We all love
to celebrate birthdays. Today we
celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, our dear mother. In December we honor her Immaculate
Conception. In January we celebrate her
as the Mother of God. In August we
celebrate her Assumption into Heaven and there are many other days throughout
the year where we honor a unique aspect of her life. But today is simply her birthday celebration!
Celebrating
her birthday is a way of celebrating her personhood. We celebrate her simply for being
herself. We don’t necessarily focus in
on any of the unique, beautiful, and profound aspects of her life today. We don’t necessarily look at all she
accomplished, her perfect yes to God, her coronation in Heaven, her assumption,
or any other specifics. All parts of her
life are glorious, beautiful, awe-inspiring, and worthy of their own unique
feasts and celebration.
Today we
simply celebrate our Blessed Mother because she was created and brought into
this world by God and that alone is worth celebrating. We honor her simply because we love her; we
celebrate her birthday as we would celebrate the birthday of anyone we love and
care for.
However,
since my goal in these reflections is to share my faith and feelings, I feel
obligated to expound on the profound impact her birth has our lives as
Christians.
Mary made
the ultimate leap of faith and gave us the gift of the birth of Jesus. She embodies the line in a reading for St.
Paul’s letter to the Romans: “We know that all things
work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” (Romans 8:28-30)
Across the
United States exploring one’s genealogy has become extremely popular. There are testing kits that we can buy that
analyze the science of the ancestry of an individual. The results of these tests are helping people
better understand their heritage. And
sometimes the results of the tests can clarify or even redefine the
understanding of family.
The story of
our birth and those of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents can be
such a powerful window into our own identity.
And stories of our heritage can ground us in larger community. Sadly though, heritage can also be used to
divide and separate communities and families.
The story of
the birth of Jesus draws us together as Christians, as the Gospel According to
Matthew reminds us: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child
and bear a son and they shall name him Emmanuel which means “God is with us.”” (Matthew 1:1-23)
From her
birth, Mary is a central actor in the series of marvelous events that are Jesus’
life. We know her ever so slightly
through the Gospels’ accounting: at His birth; at the Presentation of Jesus; at
Jerusalem and Cana; her personal growth in relating to Him; and finally and
especially, we know her intimately at the foot of her Son’s cross.
We know her
also through those people that touch our lives deeply and who move us simply by
their presence. These special persons
quietly guide us in the ups and downs of our lives. It’s not too late to consider prayerfully and
gratefully these guides who have touched and continue to touch us
profoundly. Mary’s birth to Anna and
Joachim touches us to the core.
I find it
interesting that Matthew celebrates the wonder of Mary’s existence and her
place in sacred history in a manner that is quite grand, but in a style that’s
strange to our ears; that lengthy genealogy with which he begins his gospel:
The Book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ,
the son of David, the son of Abraham.
Abraham
became the father of Isaac,
Isaac
the father of Jacob,
Jacob
the father of Judah and his brothers.
Judah
became the father of Perez and Zerah,
whose
mother was Tamar.
Perez
became the father of Hezron,
Hezron
the father of Ram,
Ram
the father of Amminadab.
Amminadab
became the father of Nahshon,
Nahshon
the father of Salmon,
Salmon
the father of Boaz,
whose
mother was Rahab.
The next few
verses contain two more surprising female entries:
Boaz
became the father of Obed,
whose mother was Ruth.
Obed became the father of Jesse,
Jesse the father of
David the king.
David became the father
of Solomon,
whose
mother had been the wife of Uriah.
It sure seems
to me like a roundabout way to celebrate the person and role of Mary. But that’s in fact what Matthew’s doing. Ancient Jewish genealogies were a totally
masculine matter, a list of legal fathers. But Matthew deliberately broke that convention
by inserting the names of women who entered this history in rather irregular
ways, to state it mildly. In the portion
quoted above, the first surprise is the name of Tamar. Genesis 38 tells how Tamar made it into the
genealogy in a rather devious way; when her husband Er died early and
childless, her father-in-law, Judah, refused to obey the Levite law which
required him to supply another of his sons, to raise up children in the name of
Er. Tamar secured her right to bear a child by dressing up as a prostitute and
seducing Judah to get pregnant by him. The
second woman to be named, Rahab, was unusual in another way; she was a real
prostitute and a Canaanite, to make the story even more compelling.
Ruth stands
out as a foreigner, a Moabite woman, who married into the covenant people by
way of Boaz. And then there’s the woman
discretely referred to as the one “who had been the wife of
Uriah.” Anyone
familiar with the story of David in 2 Samuel: 11-12 would immediately recognize
her as Bathsheba, whose husband David arranged to be killed so that he could
have her for himself. Why would Matthew
bother to include in his genealogy of the Messiah these four women who had
entered the line in such irregular ways? Because he was preparing for a person who
comes some twenty-six names later—the fifth woman, Miriam (Mary), who
participates in the genealogy with an irregularity that tops them all; she
became the Mother of Jesus through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit,
through virginal conception.
Her own
conception through the union of Joachim and Anne was perfectly normal. We celebrate that conception in her mother’s
womb as the Immaculate Conception, meaning that she was preserved from the
effects of original sin from her very beginning, but the mode of her conception
was brought about in the normal marital manner through the union of her good
Jewish parents. Her own birth, nine
month later, was also like the birth of any child of her time and place. The
wonderful “irregularity” came in the way she became the mother of the incarnate
Son of God, Jesus.
So we
celebrate the ordinary birth of Mary because of who she turned out to be and
whose mother she became. The point of
Matthew’s genealogy was not simply to prepare for the virginal conception of
Jesus but also to celebrate Jesus as the fulfillment of Israel’s history; Jesus
doesn’t just come at the end of that history; He embodies Israel’s vocation and
further implements it, helping Israel become Isaiah’s “light of the world.” (Isaiah 60: 1-5) In this process Mary was not simply the
vessel; she was the perfect example of an Israelite who hears the word of God
and responds to that word. Fulfilling
this ideal of Jewish obedience to God’s will enabled her to become the kind of
mother who could raise her child to be the man that Jesus was and is.
We celebrate Mary’s birth with gratitude and with a commitment to imitate her faith. Because of Mary, we’re beneficiaries of the divine story sketched in Matthew’s genealogy. Our baptism into the body of Christ has placed us in that lineage.
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