Open Wide the Doors for Christ!

This afternoon, after Evening prayer I had the privileged of giving a reflection to all the guys on one of the 7 last words (or sayings) of Jesus.  This is something that we started doing for the first time this Lent, but both of talks that were before mine (last week and the first week of Lent) were phenomenal, so I guess it will be something that Brute continues to do in future Lents.  Of course, their doing such a great job on the first two - "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" and "Today you will be with me in paradise" - set the bar pretty high for the reflection that I was signed up to give, "Woman, behold your son... Behold your mother".  So, over the last few weeks I had been thinking about what I was going to say for the 5 minutes that was my allotment, and I finally started making some notes yesterday.  I'm glad that I didn't have too much to do between now and then because it took me several hours to get everything I wanted to together (and run through it a few times).  Anyway, this is - more or less - what I said.  Here's hoping that it makes your Lent a bit more holy.

Last week I went out with several you and we saw the movie, Mary of Nazareth, and one of the things that struck me about the film was the intense, beautiful, tender, loving relationship that was between Jesus and His mother, Mary.  Thinking about this fact, it struck me that their relationship was unprecedented.  Spiritually, it is between the Mary, called "full of grace" by Gabriel, and Jesus Christ, truly God and man.  Mary's relationship with God was the closest of any human before the incarnation, and after Our Lord became man within her, it certainly stayed that way.  However, humanly, the relationship between these two was also incredible, again, Mary is sinless - she must have been the best, most caring, most dedicated, most loving mother ever - and Jesus, was God-incarnate, there can't have ever been a better child.  Basically, their relationship was one of the most incredible love and devotion.

However, on the cross, Jesus simply calls her "woman".  To us this seems rude, disrespectful, demeaning, at the very least, unloving...  But, if we look back at the Old Testament, we find that this is exactly opposite of the truth.  After the fall God tells the serpent "I will put empty between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel." - Genesis 3:15  Upon a cursory glance, the term "the woman" could be applied to Eve.  Actually, it is used throughout Genesis to refer to her and, as we know, eventually - after many generations - her seed will crush the head of Satan.  However, this interpretation is surpassed when we realize that Jesus' using the term "woman" on the cross indicates us that it is through her that God's plan of salvation is realized.  Through Mary's "yes" - her fiat, her obedience - she reverses Eve's "no", her disobedience, that had brought sin into the world so many millennia before. Thus, by using "woman" to refer to His mother, Jesus is doing anything but deprecate her, rather He is showing her to be the new Eve, through whom salvation enters the world.

The second half of Jesus' saying to Mary is "Behold, your son".  On first glance, this seems unnecessary.  If we put ourselves there at Calvary, wouldn't we find Mary gazing upon her son?  So, when Jesus says "woman, behold, your son", she could have answered that she already was, she already was beholding her son - in all his bloodiness, and agony.  Yet instead Jesus looks over at the "disciple whom He loved", and then Mary knows that she is being designated by Jesus to become this disciples mother, to take care of him as she ad taken care of Jesus.  But upon further reflection we find that that beloved disciple is us.   Throughout the gospel of John, the "disciple whom Jesus loved" is never named.  Of course, tradition tells us that he is John the Apostle/Evangelist, but the very fact that he has no name allows us to understand that he is taking our place, he is a stand-in for humanity.  This is further strengthened if we recall that Jesus says "whosoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother" - Matthew 12:50.  Thus, through obedience to the Father - the very definition of discipleship - Jesus says that we will become His brothers and sisters, and so, it is no surprise, when He gives His mother to us to be our mother too.  

This though, is no small gift.  Mary is the perfect mother - as mentioned before - and now she is in Heaven, body and soul, interceding for us, being that most-wonderful spiritual mother.  In the Old Testament it was the mother of the king who was the queen (Bathsheba is the queen of Solomon), not his wife.  This idea continues on with Jesus and Mary.  Jesus, of course, is the King - now glorious in heaven - but it is Mary who is the queen.  This is something that we remember every time we pray the rosary and meditate on the coronation of Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth.  Is she somehow usurping Christ as our mediator, no, of course not, but it is He who chose her to be His mother and He who gives her to us as our mother.  The big deal: Mary, at this moment at the foot of the cross, is chosen to be the mediatrix of grace, through whom salvation continues to flow into the world.  Often writers talk about the grace acheived by Christ on the cross as flowing through Mary out into the world, and it is a beautiful image.  Mary, of course, was literally at the foot of the cross, and it becomes an even more beautiful image when we realize that it was at the foot of the cross that Jesus chose Mary to be out mother, the one who cares for us just like she cared for Our Lord, with the same tenderness, concern, and love as she had for Him.

And all of that leads up to what Jesus now tells the beloved disciple, us.  "Behold, your mother".  This again, seems a bit repetitive, if Mary was told that she was now our mother why tell us that she is our mother?  - To remind us that we need to have a relationship with her as our mother.  We must, like John, take her into our homes and our hearts.  We must try, to the best of our ability, to love her as Jesus did - protecting, following, learning from, and caring for her.  Being brothers and sisters of Our Lord means doing His will, which, pretty obviously here is to "behold" our "mother".  We shouldn't be afraid to love her, Jesus did.  Is this ignoring Christ? - no, it's following His will, and regardless, Mary will always take us to Jesus, to the foot of the cross, to the stream of grace that will cleanse, heal, and transform us.

In conclusion, rather than just listing off my points, I'd like to reconnect these points to Scripture, this time the story of the Wedding Feast at Cana:

First point: Mary is the New Eve, the whose obedience to God allowed His salvation to enter the world and reverse the sin that the original Eve's (and Adam, let's not leave him out) disobedience brought into it.  Mary is the new "mother of all the living", now in a super-naturalized position of motherhood in heaven.  It is through her that salvation entered the world - in Jesus - and it is through her that salvation continues to enter the world - through the graces achieved by Jesus.

Second point: Mary intercedes for us, just as she did for the couple at the wedding feast.  She continues to go up to Jesus and say "the have no wine".  When we are broken, sinful, empty, tired, etc. - she continues to beg her son to fill us, renew us, and transform us.  She doesn't replace Jesus - as she didn't at the wedding feast - but she brings us to Him and prays that He would transform us.

Third point: As we look at Jesus on the cross, His hour has come, this is the moment of salvation, the pinnacle of everything that the Incarnation was meant to accomplish.  And what does Jesus tell us: "Behold, your mother".  Obedience, again, is the mark of discipleship, and the action that makes us brothers and sisters of Christ, and what does Mary tell us "Do whatever He tells you".  In Mary we not only have an intercessor with Christ and a loving mother, but we also have the perfect example of what it means to be a disciple.  Her obedience literally made her the mother of Jesus, let us emulate her, and love her tenderly like Jesus did, and take her into our hearts this Lent!

Wow, that only took a bit over 5 minutes when I said it...  So much longer when you write it out. 

During vacation I have been trying to read Fr. Larry Richards' book, Be a Man!, and while I haven't finished it (yet) I am a few chapters in and the major theme that has hit me is that of martyrdom.  "So the power we get from the Spirit of God is to die to ourselves by bearing witness to Christ... The question then is, are you willing to die every day to witness to Christ?  Will you lay down your life for your wife and for your children?" [page 75]  This is the ultimate challenge, and one that has existed since God first created man.

Genesis 2:15 - "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.  And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.""

Notice the words "work" and "keep".  This doesn't just indicate that Adam was supposed to be a gardener, it also means that he was in charge of protecting and preserving creation.  Here's the deal - Adam was expressly given the mission (the challenge) by God to protect creation - and he didn't.  Where was Adam when Eve is tempted by the serpent?  Genesis 3:6 - "she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate."  Adam was standing next to Eve during the temptation and he says nothing; he fails to protect creation.  God gave Adam this seemingly simple mission and he didn't do it.

This is the same mission we have today - do God's will.  Pretty simple right? (wrong!)  God's sense of humor is evident here - Adam and Eve fell to the temptation to "be like God" because they were prideful and thought they could do whatever they wanted.  Well, now our God-given challenge is exactly that: "be like God".  Of course, this isn't in the selfish way that Adam and Eve envisioned it.  Being like God means picking up our cross and following Jesus Christ up Calvary.  It means death to self and total giving of our lives to God, and thus, others.  Being like God has nothing to do with selfishness - because God isn't selfish; God is love, and love means sacrifice.

So, God has laid down the ultimate challenge for all men: "Come follow me".  There is no way to do this without grace.  There is no way to be that loving, that self-less, that totally available to God without His help.  The challenge is supremely daunting - can you give up everything, to follow Jesus Christ?  Can you love God above everything else (power, money, fame, friends, etc.)?  Writing this post has gotten me thinking about just how far away I am from living this way.

Often I would think that martyrdom, being killed for the faith, would be so much easier - you know, profess the faith, get caught, and a few days later you are a saint...  Obviously, the thing I forgot about was the huge amount of faith these people must have had to get to the point where they gave their life for Christ.  They were dying for Christ everyday, in everything they were doing.  It wasn't just a one time thing, it was their entire lives.

St. Boniface, who's feast day was yesterday, said in one of his letters (found in the Office of Readings for yesterday): "Let us trust in him who has placed this burden upon us.  What we ourselves cannot bear let us bear with the help of Christ.  For he is all-powerful and he tells us: My yoke is easy and my burden is light."  Wait a second, you say, hasn't this whole post been about the challenge of following Christ?  That doesn't sound very "easy" or "light" to me.  Here's the thing: the only way to totally follow Christ (even to martyrdom - like St. Boniface did), is by relying on Him.  We, especially Americans, don't like relying on people.  We want to do it ourselves and have that rugged individualism.  But, this challenge, of totally following Christ, is absolutely impossible if we don't do it His way, if we don't do it with Him.  Adam and Eve tried to do there own thing, they tried to be like God their own way, and look where that got them?  Notice that Jesus says "my yoke", not "your yoke".  Following Him is only possible, and even easy, if we do it His way, not our own.

Well, that's all for now.  Of course there is so much more to this topic, but we are trying to pack everything up and get checked out of the cabin this morning, so I should get going...  Have a good day folks!

Martyrdom of St. Boniface