Praise be Jesus and Mary now and forever.
Today, while many in the world celebrate the birth of a new year, the Church celebrates the last day of the octave of the birth of Christ by honoring His mother.
While she was on this earth, Mary possessed all the natural glories of womanhood. First of all, she was a daughter. She was the offspring of the love of her parents, Joachim and Anne. Mary was also a virgin, pure in mind and soul and body. She was a spouse, the wife of St. Joseph, fulfilling God's natural design for a woman to be united to a man in matrimony and to be his helper. Fourthly, Mary was a mother, giving birth at a young age to her firstborn and only Son, Jesus Christ. Lastly, she was also a queen. Her Son was the legal and legitimate heir to the throne of David, and after the death of St. Joseph, He became by birthright the King of Israel, although at that time His kingship carried with it no political or temporal power. And Mary, being the mother of Jesus, was therefore the queen of Israel, as Bathsheba in the Old Testament became queen when her son Solomon ascended to the throne of Israel after King David.
So these are the five, what we could call them, natural glories of womanhood, which Our Lady possessed—all of them.
But we can't truly speak about Our Lady without speaking about God. And so these natural glories of Mary were also crowned with a supernatural aspect. Just as those who study theology learn that grace builds on nature without substituting it or destroying it, so too Mary's natural honors became, in a certain sense, the foundation upon which her supernatural dignity is established.
We mentioned first that Mary is the daughter of Joachim and Anne. She's also the Daughter of the Heavenly Father because she was first in the mind of God the Father—alongside of Jesus—in God's plan for creation and also His plan for redemption. And because of her central role in God's plan for humanity, she was conceived without sin as a special privilege enjoyed by no other human person. If I had a chance to make my daughter perfect, I'd probably do so, so I think the Lord made a good choice in not letting sin have any part in the soul of His number one Daughter, our Blessed Mother.
Our Lady is also the Ever-Virgin Mary, as the Church has proclaimed from its earliest years and continues to proclaim in the liturgy. Tradition tells us that Mary made a vow of perpetual virginity at an early age because she wanted to love God with an undivided heart, and that God honored that vow by allowing Mary to be a virgin before and during the birth of Our Lord and to remain so afterward. Our Lord was conceived in a miraculous way. He was also born in a miraculous way. He passed from the womb of Our Lady to the cave of Bethlehem as light passes through a pane of glass without damaging Mary's physical integrity in any way. A solemn definition of this truth comes to us from Pope Martin I at the Lateran Synod in the year 649, but the origin of the teaching of Our Lady's perpetual virginity goes back actually to the second century.
The odd thing about the gift and the virtue of virginity is that it's a gift that can actually help you to love others more and love more people because it allows you to love others first with God in mind and at the center of the relationship. And it helps you to love others for the good that's inside of them or for the potential good that's inside of them and to love them with a spirit of freedom too, not with a spirit or a sense of possessiveness or exclusivity. So virginity does not exclude love; it actually fosters a rightly ordered love. So I say that it's kind of odd because it's counterintuitive. We wouldn't think that naturally, or as we like to say in Catholicism, it's a paradox of sorts.
Thirdly, Our Lady is the Virgin Spouse of the Holy Spirit, being overshadowed by the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity in such a way that Our Lord was again conceived without her having the seed of man. Again, the gift of virginity and chaste love brings forth spiritual children: first Jesus in Our Lady's life and then us, the children of her sorrows, the children that she gave birth to under the cross.
Fourthly, Our Lady is also Queen not only of Israel but also of heaven and earth too. Through her maternal compassion, she redeemed humanity alongside of Our Lord while she was on this earth, and so now she reigns alongside of Him in glory. She commands even the angels and the blessed in heaven. She's seated in glory at the right hand of her Son and is such a powerful intercessor that yes, even God Himself still obeys her. God obeys her in heaven as He did on earth when He walked among us. And unlike human rulers, Our Lady always rules with love and mercy. She rules with the heart of someone who has only your best interest at heart.
Fifthly, Our Lady is a most unique mother. As Pope Paul VI proclaimed, she's Mother of the Church, Mother of all those who profess faith in Jesus Christ and are baptized. But again, before being the Mother of the Church, she is the Mother of God. That's the feast that we celebrate today.
What exactly do we mean when we say that Mary is the Mother of God? Mary is the Mother of God because very simply, Jesus Himself is God, and Our Lady bore Him in her womb for nine months and then gave birth to Him. The Greek title which is given to her is Theotokos, which literally means God-bearer, the one who bears God. Jesus is one Person. He's a divine Person with two natures. He has a divine nature with all the attributes of divinity attached to it. So He's all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing, etc. And He has a human nature, which He received exclusively from the Virgin Mary. That's why in the profession of faith and the Apostles' Creed and in the Nicene Creed, which we recite on Sundays and also today, Solemnities, we profess that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, not simply that He was born from or by means of the Virgin Mary. To be born of Our Lady means that Jesus shares the same human nature that she has. To be born from or by means of Our Lady could be interpreted—and it has been by heretics in the early Church—that God simply passed through Mary in order to come into the world without really becoming man. That belief is actually false.
Jesus is true God because He is the eternal Son, begotten eternally by the Father. So, as God, He's always existed. And He's true man because He was begotten in time, in the fullness of time, as St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Galatians, by means of the humble Virgin of Nazareth.
Mary is, in fact, the most perfect human person that the world has ever known or will ever know. But someone may say, “Well, what about Jesus Christ? Is Mary more perfect than Him?” No, she's not more perfect than Our Lord. However, remember that Jesus Christ is not a human person. He is a divine Person. If you hear anyone say that Jesus Christ is a human person, you can politely smile, as Our Lady might have done if she was in your shoes, and then perform a spiritual act of mercy, instructing the ignorant, right? Tell a person that Jesus is not a human person. He's a divine Person, Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, as St. John tells us in the beginning of his gospel when he says, “The Word was God, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:1, 14).
We should never fear or shy away from saying too much about Our Lady or speaking too highly of Her. For those who worry about speaking too much or too highly about Mary, as if to speak about Her greatness and glory were something which would distance us or separate us from God or offend those who don't know Her very well, we can borrow from Our Lord's words where He says in the Gospel that certain people err because they don't know the Scriptures nor the power of God. They don't know the Scriptures because Mary's greatness is seen throughout the Bible from Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 12, so that's from the first to the last book of the Scriptures. And for those who have eyes to see and a heart to love, Our Lady is present in one way or another on every page of Scripture, as good theologians will tell us. And those who shy away from speaking too highly of Our Lady also do not know the power of God because thanks to the tremendous grace and glory which has been given to Her, Our Lady is actually nearer to us and more loving towards us than the best of human mothers. Mary is the best of the best of the mothers. Only God Himself is closer to us than Our Lady is.
To borrow a thought from St. Anselm, for those of you who know of his proof of the existence of God—maybe a few do—we can say that Our Lady is the greatest mother which anyone can conceive or imagine. So honoring Her, praising and speaking highly of Her actually leads us to think and speak more highly of Jesus, whereas speaking less of Our Lady actually diminishes the true honor that we give to Her Son.
Last thing that we'll mention today is just the question of how can we truly honor the Mother of God as She deserves. The most important way to honor Her is, yes, by honoring Her Son. As She Herself says in the Gospel of John to the servants of the wedding feast, She says, “Do whatever He tells you,” do whatever Jesus tells you (John 2:5). We honor Mary by honoring Jesus. We honor Jesus by keeping His commandments. And I promise you that there's more peace and joy in keeping God's commandments than going against them. Please take my word for it. Don't try it out. Take my word for it.
But the next way we honor the Mother of God is by imitating Her internal dispositions. For example, Her complete trust in God, Her immense spirit of gratitude towards the Lord for everything She'd received from Him, Her thinking humbly of Herself and thinking well of others, Her spirit of service—so always looking for ways to be helpful to others—Her spirit of mercy towards others too, trying never to judge others with a critical or uncharitable spirit, but rather seeing the good in others or seeing the potential for good in them, and praying for those who make life challenging as She did for Her and Her family and as we should do for us as well.
Imitating Our Lady's internal dispositions will lead to imitating Her virtues and to becoming a true child of Mary. So the more we become men and women of prayer, the more we center our lives on Jesus's commandments, and the more we imitate Our Lady's internal dispositions and Her virtues, the more we will become the person that we were truly created to be, and the more we will give true honor to the Mother of God.
Again, Mary is not only God's Mother; She's also your mother too. She's your spiritual mom. It's time that we really try to take that truth to heart, to make it our own as we begin this new year.
Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.