for June 1
The Memorial of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Church

Mary was there at the church’s beginning. We know that not just because Luke mentions her in today’s reading from the first chapter of Acts. After Jesus has ascended to heaven, Luke places Mary in the upper room along with some women, Jesus’s brothers and the eleven disciples. We also remember how Luke places Mary at the very beginning of his gospel, when she received an angelic visitor and her ‘yes’ allowed God’s desire to save us to become flesh in Jesus. So yes, we know that Mary is the mother of the church.

Why then, must we endure this whole reading from the fourth gospel today? Isn’t it enough to recall Mary standing at the foot of Jesus’s cross? Enough to remember how Jesus entrusts Mary to the care of the beloved disciple? Why, on this feast dedicated to the mother of church, must the assigned gospel reading go on through the excruciating details of her son’s slow execution and then of the soldiers abusing the bodies of the dead?

Whether it was intended to or not, today’s gospel provides a counterpoint to the fireworks of the arrival of the Spirit at Pentecost. It is a reminder that the church, our community of faith, is born not only in mysterious acts of wonder but also in moments of horror and sorrow. It also might caution us against sugarcoating both Mary and the faith of our church.

This is a timely warning. It is a perennial temptation to keep our faith in the sanctuary only, and safely off the streets. It is equally tempting to assume that ‘separation of church and state’ means that our faith has nothing to say about the conduct of public life. The probably-most-often quoted statement of Vatican II stood firmly against these errors, and is worth recalling in full:

The joy and hope, the grief and anguish of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted in any way, are the joy and hope, the grief and anguish, of the followers of Christ as well. Nothing that is genuinely human fails to find an echo in their hearts (Gaudium et Spes 1).

Our world is full of horrors and sorrows new and old. Racism infects our nation. Precarious lives are made more desperate by economic collapse. People suffering from pandemic disease are further burdened by an inadequate health care system. To fail to speak out, to actively heal, what wounds our community is to betray our identity as a church. Our community of faith is born not only in God’s majesty and power, but in the struggle and sorrows of a woman named Mary. We belong to a church that belongs in the lives of people like her.

Recalling Mary the mother of the church in this way is not to glorify suffering. It is not to turn away from it. Rather, it is a call to face the world and all its problems in honesty and love, and with the strength required to nurture each other toward fullness of life. Just as a mother does for her children.
—BJ Brown