Mary, Mother of God Scripture Readings We begin the Year of Our Lord 2025 with a meditation on the single greatest miracle of all: the Incarnation of the Eternal Word of God. In my homily for the liturgy of Christmas Night, I spoke at length about the messengers of God—the angels—and the Message of God who is the Word made flesh and dwelling within humanity. I also spoke about Mary, the mother of Jesus, who was the recipient of God’s message and who conceived the inconceivable God. It’s for that most astounding reason that Christians have always revered Mary, not only as the mother of Jesus the man but as the mother of God-in-the-flesh. We recognize her as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. On this feast of Mary, the Mother of God, we recognize and celebrate her for her unique role in the history of God’s dealings with humankind, the Theotokos kecharitōmenē, the God-bearer most fully graced. While in no way diminishing her unique relationship with Yahweh, our Creator-God and his eternal Word conceived in her, we also need to consider the physical dimension of the Incarnation. For centuries, this feast day which concludes the octave of Christmas celebrated Jesus’s circumcision on the eighth day after his birth. We have to acknowledge the scandal of the Incarnation—we humans recoil at the very thought of the Word made flesh and dwelling within ourselves. We hate it. On the one hand, people are always trying to humanize Jesus as just another rabbi, a teacher of spiritual and moral principles, or as a faith healer whose followers turned him into a religion. From this convenient perspective, Mary was at most a decent woman, maybe even saintly, but nobody more special than that. On the other hand, religious people are constantly trying to spiritualize Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, making of them something other than human. This approach denies such human traits to them as fear, doubt, and temptation. It tries to erase their physicality. Is that why the ancient feast of the Circumcision has been effectively erased in our own day? Is it because people don’t want to think of Jesus as having a penis? The bottom line is that the Incarnation is messy. It means that the eternal is soiled by the temporal and that God got his hands dirty by messing in human affairs. Both the denial of Jesus’s divinity and the denial of his physicality lead to the same conclusion: that having a Theotokos—a God-bearer—and a God-in-the-flesh is unthinkable. Yet, here we are at the circumcision of Jesus. Keep in mind what that was all about. The circumcision of a Jewish boy provided him with an identity. It marked him as a child of Abraham, and therefore an heir to the promise that God made to Abraham and his descendants. It acknowledged the boy’s eligibility to enter into the covenant that Yahweh God made with his people and signified the boy’s obligation to accept the stipulations of the covenant, that is, the Torah, the Law of Moses. By Jesus’s circumcision, the giver of the Law bound himself to obedience to the Law, and so fulfilled the stipulations of the covenant. And, “he was named Jesus, the name given him by the angel before he was conceived,” a name which means Yahweh saves. And so, in Jesus, the covenant between God and humanity is sealed, once and for all. The enmity between the spirit and the flesh is overcome in his person. The incompatibility that existed between the divine and the human has been resolved. The temporal has been infused with the eternal. The Holy Spirit of God himself has done this, and it is that same Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and whom we have been given. The Incarnation did not end with Jesus, it began with him. It continues in us to the extent that we have in our own hearts the mind of Mary when she said to the angel, “Be it done to me according to your word.” Some people still wonder, as Joan Osborne once sang: If God had a name what would it be?And would you call it to his face?If you were faced with him in all his gloryWhat would you ask if you had just one question? What if God was one of us?Just a slob like one of usJust a stranger on the busTryin’ to make his way home?[1] But now, we don’t have to wonder, do we? [1] One of Us, by Joan Osborne, © Warner Chappell Music, Inc Readings & Homily Video Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox
