of the Old Testament whose lives and witness formed Mary and whose words were interwoven into her Magnificat. We see Sarah, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Joel, Judith, Esther, and finally Elizabeth. The post-history involves great Marian saints, like Ireneus, Athanasius, Ephrem, Cyril of Alexandria, Ambrose, Isidore, Hildephonsus, Anselm, Peter Damian, Bernard, Bruno, Germanus of Constantinople, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, Anthony of Padua, Alphonso’s, Francis of Assisi and Dominic. You similarly have various Marian titles that have come up across the centuries: Mother of God, Mother of our Creator, Mother of our Savior, Mother of Mercy, Mediatrix most powerful, Queen of the Apostles, Queen of the Most Holy Rosary, Our Lady of Victory, Our Lady Help of Christians, Queen Conceived without Sin, Queen of Angels, Queen of Angels, Queen of Confessors, Queen of Virgins, Queen of All Saints, Virgin Most Prudent, Virgin most powerful, Virgin most chaste, Virgin most just. You similarly have scenes in which Mary has figured prominently through her intercession, like the wedding feast of Cana and the Battle of Lepanto. Finally you have three scenes in the apse that I like to call Mary’s three beatitudes: “Blessed are you among women,” “All generations will call me blessed,” and “Blessed is the womb that bore thee and the breasts that nursed thee,” all pointing to the praise that even our generation gives her among all women and men.
• Finally the third station is out in the courtyard before the lower chapel, where you have Mary’s Magnificat written in many languages, echoing still today what Mary herself said, and leading the Church in evening praise until the Blessed Fruit of Mary’s womb returns.
• Today is a day in which we can be nourished by all of these aspects of the scene of the Visitation and its place in Catholic piety in the second joyful mystery, in so many religious families that take their inspiration from the scene, even in the Sisters of Life whose principal work involves the reverencing of children in wombs and their mothers. But what I would prefer to do is to focus on the five people of the Visitation and the important lessons each has to each us so that we may relive their mystery in our own life.
• The first is the Blessed Virgin Mary. She went with haste as soon as the Archangel Gabriel left. The Archangel didn’t tell her to go. He didn’t even suggest it. But at the mere mention of Elizabeth’s being pregnant in old age, Mary went with alacrity to help her. This shows her enormous faith in everything the Archangel said, not merely that she was pregnant with the eternal Son of God but that her seemingly sterile elderly cousin was similarly pregnant. She shows us how to go faithfully in haste to care for those in need. We also see in her Magnificat what she was pondering along the four day journey from Nazareth to Jericho to Jerusalem to Ein Kerem: she was putting all the pieces together of the great prophecies and praises of Old Testament heroines and applying them to herself. Her Magnificat is a compilation of so many Old Testament passages that she saw were being fulfilled in her. And her soul magnified and spirit rejoiced in the Almighty God and all that he was doing for her in her humility such that every generation thenceforth would call her blessed. The same Almighty God has done great things for us and we, too, need to learn from Mary how to rejoice in him!
• St. Elizabeth, too, was docile to the Holy Spirit. Unless the Holy Spirit revealed to her everything, she, too, it seems to me must have received a visit from the Archangel Gabriel because, while it was perhaps possible for her by feminine intuition to guess that Mary, her cousin, was pregnant, how could she ever have guessed that she was carrying not just the Messiah but her “Lord” unless she had been explicitly told? And when Mary showed up, she went out to meet her, praising her as blessed among women because of the blessed Fruit of her womb and because of her faith that the Lord’s words to her would be fulfilled. She also showed her great humility, confessing that she couldn’t believe it that the Mother of her Lord would come to her. We learn from her in a particular way the virtue of praise. We never meet a mere mortal: we always meet someone in the image and likeness of God. We should not only not take others for granted, but regularly seek to honor and praise them for their relationship to God as much as we can. This goes for everyone, but it certainly goes for those with whom we live. So often the devil wants to make us doubt who we are, to doubt God’s love, to doubt that we have any goodness, but love of neighbor is premised on love for ourselves. How important it is for others to remind us that we are important to God, to praise us when praise is due, not in a way that makes us proud but that reminds us of how blessed we are!
• Zechariah at this time was mute, but he was paying attention to everything, listening and pondering the dialogues between Mary and Elizabeth. He shows us about the need for prayerful, contemplative silence to appreciate what God is doing, something that can lead us to our own canticle of praise, like his famous Benedictus, when we open up our mouths.
• St. John the Baptist received Jesus’ blessing in the womb and leaped. He jumped for joy. Do we leap when we receive God’s blessings? When was the last time we leaped because of what God does for us? He simply gave John his blessing when John was in utero; he allows us to consume him here on earth. How much more should we be leaping in the “womb of this world” as God blesses us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens and makes it possible for us in this world to live with our hearts set on heaven? How much should we leap to receive Jesus within in Holy Communion?
• Jesus is the last and obviously most important of the five figures. Even in his earliest stages of human life, at 3-4 days old, 8-16 cells of a blastocyst according to his human body, Jesus was blessing. He was blessing Mary even as a one-celled embryo. These are extraordinary truths! He was doing good. He was lifting up the human race. He was making others leap for joy. Once we receive his blessing, then we’re called to become his blessing for the world so that he can make others leap again, sending us out with Christ inside, just like Mary, to proclaim our Magnificat and take him to others.
• As we prepare to receive Jesus and in a sense relive this mystery of the Visitation, we ask him, through the intercession of Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah and John, to bless us as he knows we most need, to fill us with himself, to send us out with souls magnifying and rejoicing in him and our bodies leaping and going in haste, like Mary, to bring him to others!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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