Gospel:  Luke 11: 27-28

 

Today's Gospel is very brief, but it has a very important significance in the Gospel of Luke in general. It gives us the key to understand what Luke teaches regarding Mary, the Mother of Jesus.

 

The creative imagination of some apocryphal books suggests that the woman was a neighbor of Our Lady, there in Nazareth and remembering her neighbor Mary, and said: "Mary must be very happy to have such a son!"

 

Luke speaks little about Mary here and in the Gospel of the Infancy. For Luke, Mary is the Daughter of Sion, the image of the new People of God. He represents Mary as the model for the life of the communities. 

 

In Vatican Council II, the document prepared on Mary was inserted in the last chapter of the document Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. Mary is the model for the Church. And especially in the way in which Mary relates with the Word of God, Luke considers her as an example for the life of the communities: "Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it". 

 

Mary teaches us how to accept the Word of God, how to incarnate it, live it, deepen it, make it be born and grow, and allow it to shape us, even when we do not understand it, or when it makes us suffer. This is the vision which is subjacent in the first two chapter of the Gospel of the Infancy. The key to understand these two chapters is given to us by today's Gospel.