The Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God

Jan 29 2025

A New Time of Hope

What do you seek in a new year? What blessing do you ask of God, who has revealed the depth of divine love in the birth of Jesus? Consider the blessing the Lord ordered Moses to give to Aaron and his sons to speak to the people of Israel. God offered them a blessing that brings divine protection through God’s gracious presence, revealing a God who intends to look kindly upon and give peace to the chosen people.

Our annual celebration of Christmas extends these same blessings into God’s plan that we become adopted into the family of God by our birth in Christ through baptism. We are given not only the freedom that comes from being made children of God, taken up into a relationship allowing us to call God Abba (Father), but also to consider ourselves as heirs and inheritors of our God’s kingdom when we pass from this life to eternal life.

The name Jesus means “God saves.” This is the message of this season: God became one of us to save us, to seek us out and bring us into communion with the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are invited to think of ourselves as part of the family of the Trinity. Mary is set before us every first day of the new year as the woman who ponders this wonderful mystery of God-become-human from the beginning. She gently extends to us an invitation to quiet reflection, prayer, and praise.

Consider/Discuss

Why do you think this feast of Mary was chosen for New Year’s Day?
Have you spent time “pondering” God’s gift of divine life to you, given in baptism?

Responding to the Word

Mary, mother of Jesus, God’s Son and our Savior, you were ever attentive to what God was asking of you, keeping the law of Moses, but also open to hearing and obeying God’s ongoing call in your life. Pray for us to be attentive to what God will say and ask of us during this new year of grace. Amen.

Jan 29 2025

Scripture Study for

Often referred to as the Aaronic priestly blessing, the reading from Numbers illustrates various roles, one played by Moses and another played by Aaron and the priests. YHWH, the personal name of God, is repeated three times, demonstrating the power of that name. God is called on to bless with good fortune and to keep from harm; to look favorably toward and to be gracious toward; to look upon and to grant peace. These petitions all ask for the same thing, namely, the blessings that make life worth living. However, they are really all asking for peace, the condition of absolute well-being.

Christ’s mission in the world is the major focus of Paul’s teaching. “The designated time” refers to that time in history when God brought the messianic expectations to fulfillment by sending the Son into the world. Referring to Christ as God’s Son establishes his divine nature; acknowledging that he was born of a woman establishes his human nature. The Christology in this passage is rich and complex. Paul contrasts servitude under the law with freedom in Christ. Still, his attitude toward the law is really not negative. He sees it as a necessary guardian that carefully watches over minors until they are mature enough to take care of themselves.

The Gospel narrative is set within the context of the family. However, the focus is really on the observance of religious practices. Circumcision was the ritual that initiated the males into the community of Israel. As observant Jews, Mary and Joseph fulfilled all of the prescriptions of the law, seeing that the child was circumcised as custom dictated. This was also the time of naming. The child is given the name told to Mary by the angel at the time of his conception. Most of what the angel had announced has now come to pass. But we all will have to wait to see how her son will acquire the throne of his father David and rule the house of Jacob forever.

Jan 24 2025

The Lord Bless You and Keep You

When I was little, I worried about the sheep. The angels sang “Glory to God in the highest” and the sky burst with light. I loved the story of the shepherds. But I worried about their sheep. In the picture in my children’s Bible, they looked like white dots scattered on the hillside. I saw no fences with barbed wire. In the next picture, when the shepherds knelt by baby Jesus in the manger, they were not there. Had the sheep wandered every which way and gotten lost? Did they fall off a cliff? I looked at the pictures a long time. Would they be okay?

In my adult life, I have learned that ancient shepherds used shrubbery to make a fold called a keep, a hedge with thorns to guard and preserve and keep their animals. The sheep were enfolded, kept secure. Yes, they would be okay.

The author of Numbers uses that same Hebrew verb “to keep” in the blessing of Aaron: “The Lord bless you and keep you.” He is asking the Lord to protect, to preserve, to hedge us in, to make us safe. When the Lord “shines his face upon us,” we are beloved sheep. We are enfolded, kept secure from all harm.

Mary also “kept” all these things in her heart. In the Greek, that verb has a similar sheltering feel—to keep close together and to preserve from all harm. As the shepherds departed from her, her face shone upon her newborn beloved and she treasured these thoughts; she built a hedge around all that was said about him to shelter him in her heart.

Maybe we still worry in our grown-up way, will those we love wander and get lost? Will we ourselves be okay? Lord, bless us and keep us!

Consider/Discuss

Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe involves a powerful sense of the Virgin Mary’s protection, asking her to wrap her cloak or mantle around us. What joy and security do you feel when you are enfolded by love?
The shepherds in Jesus’ day were not cute little children dressed up in robes carrying stuffed animals. They were characters outside the margins of society, not necessarily the most desirable of guests. Yet the Gospel of Luke places them on the inside, at the heart of the Christmas story. As you make your New Year’s resolutions this day, who are the shepherds in your life? How could you enfold them into your life more intentionally in this upcoming year?

Living and Praying with the Word

Shepherd of souls, the thorns that surrounded your head have become the source of our safety. Wandering and scattered, we sometimes feel lost. We pray for those we love who also feel lost. Wrap your arms around them and do not let any harm befall them. Also protect those whom we do not love as we ought. We may all just be little white dots on a hillside, but we are also all your beloved sheep. In this New Year, whatever comes, be our shelter, keep us safe.

Jan 24 2025

Scripture Study for

A significant aspect of the priestly role in ancient Israel, as today, was to ask for God’s blessing for individuals and the entire community. In this passage from Numbers, God gives the priests a specific prayer of blessing to call down divine favor on Israel. Divine blessing is an all-encompassing concept, with material and spiritual aspects. It involves protection, fecundity, well-being, personal and social harmony—in a word, shalom. The holistic nature of the blessing is captured in a number of ways. To keep means to guard and protect, while to “shine his face upon you” means to have a generally favorable disposition. Graciousness implies the divine generosity, as does the notion of divine kindness.

In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul emphasizes both the divine and human origins of Christ, both of which bring blessing on those incorporated into Christ through baptism. Born of a woman, Jesus is fully human, sharing in our human condition and subject himself to the law. At the same time, as God’s Son, he has the power to save, which the law cannot do. This salvation is effected by making Christians the children of God by adoption, a legal and familial metaphor that means that they are heirs, along with Christ, to all of God’s promises. This selection features the work of (what would eventually be understood as) the Trinity: God the Father, who through the Spirit, brings Christians into “sonship” along with Christ.

The shepherds have been informed by the angels that the child born in Bethlehem, although poor and unknown, is in fact the Savior (Luke 2:8–15). Finding the child in a manger, they announce what they have heard to Mary and Joseph. While the onlookers are amazed that such a child could possibly be “Messiah and Lord,” Mary is unsurprised, and subsequently reflects on “these things.” The shepherds, among the first believers in this gospel, now go back out into the world to glorify and praise God for what has been done in Jesus.

Jan 21 2025

Mary Watches Over Jesus as the Lord Watches Over Us

I have an elderly friend who took a hard fall. Now, nurses and family hover over her continually, watching for a brain bleed and signs of confusion. What will her future hold?

I have a grandson who was recently born. His mother and father look at him continually, beholding his tiny hands and feet and admiring his shock of hair. What will this child be?

In our reading, there is a lot of clamor surrounding the shepherds. “They went with speed” and “they told everyone” and “all who heard it were astonished”—it sounds like a lot of noise, doesn’t it? Like the steady stream of visitors to the hospital, they ask, “What does the future hold?”

In the middle of the shepherds’ commotion are these few words about Mary: “She [treasured] all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” She is the quiet anchor in the center of the tumult. She feeds the baby. She rocks him. He is near to her. In the midst of the chaos, she gives a maternal gaze of blessing upon that infant child. Like the Virgin of Guadalupe, she wraps her mantle around him. And all of these experiences remain in her memory.

This same gaze of blessing is found in the blessing of Aaron in the book of Numbers. Watch over, keep, hover, safeguard—these are all images of protectiveness and care. We too are watched over. It is a blessed hovering, a nearness that we should not fear: The Lord bless you and keep you, watch over you; The Lord let his face to shine upon you. Life can sometimes worry us. But no matter what the future holds, a gaze of love enfolds us. We know Who holds our future.

Consider/Discuss

Put yourself into the Gospel story as a townsperson or a friend of one of the shepherds. How would you respond when he tells you this remarkable story of angels and a baby in the manger?
When a pregnant woman sits down with a group of older mothers, they suddenly and naturally start swapping birth stories. To whom do you think that Mary might have later told Jesus’ birth stories? What stories did your mother tell about your birth?

Living and Praying with the Word

Hover over us, Spirit of God. We want to be independent. We want to believe that we can succeed in life all by ourselves. Yet when we were children, we needed a mother’s care. Today, we need your care, too. We cry out from our hearts, “Abba, Father!” You are the source of our elation. Stir us to taste more deeply the sweetness of your love.