In the past year, there have been more and more attacks on Jewish people, both around the country and around the world. Just this past Saturday night, a suspect stabbed five people during a Hanukkah celebration in their rabbi’s home. Any attack on an innocent person is horribly evil, but that evil is compounded when the motivating factor is a person’s religion and/or race.
Why bring this up? Why talk about anti-Semitic violence on the Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God? All three readings for today’s celebration point us towards the religion of Mary and the religion of Jesus: Judaism. The first reading is the Aaronic priestly blessing, by which the Chosen people were to be blessed. The Church includes this reading as a way to begin the new year, as a people blessed by the Lord with a blessing the Lord Himself gave to His People, Israel.
The second reading reminds us that Jesus was born of Mary, “born under the law, to ransom those under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.” Perhaps this doesn’t sound so friendly to Judaism. And many will twist St. Paul and select only certain passages to make it sound like St. Paul himself was against the Jewish people, though, St. Paul, or Saul as he was called among the Jews, was himself Jewish, and a most ardent practitioner of Judaism before He began to follow Jesus. But St. Paul saw Jesus as the Jewish Messiah, who fulfilled the promises God made to Abraham and David. And God, through Jesus, fulfilled the law and raised us merely from followers of the Law to the freedom of God’s children.
And at the end of our Gospel, we heard about the circumcision of Jesus, the sign that He was part of the Chosen People, and a recipient of the covenant between God and Abraham. Jesus, yes, is the founder and Head of the Catholic Church. But the Church herself is a sister, as it were, to Judaism, and truly the fulfillment of all that God revealed of Himself to the Chosen People throughout the Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.
To understand Jesus fully, and to understand Mary fully, we have to understand Judaism. So often we gloss over things that would have been so important to the first Christians, most of whom were Jews. In our first reading, we heard this phrase over and over again: “The Lord…” In Hebrew, the language in which the Book of Numbers was written, this would have been said Adonai, though the letters spelled out the sacred Name of God, which we are not allowed to say in the Mass. In Greek, it was translated into 𝛰 𝛫𝜐𝜌𝜄𝜊𝜍 which we translate into English as “The Lord…” in all caps. If you’re ever reading your Old Testament, and wondered why that was in caps, that signifies that the word is the Sacred Name of God. And when St. Paul proclaims that “Jesus is Lord,” he is saying, “𝛪𝜀𝜎𝜊𝜐𝜍 𝛰 𝛫𝜐𝜌𝜄𝜊𝜍” which means that Jesus is the same God as the God of Israel, the Lord.
Which brings us back to Mary, whom we celebrate and honor today. Because if Jesus is the Lord, God who revealed Himself to Abraham and entered into a covenant with the Chosen People, and Mary is the mother of Jesus, then she is also rightfully called the Mother of God, the 𝛳𝜀𝜊𝜏𝜊𝜅𝜊𝜍, as was solemnly defined at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus in 431. She is not simply a woman who gave birth to a male child, but she gave birth to the creator of the entire universe, who saves us from sin and death by His own Death and Resurrection. And because of that unique role in salvation history, we honor her (not worship her) above all the saints. We love her as our mother, given to us by her Divine Son, Jesus at the foot of the cross, and we take every opportunity we can to shower our affection on her, as spiritual children and joint heirs with her Son Jesus. So, as the deacon in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom chants, “Commemorating our most holy, most pure, most blessed and glorious Lady, the Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary with all the saints, let us commit ourselves and one another and our whole life to Christ our God.”
