Sydney
6 January 2002
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Pope John Paul II prays that peace will triumph over evil
Church helps secure anti-AIDS drug for South African mothers
Pilgrims return to the skies
Catholic students, schools among best in HSC results
Minister praises St Mel’s for anti-racism project
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Brothers celebrate 200 years of religious life
Abortion doubles breast cancer risk
Vietnamese fast for freedom
Liturgy and ministry programs official
Editorial: Mary for our time
Letters: Fr Ray’s ministry
Conversation: Fr Desmond Daniels, Indian health worker
Reflections: Christ’s God - Mohammed’s God
In the footsteps of the ‘founding father’
Opinion: Star shows us the way to peace - in Christ’s way
A blend of Dreamtime and history
Obituary: Lawyer, tireless worker and papal knight - Lawrence Paul Trisley 1939-2001
Reform family law to raise status of marriage, says analyst
Mary, the perfect Christian
Inspirations: Social justice may lead kids to Mass
Mary, the perfect Christian
Painting of the Madonna and child by Irio Ottavio Fantini who tried to present the newborn Jesus as already bearing the suffering of the world within him and to show Mary abandoning herself to the will of God.
This week - on New Year’s Day - we celebrated the feast of Mary Mother of God. Fr John Iacono reflects on what she means to us today and finds her to be the perfect Christian, but no milksop. She suffered exile, was a refugee; she washed, worked and worried and, finally, shared the pain of her son’s death
How do you feel? I am not being flippant. How are you really feeling in yourself at present?
Are you in any way concerned or worried about things?
Are you feeling that you have not got many answers?
Have you been asked to take on some responsibility and are unsure about where it will lead you?
Are you anxious about someone you love perhaps someone in your family, a child, or possibly a relation under stress?
Have you had to leave your own country and wonder how you will manage and earn a living in this different land?
Do you know your God’s love and mercy in such a way that you want to proclaim it to others?
Are you standing by while someone suffers and you can do little to relieve that pain?
Then, my brothers and sisters, “rejoice and be glad” because you are not alone.
Another has been there every time before you - Mary, the Mother of the Lord, your mother and mine!
We are a remembering people, we Catholics.
We not only look forward to what will come in Christ. We look back to our past and to the great examples of our faith. We stop to give thanks to our Father, for the gift of a person who sums up in her life what being a Christian really means. For Mary is not just the virgin Mother of God, immaculately conceived and kept free from sin, who brought forth Christ and was then assumed into heaven.
She is a fellow human being of flesh and blood, one of us, with our emotions, anxieties and feelings.
She knew persecution, poverty and insecurity.
She washed, worked and worried. She cleaned, cared and cried.
She knew tiredness and tenderness and tension. She is one of us!
What is her story? What is she for?
To be Mother of the Lord, surely. The first and greatest of all her titles is Mother of God.
But she is more than that, more than fulfilling a function, bringing Christ into our world.
Mary shows what can happen when a person is prepared to love.
She sums up in herself what you and I and the whole Church are called to be; a
people of faith, of love and especially of hope!
How do we see that in her?
Can we meander through sacred scripture a little?
Mary, the teenager full of hopes and expectations for the future, is engaged to be married to the local carpenter.
But she is one who is so attuned to her God that he makes known to her his will.
She is a listening person. She is also a trusting one.
She says “yes”, even though there are few answers or explanations.
With the dark shadow of the virgin birth, there would be no sympathy for an unmarried mother at most, stoning, at best, being driven out of the community.
But she trusted and accepted the responsibilities God offered her.
She left her home, and Joseph, to help an elderly relation awaiting the birth of her child.
Just think of that pain, the gossip, the rumours.
Then to Bethlehem, no accommodation available, for the birth, the stable.
Then the flight to Egypt, refugees, how to cope? Joseph having to start again.
God is silent for her.
There are few answers given to the ‘why’ we think she must have asked.
Then finally back to their own land and beginning again.
The child grows.
He, too, is now a teenager, becoming independent and needing to go his own way.
For five days he is away from them in the capital city. Try to lay hold of her feelings and Joseph’s then.
Then that strange reply from the boy.
Before it was bad enough. She didn’t know where he was physically. Now it is another sort of confusion.
“Where is my child in himself. What does he mean?”
So she kept all these things in her heart and pondered, reflected on them.
Her husband dies.
Her only child leaves home.
She suffers loneliness.
She hears of his journeys.
She is hurt by the rejections he receives.
Sometimes they meet.
There are the good times, like Cana, where, because of her sensitive request, he saves the newly married couple from embarrassment.
As St John says, through this sign of changing water into wine, “his disciples learned to believe in him”.
But Mary believed in him even before the sign was given!
Sometimes he singled her out because of that faith of hers, and held her up for his followers to think about.
When the enthusiastic woman in the crowd praised his mother, he said, in effect: “Yes, you do well to praise her, but not just because she is my mother, rather because she heard the word of God and kept it”.
As you must!
“Whoever does the will of God is my mother and sister and brother,” he had said.
And truly she above all had done that, even when she didn’t know where it would take her.
Ultimately, it brought her to Calvary, where she became a mother again.
This was where she paid the price of getting involved, of saying “yes” to God.
This is where Mary is different from you and me.
She didn’t hang on. She didn’t go to Calvary to save her son, but to give him for us; to give him back to that same God to whom she had once offered him in the temple so many years before.
Then she had been forewarned by Simeon that she would share in her son’s sufferings and at no point did she run from that.
She entered into the mystery of redemption by suffering with her son.
And she will help us use it, too, to make saints of us. If we work with suffering as she did, in trust and faith.
Man always hopes for a better, brave new world.
Every generation is going to be the one to “fix it all up”.
Our world is rich in hope.
But what do we see about us, in nearly every paper or TV report.
Brothers and sisters, we look to our God to renew the world through the power of the Spirit of Jesus alive in us.
That he can, we know and believe.
Mary, the Hope of Christians, shows what he can do for anyone who is willing to be open and used by God.
We venerate Mary!
Yes, but we must imitate her, too, to live by faith as she did, to be open to the spirit of God, to be involved with Jesus, to serve others and to love.
Mary is the Church’s dream for each of us. She is the perfect Christianbecause of the way she lived. Not in the way she was born or died, but in the way she lived.
“Do whatever he tells you,” she said of her son at Cana.
Her son said: “Believe, love, and hope.”
And we must prepare ourselves, because union with Jesus promises suffering. It was because of her intimate union with Jesus that the greatest suffering struck Mary.
We follow her who shows the way to understanding and participation in the sacrifice of Jesus. And then, resurrection and ascension.
We have deserved it, because God has let us deserve it. Our place is reserved for us.
We will not let it slip from our grasp.
We will say to Mary:
“Keep my place for me, I am coming!”