Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Optional Memorial of Saint Lawrence of Brindisi, Priest and Doctor of the Church
Some interpret today’s Gospel to mean that Jesus is downplaying the importance of His Mother, Our Lady. This is not the case at all. As in the passage in Luke’s Gospel where a woman in the crowd cries out, “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed!” (Luke 11:27), to which Jesus responds, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it” (v. 28), the Son of Mary teaches that being a member of His family is more than a matter of familial bonds and blood. Rather, it is about being children of the Father by means of doing His Will. For obedience, more than mere descendance, is the mark of being a true child. Consider the parables of the Prodigal Son and of the sons asked to go into the vineyard, where one says “yes” and does not go, while the other says “no” but eventually does go (Luke 15:11-32; Matthew 21:28-32). This is not Jesus downplaying His Mother, but rather emphasizing that the place she holds in His life—and ours—is less about the fact that she birthed and raised Him and more about her fiat that made being His Mother possible in the first place.
Truly, we are children of God by our baptism—in which we are washed clean by the Blood of Christ—but we must live as children of God, seeking to do the will of our Father, if the life in that Blood is to transform us more and more in the likeness of His Only Begotten Son.