A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was engaged to Joseph, but before they had lived together, Mary was bound with child through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, an upright man and unwilling to expose her to the law, decided to divorce Mary quietly. Such was his intention when suddenly the angel of the lord appeared in a dream and said to Joseph, Joseph, son of David, have no fear about taking Mary as your wife.
It is by the Holy Spirit that she has conceived this child. She is to have a son, and you are to name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins. All this happened to fulfill what the Lord had said to the prophet, the virgin shall be with child and give birth to a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel, a name which means god with us. And this is for sure the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
In response, might say, to a feeling, an emotion, a sentiment on the part of the faithful down the centuries, the church has responded in a very human way to honoring the mother of god. Now she didn't come by that title without a great deal of struggle Because within the first three or four hundred years of the church's existence, and I wish to call this to your attention, the church is a fact of history. Some people would think it's just a projection of someone's need in 1980, but it has a history. Now they all kinds of ideas have been produced as regards Jesus Christ. There were those who insisted that he was totally divine, totally spiritual, and they could not swallow the fact of his having a body.
Some people still can't get over it. For the most part, they were what is called the Gnostics, and that still is with us to some extent. Now then on the other hand, there was the denial of Jesus' divinity. There's been a denial of everything that you can think of because actually the possibilities are rather limited. But the point is that the people, the voice of the church, has always given to Mary a singular position, not because of what she was because of herself.
There's the point. But because she was the mother of God, not the mother simply of a good man, but the mother of God, the bearer of God. Now, of course, this is tied up with the personality of Christ and the natures of Christ. This is where all the argumentation and controversy persisted. And to a certain extent, this comes down to our own times.
Who is Jesus Christ? Because who is Jesus Christ is certainly the question you have to ask if you ask about the motherhood of Mary. Who was her son? But the church has been unanimous right down the centuries in giving Mary a very special place in the devotion of the faith. Now at times perhaps it has been exaggerated, I don't know.
But the thing is, because something is exaggerated, it certainly doesn't disprove the value of what is being exaggerated. The fact that you take an overdose of medicine doesn't mean that the medicine wasn't good for you if you had taken it in the proper dosage, to have a very spiritual example of this problem. And so today we honor Mary's birth. An occasion Well, all these feasts of Mary, they are occasions for bringing ourselves back to thinking about her. Now you can't think about Mary without thinking about her son.
There's the point. Mary is nothing without Jesus Christ her son. Mary is not Mary if her son is only a mere human being. But if she was the the actual physical mother of a baby boy and that baby boy was simultaneously God, then you have something to honor, believe me. And that's precisely what the church teaches, that the person of Jesus Christ is a unity of person, one person.
So that when Christ said I, he was referring to himself and not to two persons. And he wasn't referring to one real person and one imaginary or a delusion or an illusion or a projection or anything else. The church teaches that this person, Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, when he said I, it was God speaking, but God with absolutely a complete human nature. This is the mystery. I'm not explaining this.
This is what the church teaches, and this is why we hold Mary to be what she is, absolutely unique, the mother of God. And Newman says someplace, don't ask me where, but someplace, that it is a it was a very interesting development. Remember, Newman had his feet on his on history on history. He worked with facts, and he said it was a very curious fact phenomenon that where you had Protestantism or the or non Catholic splinters from Catholicism coming back, you could trace it in their devotion to Mary, and I saw some of that with my own two eyes in England where you had in some instances the the the Mary chapel being restored in these churches where it had been destroyed because they didn't want any parts of Mary. And so on this feast of the birth of Mary, we pay tribute to her because she's the mother of God.
And because as the mother, she certainly has a place to play in our lives. She is one of us as Christ is not one of us. She is totally one of us. And the the the simple the simple faith that some good Catholics have in the blessed mother is absolutely breathtaking, the confidence they have in her. And it can't be misplaced because you cannot honor Mary too much because how can you honor too much a woman that we hail as the mother of god?
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit, amen. The lord