Homily for the Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Today we celebrate the Solemnity of Mary Mother of God. Fortunately, as you came into church this morning, you did not see armed troops guarding the doors, nor bishops jostling and shouting angrily at each other in Greek. We should be grateful for such peace and calm this New Year’s Day, 2024. Sixteen-hundred years ago, you might have seen just that. At that time, the fiercest controversy in the Catholic Church was over whether the title “Mother of God” could be applied to Mary, a controversy settled by the Council of Ephesus in 431. Before the Council of Ephesus, Nestorius, the bishop of Constantinople, had claimed that Mary could be called the “Mother of Christ” or the “Mother of Jesus” but not the “Mother of God.”
If you think for a minute about what is at stake in the title, you’ll realize that the controversy was not really about the identity of Mary, but the identity of her son. Mary can only be called “Mother of God” if Jesus is, in fact, fully man and fully God. The Council of Ephesus declared Nestorius a heretic for obscuring what we celebrate this Christmas season: that the Son of God has become man, that from the moment of his conception in Mary’s womb Jesus was and is God.
But today is a Marian feast. What does this title tell us about Mary? You have probably heard many times that Mary always points to Christ. Her final words recorded in Scripture are to the servants at Cana, after she has dropped an unsubtle hint to Jesus about the need for more wine at the party: “Do whatever he tells you,” she says (Jn 2:5). It is hard to think of a more exalted title to bestow on anyone than “Mother of God,” yet there’s a humility in the title too because by exalting Mary we are first exalting her son.
Mary is a woman of both humility and strength, of contemplation and action, of wisdom and patience, of courage and compassion, and yet her greatness—what makes her the greatest woman to have lived, worthy of the title of today’s feast—is the relationship she has with her son. And there is a lesson here for us, a lesson about the importance of relationships.
Very often we think of success in life in terms of our accomplishments—how many rungs we manage to climb on the corporate ladder, the power or fame or money we manage to amass. We often talk about self-improvement. Over the next week, we will no doubt see advertisements encouraging us to keep our new year’s resolutions—fitness clubs will offer discounts, Kindle will encourage us to read more—because this time of year we resolve to improve ourselves. And we tend to think of ourselves as individuals. In fact, there’s a certain school of feminist thought that criticizes Catholic devotion to Mary for putting too much emphasis on her relationship with her son and not enough on self-realization. Perhaps she should have concentrated on her career first, should have told the angel she would bear God’s Son, but only after she had finished college and achieved independence and self-sufficiency.
Perhaps I exaggerate a bit, but only a bit, because today’s individualistic ethos does indeed value independence and self-sufficiency at the expense of our relationships. In Rome, I teach a course on marriage. One of the studies I have been reading with my students talks about the pressure young people feel to achieve personal, career, and financial success before they get married. Instead of a relationship that forms the foundation of their lives, marriage has become a kind of capstone achievement. This means that today marriage is often delayed, and for many it becomes something unachievable. There is something a bit lonely in all of this because it means putting individual achievement ahead of relationships.
Yet Christianity teaches us that our relationships are everything. The language that we use to talk about God himself—Father and Son—describes a relationship. Even the way we explain the Holy Spirit—proceeding from the Father and the Son—is relational. Over the past few years, as I’ve begun my mission as a teacher, I’ve had to think a lot about what is most important to me in my life and my career. And I’ve come to see that what matters most—the impact I will have—will not be what I attain, but the effect I will have on my students, what I am able to give to them.
“It is in giving that we receive,” St. Francis wrote, and he was, of course, describing a way of being in relationship. When we talk about the Trinity, we are describing an exchange of love, an eternal back and forth of self-giving. What we mean by salvation is to enter into this relationship of divine self-giving. In the letter to the Galatians, Paul uses the language of relationship to describe the new life Christ promises: “you are no longer a slave,” he says, “but a son, and if a son then also an heir.” This is what happens in baptism. We who were God’s creatures become his sons and daughters. That relationship is what salvation is: as Paul puts it, having the spirit of Jesus in our hearts crying out to God “Father.”
There are many ways we can choose to define ourselves—by profession, by citizenship, by demographic categories. But the definitions that matter most—father, son, daughter, mother, friend, brother, sister—are those that describe our relationships. And so it is with Mary, the Mother of God. Receiving the gift of a Son, she gave the world a savior, and she became the mother of our salvation.
Readings: Nm 6:22-27; Gal 4:4-7; Lk 2:16-21
January 1, 2024
St. Charles Borromeo Church, St. Anthony, MN
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 