Homily given on Sunday 1st January 2023 (Solemnity of Mary Mother of God).
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
In St John’s Gospel, when Philip tells him that the Messiah was “Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth” Nathaniel asks a rhetorical question: can anything good come from Nazareth? Nazareth, a backwater farming town, was the butt of everyone’s jokes. It would be like telling someone here in Jersey that you were getting a new Parish Priest from Guernsey! From Guernsey? People might ask? Can anything good come from Guernsey?
When I studied theology, I was tempted to say the same about Germany (or the German-speaking Countries Germany, Austria, and Switzerland); you have the impenetrable Mess of German Theology and Philosophy, it’s the land of Hegel, and Nietzsche, and Kant, of Karl Rahner, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, and Hans Kung. These German-speakers are so difficult to read, so difficult to understand, that any aspiring student of theology might be tempted to cry out in frustration, Can anything good come from Germany?!
This is when, as a student, I began to seriously read the works of another German, Josef Aloysius Ratzinger, who would become Pope Benedict XVI. I remembered his election as Pope, which took place just as I was finishing primary school. I remembered seeing him as an eighteen year old in London. I was just a few feet away from the platform in Hyde Park where His Holiness knelt down to adore the blessed sacrament alongside eighty thousand people, in total silence. That evening in Central London, I saw the face of a man totally in love with the Lord, adoring his Lord in the Eucharist. (I learned yesterday that his last words were “Jesus I love you.”) It was almost a decade later, after he had resigned as Pope, that I would begin to properly read the extraordinary theology of this Bavarian Bishop. Unlike the other Germans I had read, Ratzinger wrote with an extraordinary clarity and simplicity. While all around him was collapsing into doubt and uncertainty and unclarity, Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, was the intellectual giant at the centre of the Church for decades who reinforced and explained the unchanging truths of the Faith for a world that was dramatically changing.
I have always described myself as a Benedict vocation; I firmly believe that my calling as a priest began in Hyde Park in 2010, seeing Benedict XVI adoring the eucharist. And so on this Solemnity of Mary Mother of God, the day after our once Holy Father has gone to his eternal reward, I want to share with you his reflections on this great feast.
Why do Catholics venerate Mary? Why do we show her such devotion? To Protestants the way we venerate her is a scandal, even a disgrace.
The old name for this feast day is the feast of the circumcision of the Lord, the day when our Lord was circumcised according to the old law and given his name, Jesus. One of Pope Benedict’s writings, when he was simply Professor Ratzinger, makes a big deal about the name of Jesus. He points out that at no point in the whole of the Old Testament does God reveal His name to anybody; in our first reading (from the book of Numbers) the blessing is said to call down the name of God, but it is not revealed. When Moses asks His name, he replies only I am that I am, and he calls himself God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he does not reveal His name. It is only the coming of Jesus that reveals God’s name to us; Jesus is the name of God, the name which means God Saves. He is the revelation of God to each one of us, the God who so loved the world that He sent His Son to live as one of us, born of a woman, born into our flesh and blood, born to reveal His great love for us, and to save us.
Because Jesus was God, born of Mary, the Council of Ephesus in 431 called Mary by the ancient title Theotokos, which means God Bearer, or God Carrier, which we translate via Latin to Mother of God. We venerate Mary then because she is the image and archetype of the Church. This great mystery is summarised by Benedict XVI in his 2012 homily on this feast day
The Mother of God is the first of the blessed, and it is she who bears the blessing; she is the woman who received Jesus into herself and brought him forth for the whole human family.[1]
Each one of us, every single Christian, is called to imitate Mary. Each one of us is called first to receive Christ, to cherish in our hearts what we learn from Him and about Him, and then to make His name, the name which means God Saves known to those around us.
Every New Year we begin with the celebration of Mary, the Mother of God, the Theotokos, the God-bearer, because we are being called to rededicate ourselves to the mystery of Mary. We are called to rededicate ourselves to being God-bearers like her; carrying Christ to our brothers and sisters.
So when we set our New Year’s resolutions, instead of focusing solely on needing to lose weight, or save money, or learn a new skill, as good as those things are, we might ask ourselves how in this New Year we can become better carriers of the Word of God.
We might ask ourselves how we can be better neighbours to those around us.
We might ask ourselves how we can become more involved in the life of our Parish community.
We might ask ourselves what habits are holding us back from being better Christians, and resolve to get rid of them this year.
Unlike our ordinary resolutions, which depend entirely on our own effort and work, these resolutions come from the Holy Spirit, who lives and moves inside each one of us. The Spirit we read about in our second reading, who lives in us and cries out to the Father. These resolutions will be sustained, and helped by prayer. These resolutions will be sustained and helped by the prayers of our heavenly mother, the mother of God. If we turn to her, and ask her continuously for her help, this can be the year we imitate her as God-bearers. This can be the year others look to us and see a real transformation. This can be the year we bring the light of God’s name into the darkness of our broken, fallen world.
God’s name is Jesus, the name which means God Saves, so we pray at the end of the old year and the beginning of the new, that he enters into our lives as our Saviour, and raises us up with Him.
Today, along with the Shepherds, we kneel in adoration at the manger, before this Nazarene Child born in Bethlehem. Today we join in the hymn of praise;
Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, he has visited his people and redeemed them. He has raised up for us a mighty Saviour in the House of David.
Luke 1:68-69
[1] Benedict XVI, Homily for the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God (Vatican Basilica, 1 January 2012) accessed at https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2012/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20120101_world-day-peace.html
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