Saturday, Twenty Seventh Week in Ordinary Time

The two verses of this morning’s are unique to Luke’s gospel. A woman in the crowd declares blessed the mother of Jesus. However, Jesus issues a counter beatitude that declares blessed ‘those who hear the word of God and keep it’. If Mary is blessed, it is not so much because she is the mother of Jesus but because she heard the word of God and kept it. In this gospel Mary is the ideal disciple of Jesus. In the opening chapter of Luke’s gospel, when Elizabeth visited Mary she initially declared her blessed among women because of the child she was about to bear, ‘the fruit of your womb’. Elizabeth then goes on to declare Mary blessed because ‘she believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was said to her by the Lord’. She believed the word of God and kept it. Jesus goes on to declare in this gospel, ‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it’ (8:21). Jesus is in the process of forming a new family. All who listen to God’s word as he speaks it and seek to live it in their lives become members of this new family, who can look to Jesus as their brother and to God as their Father. Within this new family, Jesus’ blood mother has a special place because she exemplifies what it means to hear the word of God and keep it. Her whole life was shaped by her response to God’s messenger, the angel Gabriel, ‘I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me’. We traditionally look to Mary as mother, but we can also look to her as the model disciple. She exemplifies for us the response to the call of Saint Paul in his letter to the Colossians, ‘Let the word of God dwell in you richly’