Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
“My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.”
What is it to be mother to Christ? What is it to be his brother?
No one has heard the word of God and acted on it more perfectly than Jesus’s own mother Mary. Indeed, we see these words of Jesus in their truest sense when we look at her. Her trust in God’s word was the very thing by which she became Jesus’s actual mother. We are called to the same grace. When we engage the call of the Gospel and give our whole lives over to it, wherever we go, Jesus goes too. As St. Teresa of Avila said, “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours.” The one who acts on God’s word bears him to the world.
We are also his brothers. Jesus is the one who is always listening and acting on the word of the Father. When we do the same, we stand alongside him, working together with him in the work of the Father. He invites us, scandalously, into brotherhood and friendship, a surprising relationship of mutuality that, continually colored by our obedience to him as Lord, draws us into a great understanding of our dignity. Let us, then, be both mother and brother to Christ, bearing him to the world and working alongside him for the salvation of all.