Judith and Mary

Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  “‘Blessed are you, daughter, by the Most High God, above all the women on earth.’”  “‘You are the glory of Jerusalem!  You are the great pride of Israel.’”  The gradual today echoes these words as we celebrate Mary’s immaculate conception in the womb of her mother, St. Anne.  Yet these words were not originally written or spoken about the Blessed Mother.  These words come from the Book of Judith, which tells of the widow, after whom the book takes its name, using her beauty and charm to kill Holophernes, the Assyrian general who laid siege to her city.  Along with our Gospel, they help form the first part of the prayer we all know and love, the Hail Mary: “Hail [Mary], full of grace, the Lord is with thee.  Blessed art thou amongst women…”  
    This prayer, then, connects the Old and the New Testaments.  Certainly, St. Elizabeth also echoes the words of Judith, but in Judith we see prefigured Mary, the beautiful one who attacks, not the general of a foreign army, but the leader of the ancient rebellion, the devil.  Judith kills Holofernes by cutting off his head.  This connects to the Blessed Mother, the new Eve, through the words God speaks in Genesis, chapter 3: “‘I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; They will strike at your head.”  Our Blessed Mother in her immaculate conception is depicted as a woman standing with a snake under her feet.  How do you kill a snake?  You cut off its head.  
    God, from all eternity, prepared the world and His People for this great gift that He gave to the Blessed Mother.  He began in Genesis, as I just mentioned, and then continued through the Book of Judith to tell us of a woman who would strike at the head of our enemy.  This woman would be blessed by God above all the women on the earth, the woman who is the glory of Jerusalem and the pride of Israel.  No other woman can claim such a high honor, and in the church, while we don’t worship the Mother of God, we give her more honor than any of the other saints.  We give the saints dulia or honor (the English word “adulation,” is connected to dulia).  We give to the Blessed Mother hyperdulia, or above-ordinary honor.
    Some would claim that our celebration of her immaculate conception removes the Blessed Mother from humanity, and therefore makes her not truly human.  And at first glance, one can understand the confusion.  After all, if the Blessed Virgin Mary was not conceived with sin, how can she truly by the highest honor of our race, since all of us are born with original sin?  How can she be a model for us when her beginning was so unlike ours?

    Yes, our Blessed Mother received a gift whereby she was more like Eve at her creation from the side of Adam than like Judith.  God created Eve (and Adam before her) without original sin.  And yet, Eve, though she had no sin, still disobeyed God (and Adam after her).  Eve had the power to choose good or choose evil, a power she used poorly when tempted by the devil.  The Theotokos also had the power to choose good or choose evil, but she used this power well, never disobeying God, never giving in to Satan’s wiles.  The first Eve’s disobedience found healing in the second Eve’s lifelong obedience.  But both the first Eve and the new Eve were fully human, though both entered the world without any sin on their soul.  And just as we call Adam and Eve our first parents, though they did not originally have sin at their creation, so we rightly affirm that the Blessed Virgin Mary, even with the prevenient grace of the immaculate conception, was one of us, not a tertium quid, a third thing between God and man.
    And this great gift makes sense for the one who would agree to be the Mother of Jesus Christ, our Lord and God.  God is pure holiness, and no sin can exist in His presence, any more than darkness can exist in the direct light of the sun.  So if our Blessed Mother had even just original sin, when our Lord took flesh in her womb at the Annunciation, it would have destroyed the Blessed Mother.  It is as St. Paul wrote in his second epistle to the Corinthians: “what fellowship does light have with darkness?  …What agreement as the temple of God with idols?”  The Mother of God had to be pure because light has no fellowship with darkness, and the temple of the incarnate God could not exist in the same place as idolatry, the worship of the false god of pride.  And in this sense, we return to the Gospel, in which the Archangel Gabriel refers to Mary as “full of grace.”  How could the messenger of salvation refer to her as full of grace if there were any sin in her at all?  
    Our Blessed Mother is truly a warrior queen who, united to her Divine Son, conquers the ancient enemy, the devil.  She strikes at the head of the ancient serpent to kill it, by being obedient to God and cooperating in the work of our salvation.  May we honor with lives lived in obedience to God, as best as we can, the highest honor of our race, the glory of Jerusalem, the woman blessed above all the women of the earth, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who gave birth to the eternal redeemer, Jesus Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit live and reign for ever and ever.  Amen.  

The King of Glory

Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

I think it would be safe to say that the secretary at my last parish was borderline obsessed with British royalty.  I did her wedding not long after I arrived at St. Joseph in Adrian, and one of her hymns was the same one that was used at the royal wedding.  She would often try to find less expensive versions of dresses that Katherine wears, and when the value of the British pound dropped after Brexit, she and her husband started to make plans to visit.

But America’s love of royalty is not limited to her.  For six years millions of Americans watched “Downton Abbey,” about a British noble family and their servants.  The final season finale drew 9.6 million viewers, so clearly there are a good number of people who like royalty and nobility.  And America even “created” it’s own royal family in John and Jackie Kennedy.  But what do we love about it?  Is it the fancy clothes?  Is the crowns and swords and ceremonial uniforms?  Is it the tradition?  Is it the power?

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.  Even just after our presidential election, we are celebrating a King.  We heard in our first reading a little about the best example of a Jewish king, King David.  King David was the model for all kings who followed, even though David himself wasn’t a perfect king (remember that story about Bathsheba, and how got her pregnant, even though she was someone else’s wife, and then eventually killed her husband to cover up the adultery?).  In fact, when the Archangel Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her that she will be the Mother of God, Gabriel says, “‘He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’”  

But in the rest of the Gospels, Jesus shies away from this heritage, of being a king in the line of David.  In John 6, the people want to make Jesus king after he feeds them miraculously.  But Jesus hides away, and does not let them.  The closest Jesus comes to accepting the fulfillment of the Davidic prophecy of a great king is on Palm Sunday, when Jesus receives the praise from the people that we heard in our Alleluia verse: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!”

So why is Jesus so hesitant to be cast as a king in the line of David during His earthly ministry?  If He is a king, why not accept the recognition by the people that He is a king?

Jesus is a king unlike any other, and He does not accept earthly kingship from His own people because their idea of kingship was different than God’s.  Jesus was not concerned with the fancy clothes, the crowns and swords and ceremonial uniforms.  And He was certainly not concerned with power, though all power in heaven and earth belonged to Him.  Our Gospel today shows us what the kingship of Jesus is like: a suffering kingship, that does not seek power, but empties itself out for the good of His people.  Jesus on earth does not rule from a throne of gold, but from the throne of the cross.  In Orthodox churches, their large crucifixes do not have INRI above them like ours (INRI is an abbreviation for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, which is Latin for Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews).  Instead, the inscription reads: The King of Glory, to remind them how Christ was glorified, and how we are to be glorified: through the cross.

Can we accept Jesus as our king on the cross?  Sometimes Protestants accuse us of wanting to crucify Jesus again and again because we give such a prominent place to Jesus on the cross, what we commonly call a crucifix, in our churches.  But that is our constant reminder of how Jesus reigns: on the cross.  As our preface before the Eucharistic prayer says, Jesus’ kingdom is “an eternal and universal kingdom, a kingdom of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, and kingdom of justice, love and peace.”  

Jesus has all power, and yet He, the Lord of Lords, does not lord His power over us.  He invites us to accept His reign, but He does not force it upon us.  There will come a day, at the end of time, when His kingdom will be the only kingdom.  There will be no more lies and death, no more sin and sorrow, no more injustice, hatred, and war.  And at that time, we will be recognized as a part of that kingdom based on how we accepted that kingdom while here on earth.  Instead of being a part of a kingdom because of where we are born, we become a part of Christ’s kingdom by the rebirth of baptism, and we remain a part of that kingdom by being faithful in word and deed throughout the rest of our life.  May we be obsessed, in the best sense of the word, not with British royalty, but with being subjects of our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe.