25th week, Ord. Time, Tues. Sept.26, 2006

Scripture: Prov.21:1-6,10-13. Psalm 119:1,27,30,34-35,44. Luke 8:19-21

Mary, the mother of Jesus, fulfills the message of today's Scriptures and is a model for us in our discipleship with Jesus. She is a woman of wisdom (Proverbs 21:2b, "It is God who proves the heart.") who walks in the law and precepts of the Lord according to what we learn from Psalm 119. This is the longest Psalm among the 150 in the Psalter and is what is called an acrostic psalm. It has 176 verses broken into 22 stanzas which follow the sequence of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet of which there are twenty-two letters. It reminds me of how we were taught by the excellent sisters (Dominicans of Columbus) I had in gradeschool. They suggested we make a Mother's Day card and write something really nice about our mothers while using each letter of the word m-o-t-h-er for what we see and love in our mothers. Mary, I think, lived out all of the letters of the alphabet in the Psalm and cherished doing the commandments, precepts, and instructions of this magnificent Psalm in praise of God's Torah to the people of Israel. Mary's heart was a listening heart for God's revelatory word. So much so did she ponder and meditate over that word that it became flesh in her. "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." God had proved her heart in asking her to become the mother of Jesus.

In the Gospel, Luke is extolling Mary for her listening heart. He takes what Mark has written on this incident and makes it a beatitude response for Mary. In the redaction that he gives us we see this quite clearly and realize that in Luke Mary continues to fulfill all of the criteria of a disciple of Jesus, but even moreso, she is the mother of God's Son. It is a remarkable historical fact that no other human being has been named or claimed to be the mother of Jesus than Mary of Nazareth. This is the foundation of who she is historically. She was not a passive person but rather an active agent of God's redeeming love. Jesus himself praises her by saying, "My mother and my brethren are those who hear the word of God and act upon it." She risked everything by saying yes to an impossible call realizing that "nothing is impossible with God." Amen.