Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God
For most adults in the U.S., the Christmas story is old and familiar and it comes associated with old and familiar traditions, comfort food and a retelling of all the favorite stories and songs. By contrast, New Year is treated differently than Christmas is. Here is the fresh start, the time to resolve that this year will be different, the time to shake things up. There are a few traditions – Auld Lang Syne, dropping the lighted ball in Times Square, perhaps some traditional New Year’s foods (new potatoes, black eyed peas, cornbread). But by and large, the new year is all about the opportunity to start fresh, to think differently, to get started on the weight loss program, a habit to save money, a new venture.
The fear, not much spoken of today, but in the back of peoples’ minds is that the resolve will crumble and the changes we attempt to make will dissipate by February. In spite of all the newness, what actually happens is still the same old thing: we try to change, and more often than not, we end up back nearly where we began, wondering if there was any point at all to beginning again.
Today’s scriptures allow us to revel in both the old and the new. How do we begin the year 2016 in the church? Not with a brand new story, not with a new twist, but in fact, with nearly the very same gospel verses that we had at the early morning mass on Christmas Day: Luke 2:16-21 (the Christmas mass text was Luke 2:15-20). Time again to reflect on the shepherds coming in awe to worship the child, time again to reflect on Mary holding all these things in her heart. After all, this is still the season of Christmas, and the scriptures are chosen to help us keep the church’s calendar rather than the secular shopping calendar. The additional verse that we have today mentions that on the eighth day, Jesus was circumcised, which also happens to be today. The church observed the feast of Jesus’ circumcision on January First almost exclusively, by the way, between about the fourteenth century and 1974. But the feast we observe today, instead, is Mary Mother of God and it is an older tradition, one that precedes even traditions of celebrating Christmas, for Christians.
Thus it is this very old feast that helps us usher in a new year. On today's feast, our focus turns toward Mary, rather than the child born in a manger. Mary - God's mother and God's disciple both - Mary doing the new and apparently impossible thing in her life precisely by doing the very ordinary old thing that mothers the world over, and for millennia have been doing: raising a child. The old becomes new, not because the old story changes, but because we have simply read it again, and looked for new meaning.
The themes of old and new show up in other scriptures for today. Numbers 6:22:1-7 is the place where we find one of the oldest blessings still in use today (we used to say this blessing to each other at the end of every youth group meeting when I was a kid): “The Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you.” The main point is that the Lord makes his face shine upon us. How does he do this? He does this in the flesh, as the second reading proclaims (Galatians 4:4-7), that God sends his son “born of a woman, born under the Law.” This is no superhero dashing into and out of our world at random, but someone who really came to be with us by a human person. He comes to be with us in a new way, by taking on the old: becoming a human being.
Maybe the lesson in today’s scriptures and today’s feast is not to build up the new year (or any new venture) with too high an expectation of its newness. Let us expect instead that this year, as with years past, God will be present in new ways to us - but not because WE have done anything new. God is present in new ways because we have dared to re-read, and reconnect - and let God show us new meanings in the old stuff of our lives. That's truly good news - for if and when the resolutions have been dropped, God is still there, knowing that new things can happen even in the midst of old things.
This day, this week, this year: let us pray that we can drop our control over wanting to seek the new - and instead allow our unchanging God to show us new things about our old lives.
- Jana M. Bennett