Father THOMAS IDERGARD SJ
Homily for the Solemnity of Mary – Mother of God
Numbers 6:22-27; Ps 67; Galatians 4:4-7; Luke 2:16-21
2025-01-01
St. Lars Catholic Church, Uppsala (English Mass)
Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
When another year has passed, most of us can establish, some with more pain and sorrow than others, how little we control and dispose of our time, our happiness and our misfortune. Thus, we realise how provisional our plans, expectations and endeavours are. But if we try to live in the present tense of God, we will, stepwise, in time, approach that, which God has intended for each one of us. This is the only sustainable recipe for happiness. Not defined as ecstatic feelings, but as an inner peace emanating from the awareness that the meaning of my life ultimately does not depend on my achievements or succumbs to my limitations.
For this reason, the Church wants us to put our new year, 2025, in our Blessed Virgin Mary’s tender, caring hands of perpetual intercession.
By her example of total openness to God, and therethrough her “yes” to God’s will without knowing where it would lead her; by her presence at the most crucial moments of her Son’s salvific work and by her eternal place at his side, Virgin Mary is the best guide and companion into all that is unknown.
She teaches us, speaking with the American Catholic bishop Robert Barron, that life is not an ego-drama, which we invent ourselves; where we become addicted to our own achievements and finally always succumb to our own limitations, losing both meaning and hope. Instead, life is about seeking, finding and embracing our own, individual and unique role in God’s drama, the “Theo drama”, where God is the one who writes the script, produces, casts and directs and helps us to exercise our role for the realisation of both our true selves and God’s plan.
This is exactly what our Blessed Virgin Mary did. She embraced her role in God’s great drama not without asking intelligent questions – on the contrary, why shouldn’t we be able to do that to better understand the faith and its consequences – but fully confident that there are answers, which we do not produce ourselves but are called to receive.
In today’s Gospel we heard how Virgin Mary “treasured all … things” that happened and “pondered them in her heart”. This indicates not only that she herself is the source of St. Luke’s Gospel story of Jesus’s childhood but also shows how she read everything that happened to her, even what she could not fully grasp at the time, in the light of her role in God’s great drama. So that it could characterise her heart, the Biblical expression for the innermost personal core, and guide her in everything.
Therefore, Virgin Mary was the most suitable “gateway” for the living Word of God to enter the world. In his human nature, Jesus is in every way moulded by his mother, chosen and prepared for this as she was by God at her own conception. And through his upbringing and formation by her together with St. Joseph, whom the Bible labels as a righteous man, Jesus’s humanity would become fully in tune with his divine nature.
God’s blessing of us, which uncovers his face to us, as stated in our first reading today from the Book of Numbers, i.e. Jesus Christ born of Virgin Mary, unites us into one, new, covenantal family; one new Israel, one new, promised, spiritual land, the Church, where we are connected not by blood but by something stronger: God’s grace, conferred by her unchanged teaching and seven sacraments.
This is what St. Paul tells the Galatians, in our second reading today: God’s Son was “born of a woman” so that all of us, indeed born by women (surprisingly a controversial statement in certain ideological circles today), through faith in Christ, can receive adoption as sons and daughters of God. Everyone who has been baptized into Christ has become his brother or sister. In Christ everyone – no matter their age, gender or race – can call God “Father” and Mary “Mother”, just as Christ does.
Everything that the Catholic Church believes and teaches about Virgin Mary, is a necessary consequence of that which she believes and teaches about God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. The Blessed Virgin makes the Christian faith complete. This was in fact confirmed by the Atheist 19th century philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who once said that when faith in the Mother of God diminishes, also faith in God’s Son and God the Father will diminish.
As St. Louis de Montfort, the 17th century French Catholic priest and spiritual author who has exercised a great influence on the theology of Mary, expressed it:
“We never give more honour to Jesus than when we honour his Mother, and we honour her simply and solely to honour him all the more perfectly. We go to her only as a way leading to the goal we seek – Jesus, her Son.”
God’s goodness and omnipotence does not mean that God guarantees that nothing bad will happen to us here in time and space. Just look at what happened to Jesus, God’s own son. But God guarantees that he will be with us in our sufferings and trials. In this we can trust because God in Jesus Christ has shared suffering and death with us, and therethrough conquered its consequences. So that it never can exercise power over us, in the sense that our fear of it controls what we think and do. And so that it never will have the last word, in the sense of being the end. Eternal life, the resurrection with and as Christ, is the real and happy end, for those who believe and live by faith in Christ.
The best New Year’s resolution, inspired and encouraged by the example of our Blessed Virgin Mary, is to find an area where we, in the coming year, have to say our “yes” to God and God’s will, or where we need to say it more wholeheartedly than before.
Let us ask for the protective intercessions of the Mother of God, who therefore is the Mother of the Church, who is always with her son, for more of her attitude of trust in God’s plan, also if it is difficult to first understand; that attitude expressed by the responsorial psalm’s acclamation: “God, be gracious and bless us”. So that we might be more able to treasure and ponder in our heart the coming of Jesus Christ, when he soon, most amazingly, gives himself to us in the new, eternal Bethlehem of the Holy Eucharist. Amen.