August 15, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK
Revelation 11: 19, 12: 6-10 +1 Corinthians 15: 20-27 + Luke 1: 39-56
The messenger says that she is favored by God. Yet anyone who would examine her life might at first wonder what being favored by God means.
There is certainly no reason to think that it brings the promise of an easy life. This woman so highly favored by God watched her Son be misunderstood by the crowds, denied and betrayed by his friends, and killed by the powerful political and religious authorities of her time. She might have thought God’s favor would spare her but instead it made her more vulnerable to a broken heart and brought immense responsibility. She stood at the foot of the cross, and she watched her Son breathe his last, accepting his painful death. She held his dead body in her arms and let go of the one she loved most.
But this Feast of Hope reminds us that this is not the end of her story. Easter came and Pentecost. Jesus, who had promised that he was the resurrection and the life, fulfilled that promise before her very eyes. His promise to send the Spirit was fulfilled, and she was in that room says the one who records the event. In this truth lies the meaning of God’s “favor”. Being favored by God and faithful to God never means being free of trouble and pain. It means something more important and more wonderful. It means that when that favor is returned, promises are fulfilled and hope if sustained through the darkest of times.
That Pentecost was not the first time the Spirit had come upon Mary. The first time in Nazareth she became the mother of Christ. The second time in Jerusalem she became the mother of us all, Mother of the Church. She continues to proclaim the greatness of God and lift up the lowly, the hungry, and those overlooked in every age. In so far as we her children learn from our mother and make her cry of victory our own, we too shall know the favor of God.
Anyone of us who has stood at the side of a loved one dying or in death has every reason to cling to the hope this Feast proclaims. It is the hope that there is life after death for both those who continue on this earth and for those who pass into God’s embrace. It is the hope that every trial and every suffering opens us ever more widely to the possibility and the promise that all will be well in God’s time, and that those ponder these things in their heart meaning seek God’s plan and God’s will shall experience the gratitude of the Father and the embrace of His Only Son when finally coming home.