Over this week of the octave of Christmas we celebrate witnesses to his divine presence and have contemplated deeply what his presence means to us today. St. Stephen the proto-martyr reminds us that we must lay down our lives for Christ, St. John the Evangelist proclaims that eternal life was made visible in Jesus, the Eternal Word Incarnate and that we must also “see and believe”, the Holy Innocents point us to the threat and fear and hatred that the world of Herods harbors toward believers born anew into the world of the Spirit. We celebrate the feast of the Holy Family and we see God enter into a share of our human life through the Holy Family of Nazareth and therefore sanctify all of family life. It reminds us that our love of God, manifest in the child Jesus, must be real and every day, first received in the love of family life, in the domestic church of the family home, nurtured each day in prayer, sheltered, protected and grown to full maturity. It helps us to recognize the sacred nature of marriage and family life to foster faith and growth in the Spirit of Jesus and lead us to our true vocation in service to the Father in love.
On the eighth day of the Octave of Christmas we celebrate the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God. We have seen the mystery of the Son of God manifested in our human history and have come to believe in faith that he is God, Christ and Lord. We have seen in time that Mary is the Theotokus, the God-bearer, the Mother of God. She is the one who points us to her Son as God’s true gift to the world for our salvation. Through Mary we come to a full understanding of the mystery of the Incarnation as the Eternal Word is made Incarnate in her womb through the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit. He has received our human nature from her immaculate and virginal flesh and has sanctified our human existence by sharing in our human nature and history. In entering into our world and history through Mary, the Mother of God, he has redeemed all of our human life.
The council fathers at Ephesus affirmed this great mystery of faith in proclaiming Mary as the Theotokus, the God-bearer, the Mother of God, in 431, against the heresies of Nestorius, who had proclaimed that a baby of two or three months could not be considered to be God. From that time the Church has honored Mary as the Mother of God, who bore for us a savior who is Lord and God. At Bethlehem, through the birth of Jesus, Mary is seen to be the Mother of God. At Calvary, through the death of Jesus, Mary is given to be the Mother of the Church. Always she is a disciple of the Lord and united in her will with the will of God. We should also become God-bearers in our lives and allow the divine presence to grow within our own interior being. We must also carry him out into the world and be his humble servants and allow his word to accomplish its purpose in our lives.
Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis reflects upon this great mystery: “‘To keep the Word of God’, as Jesus enjoins, cannot at bottom mean anything other than allowing the Holy Spirit to implant the Son of the Father in the womb of our souls, and then for us to give birth to this Word into the world in union with Mary, the historical Mother of Jesus and perennial Mother of the Church…To be a Christian and a disciple, then, means becoming Christ-bearers in the world in the most radical and literal sense. However, such a visible presence and communication of the the total Jesus through us cannot occur without our being in constant communion with both the Father and the Mother of Jesus, the two origins of his divine and human life. The Holy Spirit cannot accomplish the fullness of redemption in us, cannot effect the conception of the Son of the Most High within us - and we cannot become another Mary, the Christian vocation in a nutshell - unless we seek the company of her through whom and in whom he is permanently present, not only among the choirs of angels in union with his Father and their Spirit, but also visibly and humanly in his Church and within the landscape of this world, so wretched yet so graced.”