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Letters Solemnity of Mary Galatians 4:4-7 |
The octave day of Christmas has been celebrated under various headings in the history of the Church. For some time its title was the Feast of the Circumcision. Our Episcopalian brothers and sisters call it the feast of the Holy Name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Beginning in 1968 the Popes have designated January 1 as a World Day of Prayer for Peace. Originally, however, it was a Marian feast, the oldest Marian feast in the Roman liturgy. In the renewed liturgical calendar it is the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.
On this day we celebrate relationships: the relationship between Jesus and His mother, between Jesus and the Jewish people, between Jesus and us, between ourselves and Jesus, between ourselves and the Holy Trinity.
The gospel reading is the same reading we heard at the dawn Mass on Christmas, with the addition of the verse about Jesus’ circumcision, the cultic act that made Him a member of the people of Abraham. This ritual relationship serves as the jumping off point of the second reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
Apparently some Jewish Christian missionaries had come to Paul’s converts in Galatia and were telling them that, in order to be true followers of Christ, they had to observe certain elements of the Jewish law, including circumcision. Paul replies that the Jewish law was a temporary expedient in God’s plan which had no power in itself to gain God’s favor and blessings. It was a kind of training program that would come to an end when God’s plan reached its final stage in Christ.
In the verses that immediately precede our second reading, Paul uses an image from the social customs of his time. A rich man would appoint in his will a guardian for his son who, in the event of the father’s death, would administer the son’s inheritance until he came of age. Even though the son was entitled to vast wealth, he was no better than a slave. Paul goes on to say that, until God’s people came of age, they, too, were slaves, subject not only to the Mosaic law but to the constraints of sin that are so powerful in the world.
This is where our reading begins. Paul tells the Galatians that God sent His Son, born at a certain specific time of a certain specific woman, to end the time of slavery. Through Christ, we are no longer slaves but have become sons and daughters of God. We are adopted into God’s family and so are able to speak intimately with the Father through God’s own Holy Spirit Who now lives in our hearts.
Our salvation is a matter of relationships: Jesus’ relationships and our relationship to Him. Jesus is the only begotten Son of the Father, yet, through the humanity that He took from His mother, He became a human being, one of us. He spent His life as a Jew, subject to the demands of the Jewish law, starting with circumcision. But He didn’t just relate to His own people, but to all of human kind. He came to save and free us all. When He becomes our brother He invites us to become His brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters to the man Jesus, but also brothers and sisters to the Jesus Who is God. We become members of God’s household and live in the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The temporary and provisional demands of the Jewish law are now irrelevant and the powers of our sinful world have no more control over us. We are free of all that because we are now relatives of God, members of God’s household. We can address God as "Father" just as the Holy Spirit of Jesus does.
In our culture, our social standing does not depend on the family we are born into. Being lucky enough to be born to wealth does help some, of course, and having parents who care for us and raise us well is important. But being born into nobility or prominence of some sort doesn’t really matter much. What really matters is what we achieve for ourselves, what we "make of ourselves." In the context of our salvation, it’s just the opposite. We can observe all the moral laws we want and spend our whole lives struggling to be religious, but it doesn’t mean a thing unless we somehow belong to the right family, the divine family of Jesus, the family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The linkage between us and Jesus is our humanness. We are capable of sharing the divinity of Christ because He was willing to share in our humanity. We can become His relatives because He became our relative. That overlap provides the contact point between God and us that God used to free us from slavery and give us an eternal inheritance in His household. That saving humanity of Jesus was the gift of Mary. Our human link with Jesus is on His mother’s side.
Today we don’t just commemorate the fact that a woman named Mary happened to be the mother of Jesus. We celebrate Mary and what we celebrate is that it was she who made it possible for us to become relatives of God.
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Conversation Questions:
How do I celebrate Mary’s role in my salvation?
Does my relationship with Jesus imply relationships with other people?
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