Homily

Some of you, or maybe many of you have heard the pious idea that it is a good thing to pray to Mary and ask her to intercede for us, because Jesus can never refuse a request from His mother. So bang! If you ask her and she asks Him, you're in. You'll get what you want. Wedding Feast at Cana. Mary gets Jesus to perform a miracle even though He tells her that His hour has not yet come. He did what she wanted, even though it seems like He didn't want to do it. What further proof do you need?

As a boy, I could never believe in this pious idea because, and I do not intend to disrespect people who hold this pious notion, I just cannot understand it. Is it the idea that a son always has to obey his mother even as an adult? Who does that? And where does that idea come from? My mother could have given you a long list of the things I never did that she asked me to do, and that list would cover decades.

Also, that phrase makes it sound as though Mary has some kind of power over Jesus, as if He must comply with her requests. Who then is God the Son? This is not the attitude we find in the Gospels when we read of Mary. "Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to me according to your word." And she tells Elizabeth, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. For He has looked down upon His handmaid's lowliness; behold from now on all ages will call me blessed." Not one who is blessing, but rather one who is blessed.

Another reason I do not like this notion of Mary is because it seems to set her apart from the rest of us, with the idea that if we ask Jesus, we don't know if He will grant our request, but if Mary asks for us, it's guaranteed, in the bag. Jesus loves Mary more than us it would seem. This is not what we read in Sacred Scripture, and it's certainly not Mary's viewpoint. I think we can see that plainly in today's Gospel. ("My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.")

Many are the times over the years when I've heard people say, "Mary was born without sin. She was conceived without Original Sin. She never sinned during her entire life. She is nothing like me. I could never live as she did." And there is distancing from the Mother of God which is done in a pious way. And I think it's very, very bad for us to put her in a category that is different than ours. I have heard people say they cannot be like Mary because they are only human. So now Mary is not even human?

True, she was the mother of the Son of God, which does put her in an exceptional role in salvation history. True, she never sinned, and we have all offended from our early childhood. But she is a Christian, she is a follower of Christ, she is a servant of the Lord who claims no privilege for herself, nor does she deny that she owes every blessing to the graciousness of God. She was a real girl growing up in Israel. She had an encounter with an angel and agreed to become a mother without the aid of human intervention. Now granted, that is exceptional. But it's good for us to try to imagine what it must have been like for her. How could she understand all these things she kept storing up in her heart? She did all the mother-stuff: she cooked, she cleaned, she taught her son, she took care of Him when He was sick, and surely she must have wondered what would happen to Him when He grew up, and she must have worried. Mary changed Jesus' diapers, and you probably never thought about that. (And that's because angels don't like to get their hands dirty.)

So if we have Mary set in our minds so far away from and so high above us that we can barely call her human, I don't know how we can relate to her. But if we see her as an authentic human being, a real woman, a genuine person, a true mother, a Christian who follows the Lord, then perhaps instead of "I could never be like her," we could say, "I want to be like her. I want to follow Christ as closely as she did. I want to share in God's divine life as much as she did. Even when I don't know how things will turn out, even when I see the face of death, I want to have a faith as strong as Mary did."

She is one of our company, a member of the Church who prays for us and cares for us as we pray and care for one another. Mary is a great intercessor for us even as she is a great example for us. As we will sing later in the Liturgy, "Dostoyno yest--It is truly proper to glorify you. . ." and it is right for us to do so, for she is indeed the greatest woman who ever lived, the best of all humans ever born. But she is one of us, she is close to us and she has only one desire for us: that we too would live in the divine life her son has given us. I really don't care for the western-style images of Mary that show her floating in the air surrounded by baby angel heads almost as if she were some kind of goddess or maybe an alien beaming back up to a spaceship. I very much prefer the icon theology of Mary, where she does not appear by herself but always, always with her Son, because she is a true mother. And we always see in the icons where her true glory can be found because she is always pointing to Him so that we may come to Him and share in that glory with her. Through the prayers of the Mother of God, may our Savior save us.