Homily
for the Solemnity of
Mary,
Mother of God
Jan.
1, 1994
Luke
2: 16-21
St.
Vincent de Paul, Hunter, Grand Bahama Island
“When 8 days were completed for his
circumcision, he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was
conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21).
Some of us remember when Jan. 1 was celebrated as the feast of the Circumcision. In shedding his blood for the 1st time, Jesus became a son of the covenant between God and Abraham, became a member of the Chosen People. As Mary and Joseph submitted to the laws by going to Bethlehem to register for Caesar’s census and by going up to Jerusalem to present Jesus to the Lord and redeem him with a sacrifice, Jesus also submitted to the law of the covenant. As St. Paul said in the 2d reading (Gal 4:4), “he was born under the law.”
Today we call this feast the solemnity
of Mary, the Mother of God. We honor
Mary many times during the year, of course, just as we honor our earthly
mothers often and not only on Mother’s Day.
Because of this focus of the feast, we heard part of the Christmas
gospel again, about Mary and the child and about Mary’s pondering the mystery
of all these events; and our Mass prayers mention her frequently.
It is the 8th day of Christmas. Our true love gives us no maids a-milking,
but he has given us the pure maid of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary, to be our
mother as well as his own.
Before Mass began we kept a short vigil
for world peace. Pope Paul and Pope John
Paul have regularly designated Jan. 1 as a day for prayer for peace. We pray for peace often during the year, and surely
our world needs those prayers. But our
Christmas season reminds us that Christ alone is the source of real peace.
We have just begun 1994, another year
of grace, another year when we will enjoy God’s blessings and, like Jesus, grow
in age and wisdom—we trust—before God and men.
We will welcome new life this year. We will commend some of our sisters
and brothers to eternal life. Perhaps we
ourselves will be graced by coming into our everlasting inheritance; during
1994 we must watch and be ready. We pray
today for a year of blessings on ourselves, on our relatives and friends, and
on the whole human family.
But I return to where I started. “He was named Jesus.” Jesus, Yeshua
in the Aramaic that Jesus spoke as his native tongue, means “Yahweh is
salvation.” Many ancient peoples, the
American Indians, and others believed that a personal name was supposed to
capture one’s essence, tell who one really was.
So, e.g., the angel with whom Jacob wrestled (Gen 32:23-31) refused to
tell his own name to Jacob; he didn’t want Jacob to get power over him; but he
changed Jacob’s name to Israel, “He contends against God.” Jesus changes Simon’s name to Peter, “the
Rock.” But no one’s name is truer to
himself than Jesus’ name: Yahweh is
salvation. Jesus, God’s only Son, is our
salvation. And so we reverence his name,
we invoke it only in prayer, we form a society to honor it and defend it, we
use it as a blessing.
I’m pleased that in the short time I’ve
been here I haven’t heard anyone take God’s name in vain or use it as a curse
rather than a blessing. I’m not saying I
haven’t heard some naughty words—out there on the basketball court in
particular—but my early judgment is that you do reverence the holy name of
Jesus, the sacred name of God. And may
God bless you for that.
The Jews held, and still do hold, the
sacred name of God in such reverence that they won’t pronounce it. When writing it in the Scriptures they omit
the vowel marks; and so we have a minor question of whether it should be
pronounced Yahweh or Jehovah. The sacred
name was used in early Judaism, of course, or it wouldn’t appear in the Bible
at all. But the Bible teaches us, and
the Jewish people teach us, to use it only reverently: to call God by name in our prayer—tho Jesus
teaches us to be even more familiar, to call God not by his name but by Abba, “Daddy”; to use it reverently to
call God as our witness on a solemn occasion—taking an oath, in other words; to
use it reverently to recount the stories of God’s love for us; and to use it
reverently to invoke blessings on people, as we heard in the 1st reading.
What is true of the 3-personned God or
of the Father is true of Jesus too. Our
hymns tell us how sweet his name is, tell us every knee must bend at his name—that’s
actually a very ancient hymn that Paul quotes in Phil 2. Some people when meditating use our Savior’s
name as a mantra to deepen their concentration.
However we describe Jesus’ name,
however we use it in our prayer, what is important is that we call upon him as
our Savior, as the one who “delivered from the law those who were subjected to
it,” i.e., he delivers us from the law’s penalties that we earned by our sins;
and he gives us back our status as God’s adopted children and coheirs with him
of all God’s heavenly treasures. May we
bless his holy name all our days and for all eternity.
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