The Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God, Sunday, January 1, 2023

Luke 2, 16–21

The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known the message that had been told them about this child. All who heard it were amazed by what had been told them by the shepherds. And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart. Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them. When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

Karl Ratzinger’s election to the papal throne was greeted with rejoicing and relief by faithful Catholics who looked forward to continued stability in the Church after the rocky years of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He ruled the Church with a steady hand, appointed some good bishops and member of the Curia, and he laid out a logical and clear explanation that the Mass of the 1962 Missal had never been abrogated and that any Catholic priest was free to offer it.  This proved a great boon to the Church in many ways, not the least being that priests who trained to offer the traditional Mass discovered the riches and beauty of the Mass in both forms.  Bizarre but true, seminaries spend very little time training men to say the Mass.  The Mass is considered a function rather than a ritual by those in charge.  A function can be carried out without much thought, but a ritual requires attention to every detail, for every word and gesture contains meaning.  A priest who is aware of this and offers the Mass with this awareness will truly worship God and help the congregation to worship him too.  I know of a number of priests who discovered this during Ratzinger’s reign as Benedict XVI.  His abdication came as a tremendous shock to a Church still healing from the unsettled times after Vatican II and brought forth a new pope whose ways are very different from those of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.  We thank God for the bit of sunshine that glowed upon the world while Benedict reigned and pray for his immortal soul, which surely stands in need of prayers just as any of ours do.

“The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger.”  If we think about this for a minute, we might wonder why the angels directed anyone at all — let alone shepherds — to Mary, Joseph, and Jesus just after he was born.  The shepherds could do nothing for the Holy Family and might even prove an embarrassment or inconvenience.  The sole possible reason would be to comfort the parents with the news and the reassuring words of of the exulting angels.  The Birth of Jesus caught them out of doors and perhaps without a woman to assist Mary.  While the sight of the Infant would have provided consolation, we should keep in mind that in the Birth itself there were no angels, no glory, no divine words.  It is possible that the reason the Virgin Mary went with Joseph to Bethlehem though she was heavily pregnant was that they intended for her to give birth to the King of Israel in Jerusalem, and to remain there.  This would have seemed much more appropriate than for the Child to be born in Nazareth in Galilee.  We get a hint of confirmation that this was their plan from Matthew 2, 22, when we are told: “Hearing that Archelaus reigned in Judea in the place of Herod his father, [Joseph] was afraid to go there: and being warned in sleep returned into the region of Galilee.”  In God’s Providence, Herod’s son became king so that Joseph would not be able to take his family back to Judea, as though he had planned to do so.  The Lord Jesus did not will to be born or to live in the royal city, but to grow up as a nondescript Galilean.  He did not come to save kings but to redeem slaves.  

“And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”  This would be better translated as, “Mary was preserving all these words, pondering them in her heart.”  The main verb is in the imperfect, meaning an action continuously carried out in the past.  Mary did not think about these words and forget them, but continued to think about them for the rest of her life.  Also, it is not “things” but “words” or “sayings” or “spoken accounts”.  Because Mary’s intellect was untainted by sin, her memory would have held the words of the shepherds and all the circumstances of the Birth of her Son in perfect retention.  And the words upon which she reflected she revealed later to St. Luke, which he put into his Gospel for us.  It is as though she herself were speaking these words from the shepherds to us through Luke’s pen.

“Then the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, just as it had been told to them.”  One day we will learn whether this experience led to these shepherds leading virtuous lives or whether, like so many of us after great experiences, they soon forgot what they had seen and heard and kept on as they had been doing.

“When eight days were completed for his circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived in the womb.”  Formerly and for many centuries, January 1, eight days after Christmas, the Church celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision.  The Fast of Mary, Mother of God, occurred in the Fall.  It was at the Circumcision of the Lord that Joseph gave the Child his name, Jesus, thereby also officially claiming his paternity.  Jesus became a Jew at this point.  And so on this day we celebrate the legal fatherhood of Joseph, the beginning of his life as a member of the Chosen People by Jesus, and the Motherhood of the Blessed Virgin Mary.