Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major

20th July 2013—Pope Francis paid a visit to the Basilica of Saint Mary Major in Rome to ask the Virgin, first, for her protection for his upcoming apostolic journey at the World Youth Day in Rio de Janeiro, and second, for the young people who will gather together including all young people worldwide.

T

here are three points to my homily. First, is what Fr Richard Rohr calls the "paradox of grace." Many of us have been schooled by this thinking when a person sins he is punished or condemned, and when the person is good, he or she is rewarded. This lopsided theology has been deeply ingrained in us. We grew up thinking that we must work hard to earn our salvation because salvation depends on our own merits. Worst we even compete. This is true among many of us religious. I heard how one visiting Jesuit in a certain community remarked this way: “How is the competition here going?” It was a sarcasm that is so honestly true. It can be very tiring following this kind of journey even in religious life. But thank God this is not the journey I signed up for. I do not need to earn God’s love for he loved me first already. We do not have to compete whose idea or whose way of living the religious life is the best. We do not have to shove down each other’s throats our accomplishments. This is not what Jesus teaches us. It is much truer to say that our weakness and brokenness bring us to God. Such is the paradox of grace. St Paul stated this in a clear cut fashion: “‘For power is made perfect in weakness.’… For whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Cor 12:9-10). Can I see the hand of God even in my brokenness? Can I find strength in my weakness? Remember we cannot do it on our own, that is why it is called grace.

Secondly, when God says something he does it. Winning the Olympics seems to be the end all and be all these days, isn’t it? No wonder an entire nation like the Philippines became ecstatic as soon as we got our first ever gold medal after 97 years. We have the right to celebrate of course, there is nothing wrong about that. But it is good to recognize the voice that keeps on pushing us to be number one, a voice that keeps hammering that the preferred way to go is up. The way of Jesus is radically far different. He came down to the bottom. The way Jesus took is a radical way “Who, being in his very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage” (Phil 2:6) nor to lord it over. He came down to live under a shelter like us humans. In fact he was first homeless when he first came. He was not welcome. This is one important significance of our celebration today of the Dedication of the Basilica of Saint Mary Major. This is the oldest church in the West built shortly after the Council of Ephesus in 431. God needed a home, how could anyone in the past have ever expected such a thing to happen?

During the first few centuries after the lifetime of Jesus on earth, there were fierce debates over what comprised true Christian teaching. In order to give clarity to the faith and, thereby, to bring unity among the churches, councils were called by the Roman Emperors. First was the Council of Nicea in 325 by Constantine the Great. Nicea formulated the Nicene Creed. The second was the Council of Constantinople in 381 which reaffirmed the Nicene Creed. It also affirmed the divinity of the Holy Spirit, the "Lord and Giver of Life" who with the Father and the Son "is worshipped and glorified" and that phrase was added to what we now recite as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Two more councils followed: Council of Ephesus in 431 and Council of Chalcedon in 451. Gregory the Great once said that just as there are four books of the Gospel so also the four Councils serve like a four-square stone on which the structure of the holy faith is built. I am not surprised that the centuries old debate of favoring only Jesus’s divine nature and frowning upon his human nature keeps resurrecting and mutating in different forms. One of those is the lopsided theology of favoring the perfect and condemning the weak, broken people and many who are seen as outcasts because they do not fit in a given mold. When has my own image of God brought God closer or farther away? Do I need to change this image in order to grow more in my relationship with Him here and now?

Basilica of Saint Mary Major

For my third and last point, I would like to pose a question. Was God’s plan of saving all of humanity a plan A or a plan B? If we say it was a plan B, when Jesus came down to live with us, it was done to correct our mistakes. However if we claim that it was a plan A, we are saying that God was planning even from the very beginning of time to send us His Son even if we did not sin. How did the Council of Ephesus in 431 answer this question? The Council formally proclaimed the mother of Jesus as the Mother of God, and the basilica on the Esquiline Hill in Rome was dedicated to Our Lady to celebrate, precisely, her motherhood. God did not need only a home, he needed a mother too. There is more! Not only to be incarnated as a human being but also to have a mother who is a human being. Mary, recognized far beyond being a mother to the human Jesus, has an abysmal depth of significance because it tells us that Mary was not just a last minute remedy—to put right, to rectify—worse, tasked to give birth to a last minute savior. Mary was part of the beautiful plan when God first thought about gathering everyone back to His fold. That is why Mary is not just a mother to the human Jesus, she is Mother of God—the whole being of God. When God first conceived Mary in his Divine and eternal mind, Mary has been destined already to be “The” Mother. This title “Mother of God” Theotokos (God bearer) may seem technical or even excessive. But boy! it depends on this solemn definition, the first among four Marian dogmas, the whole plan of God to love us and to be with us in a much closer way than we might think. Under the constant aegis of Mary’s motherhood, the Lord has been protected from the womb to his resurrection in order to accomplish his mission as Emmanuel—God-with-us. As the National Conference of Catholic Bishops say in their letter Behold Your Mother: Woman of Faith, “Mary can be rightly called ‘Mother of God,’ not indeed in the blasphemous sense of having existed before God, but as an affirmation of the truth of the Incarnation” and that Jesus Christ is truly God—at-home-with-us. Amen Fr JM Manzano SJ