Today's Providential Gospel

           Today’s Gospel features two things.  It speaks of Mary with Jesus and Joseph in Bethlehem, where the shepherds encounter them as the angels announced, an appropriate commemoration of the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God.  It also speaks of Jesus’s circumcision “when eight days were completed,” coinciding with today as the Octave Day of Christmas.

          The Gospel is appropriate to celebrate Mary’s Motherhood, because maternity is never an “individualist” matter – it’s never just about the mother.  Motherhood always exists only because of a relationship, another example of God’s insistence that it is not good that people are alone.  And, especially in this relationship, everything about Mary is what it is and what she is because she is “the handmaid of the Lord.”

          But I want to focus on something that perhaps is overlooked in today's Gospel: verse 19.  “And Mary kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.”

          Our lives are not accidents.  We exist because God wanted us to exist (even if our parent(s) did not, which says something about the moral side of the relational nature of parenthood).  We are not unwanted – at least not by God.  And what happens in our lives happens for a purpose.

          That purpose may not immediately be apparent.  It may sometimes never be apparent in this life.  In that sense, it is a test of faith, one which many people find a stumbling block.  Our ways, after all, are not God’s ways (nor vice versa) and, according to human logic, sometimes the latter are mysterious: just ask Job.  Nor does God necessarily feel an obligation to justify those ways to us: just read Job 38, where God thrusts Job back on his faith.

          Mary is consummate disciple because of her faith.  She could not have explained everything that would happen to her, starting with “how can this be, since I do not know man?”  But she accepts that because “I know whom I have believed” (2 Tm 1:12), who is ultimately trustworthy.  In that sense, faith is not so much about explaining what happens as knowing that He who allows us to happen “makes all things work together for the good of those who love Him” (Rm 8:28) according to His plan.

          What was happening around Mary may not have been immediately intelligible by human logic.  Why she was chosen.  How she is a mother.  Why they had to travel right as she was to give birth.  Why that birth had to occur amidst such humanly primitive conditions.  How angels seem to be associated with this baby, evidenced by these unknown shepherds who found them.

          Mary believes God has a plan.  She may not understand all its details, but she accepts her life is in hands bigger than hers.  That doesn’t mean she lacks free will.  Quite the contrary: it tells her that, given the designs of a plan so much bigger that she knows or can comprehend, basic human logic here says to trust the Benevolent One whose design it is. 

          Throughout her life Mary is a quite observer.  Fr. Charles Pavlick notes that, at the wedding feast in Cana, the people who first notice the wine supply running out are the waiters and a certain guest named Mary. The “more important” folks don’t: the couple hasn’t been alerted, and the site manager seems to think the bridegroom pulled a fast one by holding back on the prime vintage.  As Pavlick notes, Mary observes what’s happening and, “pondering it in her heart,” what’s needed.  She brings those needs to her Son.  She still does.  That is why she is our mother … and our model.

          And why the undercurrent of today’s Gospel is the Providence of God.