Friday in the Eighteenth Week of Ordinary Time, August 5, 2022

The Feast of the Dedication of St. Mary Major

Matthew 16, 24-28

Jesus said to his disciples, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life? For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay each according to his conduct. Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.”

In considering this reading, we might think of how the Blessed Virgin Mary lived what her Son taught.  

“Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.”  Certainly the Blessed Virgin followed God’s will so closely that she shared in carrying his only-begotten Son’s Cross.  And as the nails were pounded into his hands and feet on Calvary, the sword prophesied by Simeon ran through her heart.  She denied herself all the consolations of earthly life in order to do God’s will, things other mothers had but which meant nothing to her if they hindered her.  “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”  Mary could have said no to the Archangel Gabriel.  She possessed free will and she could have decided that God was asking to much of her, or she could have shrunk away, obsessed with her lowliness.  She could have gone on to marry Joseph, had children with him, raised them, and enjoyed her grandchildren.  She could have a quiet, pious life in Nazareth.  Of course, since she would have rejected God’s call to her, she would have suffered bouts of regret, but life would have gone on.  But she chose, in the presence of Gabriel, to lose these prospects in favor of a life that would entail great suffering.  If anyone on earth at that time understood that the Son of man, the Messiah, was to be the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, it was the Virgin Mary, with her clear-sighted understanding of the Scriptures.  She “lost” the life she could have led in order to find true life in God.  The Greek word translated here as “to lose” also has the meaning of “to destroy”: Once embarked on, there was no turning back for her, and she knew this.  Her mind, unscarred by the ravages of sin and of the weakness of fallen human nature, saw farther and with more insight than anyone before her or since.  You and I might convince ourselves that we will not suffer if we follow the Lord, but she was in no doubt whatsoever.  

“What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life? Or what can one give in exchange for his life?”  For the Blessed Virgin, Jesus Christ was the whole world.  Jesus was everything to her.  In forfeiting her life, she gained the “whole world”, and we will too, if we imitate her love.

“For the Son of Man will come with his angels in his Father’s glory, and then he will repay each according to his conduct.”  He will come at the end of the world and judge those who, like Mary, counted “all things to be but loss for the excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them but as dung, that I may gain Christ” (Philippians 3, 8). 

“Amen, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.”  On the face of it, the Lord seems to say that he would return in the final judgment before some of those listening to him at that time had died.  St. Thomas Aquinas says that sinners are swallowed up by death, but the just taste death.  The just “taste” death in their death and recreation in baptism in Christ, and in their daily dying to themselves in preferring the will of God to their own.  The wicked do not “taste” death in this way, and once they have died they cannot.  They will never taste death, then.  These incur eternity in hell.  

The Blessed Virgin tasted death most of all in that she knew her Son would “suffer many things from the ancients and scribes and chief priests, and be put to death” (Matthew 16, 21) even while his Apostles denied that this would happen.