Saturday in the 27th Week 9pf Ordinary Time, October, 14, 2023

Luke 11, 27-28

“While Jesus was speaking.”  The context for the verses which make up today’s Gospel reading is the charge by members of the Jewish crowd that Jesus was casting out demons by the prince of demons, an absurd, desperate, idea.  It is while he is answering the charge that a woman from the same crowd cried out in his defense.  Opposing the charge that the Lord performed the good act of exorcism by another’s (wicked) power, the woman declares that the Lord’s blessedness has caused his Mother to be blessed likewise.  “Blessed is the womb that carried you.”  We remember how Elizabeth cried out to the Virgin Mary, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the Fruit of your womb” (Luke 1, 42).  Elizabeth showed the depth of her feeling by following this with, “And whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?”  She knew through the Holy Spirit that Mary carried her Lord in her womb, but she felt unworthy even to be in the presence of Mary, her Lord’s Mother.  “And the breasts at which you nursed.”  The Son of God deigned not only to be born, taking his flesh from a human, but even to be nursed by that human, he who, with the Father in heaven, had no need of anything.  We may rightly say that a woman who has given birth to a healthy baby is blessed, and that she who is able to nurse him is also blessed, but here is the very Son of God who has chosen to be born from this woman, and to nurse at the breasts of this woman.  The woman from the crowd is calling out, Blessed is the woman whom God had chosen for this work!

“Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.”  The Lord’s reply fits into the woman’s declaration, making it a call-and-response.  She has said, Blessed is the one chosen by God; the Lord answers, And blessed is the one who fulfills God’s command.  It is indeed blessed to be chosen by God, but one must carry out the work God has assigned in order to be blessed in heaven.  In this way, the Lord confirms that the Virgin Mary is both blessed by the choice God has made of her, and by her immediate affirmative to this, and then her doing his will, which she did right away after the Annunciation by going to assist her older and pregnant cousin.  That is, when the Angel Gabriel told Mary about Elizabeth’s pregnancy directly after telling her that the Holy Spirit would overshadow her, the Virgin took this as a sign of God’s will for her to go care for her.  And she did, going to her “in haste”.  

These words of the Lord are also addressed to those who follow him.  We have been inestimably blessed by our baptism into the Lord’s own Body and made adopted sons and daughters of the Father.  Yet it is necessary for us to listen to God’s word and to observe it or our baptism goes for nought.  The blessing that we receive in the waters of the sacrament prepare and dispose us for the “water of refreshment” beside which we will lie in heaven, if we do God’s holy will.  We will see the Mother of our Lord there and truly learn from her the glory of perfect blessedness.